International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts

Gothflix, A Conference

1st-2nd February 2020 – Lancaster University

This conference was born following a discussion between Luke (Lancaster University) and Jess (University of Liverpool) the night before Sheffield’s Reimagining the Gothic 2019 conference where they were together presenting on a group panel on The Good Place (2016) – a tentative plan for another group panel the next year quickly evolved into something else entirely, a whole conference on Netflix and the Gothic.

With over 100-million subscribers, Netflix has exploded into popular culture having become not just a medium for consumption but also, since 2012, a creator and producer of its own content. Much of its programming makes nods to the Gothic, whether this be more obvious through its Horror and Fantasy programming such as Hemlock Grove (2013) and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018) or the more subtle like The Crown (2016). Catherine Spooner writes that ‘Gothic sells’ and Netflix has created a means not only for the Gothic to be sold but streamed directly into the household at any time, not limited by scheduling or network censorship. We look forward to the many interesting and exciting papers as well as to announcing our keynote.

We are inviting papers of 20-minutes in length on any paper which explores the links between Netflix and the Gothic.* Group panels are also welcome and must consist of 3-4 papers each of 20 minutes length.

Papers may consider any of a variety of topics and Netflix Original texts; possible foci for papers may include but are not limited to the subjects and texts below:

· The nature of streaming and how it affects our consumption of texts.

· How have series such as Lucifer (2019) been altered in their transfer to Netflix from cable television?

· The use of algorithms to tailor our Netflix experience.

· Text focused papers on any of the many ‘Netflix Originals’.

· The shared experience of consuming streamed media.

· The effect of binge watching on the viewing of television series and on viewing of Horror.

Please submit a title, 300-word abstract, and a 50-word bionote in a single document for consideration by 11pm on the 31st October 2019 to gothflix@gmail.com. For group panels, please submit your papers as separate documents together in a single email. You will usually receive a confirmation email within 48 hours confirming receipt of your submission.

Keep up with the news about the conference by following @gothflix on Twitter and at our website: gothflixconference.wordpress.com as well as by using the following hashtags: #Gothflix #StreamingTheGothic.

*We are asking papers be solely focused on texts marketed as Netflix Originals within the UK (any text produced by Netflix, such as Orange is the New Black, or exclusively first distributed in the UK by Netflix, such as Riverdale) and a full list is available on our website. If you have any questions, please email us. If you want to focus on a none UK Netflix Original, we would ask that the paper has a strong focus on what the Netflix platform brings to the text.

Journal of Dracula Studies Special Issue: Witches

deadline for submissions:
January 1, 2020

full name / name of organization:
Anne DeLong/Transylvanian Society of Dracula

contact email:
journalofdraculastudies@kutztown.edu

The Journal of Dracula Studies is accepting submissions of manuscripts of scholarly articles (4000-6000 words) for a 2020 Special Issue focusing on witches and witchcraft. Papers may examine the figure of the witch and/or the practice of witchcraft in literature, film, folklore, and popular culture. Submissions are due by January 1, 2020. Possible topics include the following:

witches, wizards, warlocks, cunning folk

magic and magical practices

hexing and spell casting

witches throughout history

witch hunts and witch trials

witchcraft and feminism

witchcraft and New Age spirituality

witchcraft and political activism

witchcraft and spiritualism: seances, spirit communication

culturally diverse witchcraft practices: Voodoo, conjure, pow wow, etc.

depictions of witches and witchcraft in film, television, and popular culture

An Astounding 90 Years of Analog Science Fiction and Fact: The Fourth Annual City Tech Science Fiction Symposium

Date and Time: December 12, 2019, 9:00AM-6:00PM

Location: New York City College of Technology, 285 Jay St., A105, Brooklyn, NY

Almost 90 years ago, Analog Science Fiction and Fact began its storied history as one of the most important and influential SF magazines with the publication of its first issue under the title Astounding Stories of Super-Science. During that time, its fabled editors, award-winning writers, recognized artists, and invested readers played roles in the development of one of the longest running and renowned SF magazines, which in turn, influenced the field and adapted to change itself.

The Fourth Annual City Tech Science Fiction Symposium will celebrate “An Astounding 90 Years of Analog Science Fiction and Fact.” It will feature talks, readings, and discussion panels with Analog Science Fiction and Fact’s current and past editors and writers, and paper presentations and discussion panels about its extensive history, its relationship to the SF genre, its connection to fandom, and its role within the larger SF publishing industry.

We invite proposals for 15-20 minute paper presentations that explore or strongly relate to Analog Science Fiction and Fact. Please send a 250-word abstract with title, brief professional bio, and contact information to Jason Ellis (jellis@citytech.cuny.edu) by September 30, 2019. Topics with a connection to Analog Science Fiction and Fact might include but are certainly not limited to:

• Histories of the magazine’s editors, writers, and relationship to other SF magazines.
• Relationship of the magazine to the ongoing development of the SF genre.
• Tropes, themes, and concepts in the magazine.
• Issues of identity (culture, ethnicity, race, sex, and gender) in the magazine.
• Writers of color in the magazine.
• Women writers in the magazine.
• Fandom and the magazine.
• Visual studies of cover and interior artwork.
• Hard SF and the magazine.
• Interdisciplinary approaches to studying the magazine.
• STEM and the Humanities bridged in the magazine.
• Pedagogical approaches to teaching SF and/or STEM with the magazine.

This event is free and open to the public as space permits: an RSVP will be included with the program when announced on the Science Fiction at City Tech website (https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/sciencefictionatcitytech/).

This symposium is held in partnership with Analog Science Fiction and Fact and its publisher Penny Publications. It is hosted by the School of Arts and Sciences at the New York City College of Technology, CUNY.

The Annual City Tech Symposium on Science Fiction is held in celebration of the City Tech Science Fiction Collection, an archival holding of over 600-linear feet of magazines, anthologies, novels, and scholarship. It is in the Archives and Special Collections of the Ursula C. Schwerin Library (Library Building, L543C, New York City College of Technology, 300 Jay Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201). More information about the collection and how to access it is available here: https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/sciencefictionatcitytech/librarycollection/.

Conference, University of Southern Denmark, May 28–29, 2020

Utopia & Dystopia

Conference on the Fantastic in Media Entertainment

Venue: University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark Proposal Deadline: December 10, 2019

Call for Presentations

Today, genres of the fantastic reign supreme in all media entertainment – film, television, games, toys, theme parks, haunted houses. We are surrounded by superheroes, fantastic beasts, and battles in dystopian futures. Intriguingly, the more secularized societies become, the more infatuated we are with the fantastic. In terms of revenue and fan interest, fantastic genres are the most popular the world over. The Shape of Water (2017), an adult fairy tale, won four Oscars. The Star Wars trilogy (2015–), Wonder Woman (2017), and Captain Marvel (2019) feature female protagonists, a recent development. Black Panther (2017) featured an African-American protagonist. And shows like The Walking Dead (2011–) and Game of Thrones (2011–2019) have made adult fantastic television the new black. The fantastic, once considered for children, has become respected for its ability to break existing limits and imagine the impossible and the unknown.

This conference invites new research in the fantastic. Why is the fantastic more popular than ever? What theories – or bundle of theories – capture the specific nature of the fantastic? What purposes do fantastic genres serve in terms of evolution, adaptation, sensory pleasures, and cognitive as well as social uses? How do we create fantastic stories across media platforms and in different aesthetic forms? How is worldbuilding used to create transmedia stories of the fantastic? How do new technologies and media aesthetics affect the fantastic in terms of production, distribution, and fan uses?

The conference welcomes multiple theoretical approaches and perspectives. The aim is to understand the use, function, and role of the fantastic today; to engage with its various expressions across media; and to ask what powers and appeal all its genres hold, from fantasy and fairy tales to science fiction and supernatural horror. We believe the fantastic is especially suited to ask questions about human existence, pressing questions in times of today’s ecological crisis, and with this call we want to ask those questions.

Greek phantastikos means producing mental images, and the OED defines fantastic as “existing only in imagination . . . fabulous, imaginary, unreal.” But the fantastic has been defined multiple ways. A broad definition sees it a supergenre with subgenres that break with the laws of nature: sci- fi, fantasy, fairy tale, supernatural horror, and superheroes. A narrow definition targets singular elements, for example a reader’s hesitation between a natural or a supernatural explanation of events (Todorov). We use a broad definition of the fantastic and welcome paper proposals on all subgenres of the fantastic and its expressions in practice, film, tv, games, digital media, theme parks, haunted houses, fan studies, and more.

Suggested Themes

• Play and the fantastic
• Cognitive and evolutionary approaches to the fantastic
• The fantastic as live entertainment (haunted attractions such as haunted houses, escape
rooms, zombie runs)
• Genre mashup and new mixing
• The precariat in the fantastic
• Women in the fantastic
• Indigenous fantastic
• Transnational and global fantastic
• Fantastic beasts – imaginary animals in the fantastic
• Auteurs in the fantastic
• Fan tourism and the fantastic
• Designing and creating fantastic spaces
• Subgenres of the fantastic – all subgenres are welcome

Keynotes Speakers – More Keynote Speakers to be Announced

Professor Cristina Bacchilega, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Professor Angela Ndalianis, Swinburne University of Technology

We invite submissions of research papers of 20 minutes as well as pre–constituted panels of three or four people. Proposals of 300 words and 150 word bio should be sent to Rikke Schubart, schubart@sdu.dk by December 10, 2019, as should any queries.

Conference Steering Committee

Ass. Prof. Rikke Schubart, University of Southern Denmark, schubart@sdu.dk
Ass. Prof. Anita Nell Bech Albertsen, University of Southern Denmark, nell@sdu.dk
Ass. Prof. Rune Graulund, University of Southern Denmark, graulund@sdu.dk
Professor Cristina Bacchilega, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, cbacchi@hawaii.edu Professor Angela Ndalianis, Swinburne University of Technology, andalianis@swin.edu.au

The conference is arranged by the Institute for the Study of Culture, SDU, and Danish IRFD research network Imagining the impossible: The Fantastic as Media Entertainment and Play

“In this world only play, play as artists and children engage in it, exhibits coming-to-be and passing away, structuring and destroying, without any moral additive, in forever equal innocence. And as children and artists play, so plays the ever-living fire.”
Friedrich Nietzsche (1873)

Panel Call for ICFA 2020: Expanding the Archive

In 2019, the fanfiction site Archive of Our Own (AO3) was nominated for a Hugo award. This repository of nearly 5 million original works, representing over 30 thousand fandoms, stands out in the world of Science Fiction and Fantasy awards not only because of the sheer number of authors it represents, but also because it is the first nomination for unpublished fanfiction and many of the authors are young women. This nomination draws attention to what is “archived” and, by extension, what is valued. AO3’s nomination is not the year’s only example of the expanding canon of Speculative Fiction. The documentary film Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror, produced by Tananarive Due, directed by Xavier Burgin, and based on Dr. Robin R. Means Coleman’s book Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present (2011), begins with the assertion that “black history is black horror” and tracks how the genre can engage with questions of race and power. Similarly, Dr. Ebony Thomas’s The Dark Fantastic considers Black female characters Bonnie Bennett (CW’s The Vampire Diaries), Rue (The Hunger Games), Gwen (Merlin), and Angelina Johnson (Harry Potter), and explores how these characters mirror racist violence in the real world. Each of these examples makes a case for expanding the idea of the canon (and what we value enough to archive) to include different types of characters and voices.

In terms of physical archives, a recent open letter on the Reading While White blog called out the lack of context and white-washing of the University of Minnesota’s Children’s Literature Research Collection’s exhibit and corresponding book The ABC of It: Why Children’s Books Matter, demonstrating that even professional archives are not neutral—especially once their materials are extracted and exhibited for public consumption. In the wake of this controversy, curators of archives, whether in libraries, classrooms, or their own scholarly work, must address how the materials presented and their surrounding context represent choices that speak to the curator’s values and priorities.

When archives hold the power to exclude and include, to value and affirm both people and genre, then how do we as scholars decide what belongs and how do we think through the consequences of those choices for ourselves, our students, and our field? We encourage submissions that answer these questions and otherwise critically examine the speculative fiction archive, broadly defined.

Submissions may consider but are not limited to the following topics in relation to archives:

Accessibility
Materialism
The worth/value estimation of collecting
Teaching courses in the archives
Archival pedagogy- constructing the archives for our courses/ asking students to construct their own archives
Controversies and canon
Digital collections
Internet as archive
Fan spaces
Race and representation
Award winners as archive

Please submit a 300-500 word abstract and preliminary bibliography to Emily Midkiff (midki003@umn.edu) or Sara Austin (austins4@miamioh.edu) by Oct 11, 2019. Abstracts will also be considered for a special issue of the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, for which we will be issuing a CFP in November.

Bookmark the Google Doc version of this call to keep on top of any updates: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1i1_izexTPz_vj8hfreDZjqaXc3yNN4zud5ifc6TV9QA/edit?usp=sharing

European Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSAeu) invites submission for the SLSAeu’s conference: ANTHROPOCENES: Reworking of the Wound, to be held on 17-20 June 2020 in Katowice, Poland.

Call for Proposals

Anthropocenes (Reworking the Wound)

The concept of the Anthropocene, formulated by geologists and chemists, was created to name the changes in planetary (geological) record exerted by human global activity. Despite its specific scientific provenance, the idea of human environmental domination brought the awareness of overall planetary problems this domination triggered for the latest forms of life developed on earth (humans included). This in turn has kindled discussion not only across sciences but also across the humanities. The manner in how humans utilize the common habitat and abuse their power in the shared space thus coalesced under the moniker of the Anthropocene, which has gathered a number of critical assumptions, speculations, and diagnoses. Such critical attention ponders the onset of the new geological era caused by the exploitative attitude of humans in intra and extra species relations, seen in the epistemological, ethical and practical organisation of life on Earth.
Following that critical considerations of the Anthropocentric condition, informed by a number of –cenes (such as Capitalocene, Cthulucene, Robocene, Planthropocene, Neganthropocene, Urbanocene etc.) , the conference would like to invite a debate on the forms of conceptualizing human planetary agency with regard to narratives, concepts, representations, formulations, discoveries, approaches, research, data, and controversies the concept has begotten. With the subtitle – reworking the wound – that specifies the debate’s trajectory, we would like to examine the possibilities for exploring the existing damage and discuss the responses (not necessarily solutions) to its outcomes and the ways those outcomes can be embraced. With this in mind, we encourage presentations and panels that are interested in (but not limited to) discussing the Anthropocene and the notion of the wound in the Earth in light of:

– theories and diagnoses for the anthropocentric/anthropocentric condition (the Anthropocene in the humanities and the sciences)
– forms of activism triggered in response to the environmental change
– artistic reactions to the environmental exploitation (aesthetics for the Anthropocene as a coping mechanism)
– environmental awareness vs./and anthropocentric awareness (the Anthropocene as a state of consciousness)
– mechanisms of domination and political strategy (the Anthropocene and the social/the legal)
– the agency of the natural and the unnatural
– ecological crisis as value relations
– hierarchies of species (the animal, the human, the machine)
– petrocultures and permacultures (reorganizing the policies of utilization)
– preservation into cohabitation (rethinking the policies of the common)
– histories of human and non-human species/natures.
– materialities of natural resources and their cultural signification
– economies of/for ecological crisis
– hierarchies of species and environmental agents
– technologies as ecosystems
– outcomes of the crisis and its discontents.
– materials of the anthropocene – plastic, rubber, silicon etc.
– cosmopolitics and cosmotechnics
– post-planetary foresight (theory and design)
– non-human imageries (the phenomenology of the Anthropocene)
– pedagogies of the Anthropocene(s)

Presentation/panel proposals of 300 words max should be submitted to anthropocenes2020@gmail.com along with a bio note and affiliation. We also encourage roundtables and other creative/alternative forms of contribution. Submission deadline is November 15, 2019.
The conference website will start soon and will be linked to SLSAeu’s official website. Information about keynotes will have been available by the end of September 2019.

You do not have to be a current member of SLSAeu to present at the conference, but we encourage you to join the association. Information about SLSAeu membership is available at https://www.slsa-eu.org/membership.html. A detailed profile of the organisation is presented at https://www.slsa-eu.org/.

Call for Papers
Threshold, Boundary, and Crossover in Fantasy

Organised by Alex Gushurst-Moore, Mariam Hale, and Jun Qiang (PhD Students at the University of York)
As part of the York Fantasy Discussion Group

To be held in York 12th-13th March 2020

Keynote speakers: Professor George P. Landow (Emeritus Professor, Brown) and
Dr Rob Maslen (University of Glasgow)

‘There was nothing Lucy liked so much as the smell and feel of fur. She immediately stepped into the wardrobe and got in among the coats and rubbed her face against them, leaving the door open, of course, because she knew that it is very foolish to shut oneself into any wardrobe. Soon she went further in and found that there was a second row of coats hanging up behind the first one. It was almost quite dark in there and she kept her arms stretched out in front of her so as not to bump her face into the back of the wardrobe. She took a step further in – then two or three steps – always expecting to feel woodwork against the tips of her fingers. But she could not feel it.’ – C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, first published in 1950.

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers on the subject of ‘threshold, boundary, and crossover’ in fantasy. Creative interpretation of the theme is encouraged, and particular precedence will be given to papers looking at interdisciplinarity in fantasy studies. We wish to push the limits of how we interpret and understand fantasy as a categorical term, interrogating the idea put forward by art historian Walter Schurian that ‘the fantastic can also be found in other fields of art, such as literature, architecture, music and film; fantastical tendencies and currents can even be observed in the natural sciences, for example in the form of unusual, chance opinions and theories.’ As such, we welcome papers from scholars working in any field or discipline. Some thematic prompts include:

Interdisciplinarity
Intertextuality
Cross-cultural exchange
International exchange
National fantasies
Gender
Selfhood, self and other
Children/ YA/ Adult
Journey, pilgrimage, passage
Ancient/ Medieval/ Modern
Between worlds
Frames, framing devices and literal thresholds
Hermeticism
Retellings
Portals and transportation
Genre, categorisation, classification
Ideas of here and there
Fin-de-siècle
Youth and age
Fantasy and science fiction

To submit a proposal, please send (in one document) a biography of c. 100 words and a paper abstract of no more than 400 words to fantasythreshold2020@gmail.com by September 13th 2019. Queries can be directed to this email address also.