International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts

THE SOCIETY FOR UTOPIAN STUDIES

39th Annual Meeting

Global Work and Play

23-26 October 2014

Delta Montréal

475, Avenue Président Kennedy

Montréal, Canada

http://utopian-studies.org/conference2014

Utopias have nowhere left to hide in an era of global capital and information flows.  Imagining the perfect society means envisioning global as much as, or more than, national or local change.  Labor is transformed as heavy industry relentlessly relocates. Post-industrial refugees chase immaterial wealth flowing across borders that are porous for information and capital, but not for bodies.  Even leisure becomes work when corporations mine Twitter and Facebook for content to monetize, while gamifying daily life.  Under such conditions, visualizing a utopian balance of work and play grows both more difficult and more urgent.

Papers are welcome on all aspects of the utopian tradition, from the earliest utopian visions to the utopian speculations and yearnings of the 21st century, including art, architecture, urban and rural planning, literary utopias, dystopian writings and films, utopian political activism, theories of utopian spaces and ontologies, music, new media, and intentional communities. We especially welcome papers and panels on games, gamers and gamification; utopian and dystopian aspects of globalization; and non-Western utopian traditions.

Additionally, we are introducing a new poster and demonstration track. We invite abstracts for presentations featuring interactive games, apps, digital artifacts, tools, projects, websites, or works in progress with a utopian or dystopian dimension. Those invited to participate will be given a backdrop and table for a poster and/or computer in our exhibition hall. Indie developers and digital humanists are especially welcome.

Abstracts of up to 250 words are due 15 July 2014, and may be for:

   a 15-20 minute paper

   a panel: include a title, designated Chair, an abstract for the panel and for each of 3-4 papers

   an informal roundtable of 3-6 presenters, or a combination of presenters and respondents

   a presentation or performance of a utopian creative work or artifact

   a poster and/or demo

Please use our online form for submissions here.

*All submissions must include 3-5 keywords to assist in forming cohesive panels. The official language of the conference is English.

For information about registration, travel or accommodations, please contact Brian Greenspan, brian.greenspan@carleton.ca

For information about panel topics, assistance finding co-panelists, and other questions about the conference, please contact Peter Sands, sands@uwm.edu

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“I don’t think I am like other people”: Anomalous Embodiment in Young Adult Speculative Fiction.

Editors Sherryl Vint and Mathieu Donner are seeking submissions for a volume of essays on young adult literature entitled Anomalous Embodiment in Young Adult Speculative Fiction.

The large commercial as well as critical successes of such works as J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter, Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials or Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series have pushed young adult fiction to the forefront of the literary world. However, and though most of these texts themselves engage in one way or another with questions related to the body, and, more precisely, to a body that refuses to conform to social norms as to what a body ‘ought to be’, few academic studies have really explored the relation that young adult fiction entertains with this adolescent ‘abnormal’ body.

In her work on corporeal feminism, Volatile Bodies, Elizabeth Grosz suggests that adolescence is not only the period during which the body itself undergoes massive transformation, shifting from childhood to adulthood, but that it is also in this period that ‘the subject feels the greatest discord between the body image and the lived body, between its psychical idealized self-image and its bodily changes’ and that therefore, the ‘philosophical desire to transcend corporeality and its urges may be dated from this period’ (Volatile Bodies 75). Following upon Grosz’s observation, this interdisciplinary collection of essays addresses the relation that young adult fiction weaves between the adolescent body and the ‘norm’, this socially constructed idealized body image which the subject perceives to be in direct conflict with her/his own experience.

This collection will thus be centred on the representation, both positive and negative, of such body or bodies. From the vampiric and lycanthropic bodies of Twilight and Teen Wolf to the ‘harvested’ bodies of Neal Shusterman’s novel Unwind, YA fiction entertains a complex relation to the adolescent body. Often singularized as ‘abnormal’, this body comes to symbolise the violence of a hegemonic and normative medical discourse which constitutes itself around an ideal of ‘normality’. However, and more than a simple condemnation or interrogation of the problematic dominant representation of the corporeal within young adult fiction, this collection also proposes to explore how such texts can present a foray into new alternative territories. As such, the collection proposes a focus on what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s label the anomalous body, or embodiment re-articulated not necessarily as the presumption of an inside and an outside of normality, but rather as ‘a position or set of positions in relation to a multiplicity’ (A Thousand Plateaus, 244), one which interrogates and challenges the setting of such a boundary by positioning itself at the threshold of normativity.

We are particularly looking for contributions on works which either (1) interrogate, problematize the dominant discourse on normative embodiment present in YA fiction, (2) emphasize, by a play on repetition or any other means, the limitations of the traditional discourse on the ‘abnormal’ or ‘disabled’ body, and signal the inherent violence of such normative paradigms, and/or (3) propose an alternative approach to the anomalous body. Relevant topics include (but are not limited to):

·       (Re-)Articulating disability;

·       The adolescent as ‘abnormally’ embodied;

·       Transcending gender and the sexuated body;

·       Medical norms and the violence of ‘normative’ embodiment;

·       Bodies and prosthetic technologies, or the posthuman boundary;

·       Genetics, Diseases and medication, or transforming the body from the inside;

·       Cognitive readings of the body, or how do we read body difference;

·       Embodied subjectivities, anomalous/abnormal consciousness;

We invite proposals (approximately 500 words) for 8’000-10’000-word chapters by Monday 15th September. Abstract submissions should be included in a Word document and sent to Sherryl Vint (sherryl.vint@ucr.edu) and Mathieu Donner (Mathieu.Donner@nottingham.ac.uk). Please remember to include name, affiliation, academic title and email address. Postgraduate and early-careers researchers are encouraged to participate.

In November 2014, the Mid-Atlantic Popular and American Culture Association will be holding its 25th Anniversary Conference in Baltimore, MD.  We are inviting all academics who live and work in the Mid-Atlantic Region (or anyone interested in a trip to Baltimore) to consider submitting an abstract for the conference.  The Science Fiction and Fantasy area is encouraging scholars who are interested in the genre (or its related areas in Victorian Literature, particularly in reference to Steampunk, or the relationship of medieval literature to fantasy, for example) to submit a proposal.  Our call for papers is reproduced below.  Please feel free to share with your colleagues and your graduate students.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Leigha McReynolds and Marilyn Stern

Area Co-chairs

Call for Papers MAPACA 2014

SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY AREA

The Mid-Atlantic Popular and American Culture Association (MAPACA) invites academics, graduate and undergraduate students, independent scholars, and artists to submit papers for the annual conference, to be held in Baltimore, November 6-8, 2014. Those interested in presenting at the conference are invited to submit a proposal or panel by June 15, 2014. Abstracts should be no more than 300 words long. Include a brief bio with your proposal. Single papers, as well as 3- or 4-person panels and roundtables, are encouraged. All proposals should be submitted via the online system at www.mapaca.net, where you can also find more information on our organization and our conference.

Science Fiction and Fantasy welcomes papers/presentations in any critical, theoretical, or (inter)disciplinary approach to any topic related to SF/F: art; literature; radio; film; television; video, role-playing, and multi-player online games. Though not an exhaustive list, potential presenters may wish to consider the following:

Ø  Gender and Sexuality

Ø  Race and Otherness

Ø  Class and Hierarchies

Ø  Utopia/Dystopia

Ø  Mythology and Quest Narratives

Ø  Creatures and Aliens

Ø  Science and Magic

Ø  Reading Other Worlds

Ø  Language and Rhetoric

Ø  Genre: Space Opera, Cyberpunk, Dark Fantasy, Steampunk, etc.

Ø  Fans and Fandom/Community Building

Ø  Textual Analysis

Ø  Sociological or Psychological Readings

Ø  Archival Research/History

Ø  Technology: Textual and Literal

Ø  Online Identity Construction

Ø  Fairy Tales

Ø  Paranormal Romance

Ø  Young Adult Literature

Ø  Tolkien (literature and film)

Area Chairs:

Marilyn Stern                             Leigha McReynolds

sternm@wit.edu                        lhm@gwmail.gwu.edu

Visit www.mapaca.net for a full list of areas.

—

Leigha McReynolds
Conference Organizer, NASSR 2014
Co-chair Science Fiction and Fantasy Division, MAPACA
PhD Candidate in English
The George Washington University

Deadline: 22 August 2014

This is why the properly aesthetic attitude of the radical ecologist is not that of admiring or longing for a pristine nature of virgin forests and clear sky, but rather of accepting waste as such, of discovering the aesthetic potential of waste, of decay, of the inertia of rotten material that serves no purpose.

                                                                    — Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times

This special issue of NANO begins with a question: in what new ways can trash and waste be acknowledged or conceptualized today?

Contemporary critics are eager to laud sustainability and to celebrate modern and postmodern arts and practices that make inventive use of the wastes of industrial production and the trash of consumer capitalism. These possibilities provide compelling ways to grasp late capitalist culture because it seems to offer a potential answer to an almost unimaginable problem: the ceaseless, ubiquitous, and disastrous production of waste. Some practices of collection and creative reuse in collage, collections, and found-object arts create stunning acknowledgements of the sheer and generally unacknowledged scale of waste (think, for instance, of work of artist Vic Munoz so well documented in the film Waste Land). However, endlessly celebratory emphases on isolated examples of re-use and recycling risk becoming profound disavowals, as if such reuse solved the problem and absolved us of responsibility. Put simply, is this celebration of arts or practices that incorporate or recycle waste simply making us feel better about waste problems that we cannot adequately solve by making some waste useful? Are there ways—through art—to acknowledge or conceptualize waste that would do more than celebrate such recuperations?

How can artists, philosophers, theorists, activists, and others produce new ways to acknowledge or envision events and phenomena like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, radioactive wastelands like Fukushima or Bikini Atoll, the animal wastes of feedlots, the water wastes of fracking, or the mountains of trash produced by consumer culture? How can such new conceptualizations address biopower, in which whole populations are controlled by the industrial production of waste or by the dumping of waste? How can new ideas address the ways in which some populations are themselves figured as potential waste or treated as waste, living out what Giorgio Agamben names “bare life.”

In this special issue, we seek critical reports or multimodal notes (up to 3,500 words) that sketch new strategies, modes, or practices of acknowledging waste.

Potential topics can include, but are not limited to:

• Representations of waste
• New trash aesthetics
• Trash beyond the dialectic of recycling
• Trash and populations
• Mapping waste
• Collections of trash and waste
• Waste and the sublime
• Populations and waste
• Waste and abjection
• Wastelands
• Waste and power

Please refer to the sidebar on right side of this page for submission details and preferences. Direct any questions to the Special Issue co-editors: David Banash (d-banash AT wiu.edu) and John DeGregorio (ja-degregorio AT wiu.edu).

Keywords: Each author is asked to submit 5 keywords to accompany their submission.

Schedule: Deadlines concerning the special issue to be published in NANO:

• 22 Aug. 2014: notes due
• Oct. 2014: Comments and peer review complete
• Dec. 2014: Pre-production begins

 We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Below is a CFP for a panel on fantasy and politics I am putting together for a conference on 24-25th October in Atlanta:”Medievalisms on the Move”

http://www.medievalism.net/conferences.html Medievalism folks are open to work on genre, and it would be great to have some contributions from folk who aren’t Medieval Studies specialists (although they are also welcome of course). The deadline is quite soon, on the 2nd of June. In light of that, if you’re interested but not able to provide an abstract by then, an indicative title with abstract to follow would be fine. Contact me off list at <helen.young AT sydney.edu.au> with abstracts, expressions of interest, or queries.

All best,
Helen

J. R. R. Tolkien¹s work is widely associated with a conservative political outlook and approach to identity questions such as gender and race. Scholars have challenged the basis of this association, but it remains powerful in wider culture: for the fantasy genre in particular, “Tolkienian” is synonymous with “medievalist” and with conservatism.

Rather than engaging with Tolkien¹s work itself, this panel will explore ways in which the conservative connotations of “medieval” in the fantasy genre, are being challenged in the twenty-first century. It will examine the ways that medievalisms in fantasy have changed, or remained the same, in the five decades since the first US paperback edition of Lord of the Rings kick-started the genre as a published phenomenon. Are writers, and other creators, simply reproducing the perceived link between political conservatism and medievalism, are they challenging it, or are their engagements more complex?

Papers might ask how contemporary trends in technology, society, politics, and culture influence contemporary writers, readers, and critics as they take up medieval material and the idea of the Middle Ages. Are there shifts in the genre as a whole? Tolkien drew on the European Middle Ages, as do his imitators; is this pattern changing as Eurocentric views become increasingly problematic and the world is ever more globalised? How do questions of identity, including but not limited to, gender, race, dis/ability, and sexuality play out in medievalist fantasy worlds? What impact has the rise of digital media had? What voices, other than Tolkien’s, have shaped the medievalisms of the fantasy genre? The panel invites contributions not only on fantasy fiction, but also games, films, and television series, reflecting the multi-media nature of the genre.

Dr Helen Young
DECRA Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of English
University of Sydney