International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts

Extrapolation, Interdisciplinarity, and Learning: The Second Annual City Tech Symposium on Science Fiction

deadline for submissions:
October 31, 2017

full name / name of organization:
Jason Ellis at New York City College of Technology, CUNY

contact email:
jellis@citytech.cuny.edu

Extrapolation, Interdisciplinarity, and Learning: The Second Annual City Tech Symposium on Science Fiction

Date: Wednesday, December 6, 2017

Location: New York City College of Technology, 300 Jay St., Namm N119,

Brooklyn, NY

Knowledge is indivisible. When people grow wise in one direction, they are sure to make it easier for themselves to grow wise in other directions as well. On the other hand, when they split up knowledge, concentrate on their own field, and scorn and ignore other fields, they grow less wise—even in their own field.

How often people speak of art and science as though they were two entirely different things, with no interconnection. . . . That is all wrong. . . . If we go through the history of human advance, we find that there are many places where art and science intermingled and where an advance in one was impossible without an advance in the other.

–Isaac Asimov, A Roving Mind (1983)

Over twenty years after C. P. Snow published The Two Cultures, the unparalleled writer, scientist, and educator Isaac Asimov defends the “interconnection” between the sciences and the arts. In fact, he demonstrates the importance of interdisciplinarity—both within STEM fields as well as between STEM and the humanities—through his unsurpassed 500+ books ranging from Biblical scholarship to biochemistry, and science to science fiction. He shows how disciplines inform and strengthen one another to create greater knowledge and wisdom, which in turn leads to greater understanding and new insights. While significant strides have been made in promoting interdisciplinarity, Asimov’s defense continues to echo today.

Join us for a one-day symposium in the spirit of Asimov’s defense by exploring interdisciplinarity through the lens of science fiction—a mediating ‘third culture’ (borrowing Snow’s term) that combines the sciences and the humanities to extrapolate new worlds while reflecting on our own. This symposium aims to explore science fiction as an interdisciplinary literary form, a tool for teaching interdisciplinarity, and a cultural art form benefiting from interdisciplinary research approaches.

We invite presentations of 15-20 minutes on SF and interdisciplinarity. Possible presentation topics include, but are not limited to:

Explorations of interdisciplinary ideas, approaches, and themes in SF (or what disciplinary boundaries does SF bridge)
SF as an interdisciplinary teaching tool (or what SF have you used or want to use in your classes to achieve interdisciplinary outcomes)
SF’s interdisciplinary imaginative functions (or Gedankenexperiment, considering ethical issues, unintended consequences, or unexpected breakthroughs)
Studying SF through an interdisciplinary lens (or combining otherwise discipline-bound approaches to uncover new meanings)
Bridging STEM and the humanities via SF (or SF as an interdisciplinary cultural work that embraces STEAM—Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts, and Mathematics)
SF and place (or how SF’s settings are interdisciplinary, or where it is written fosters its interdisciplinarity)
Interdisciplinarity and archival work in SF collections (or making the City Tech Science Fiction Collection work for faculty, students, and researchers across disciplines)

Please send your abstract (no more than 250 words), brief bio, and contact information to Jason Ellis (jellis@citytech.cuny.edu) by Oct. 31, 2017.

The program will be announced by Nov. 15, 2017 on the Science Fiction at City Tech website here: https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/sciencefictionatcitytech/.

Hosted by the School of Arts and Sciences at the New York City College of Technology, CUNY.

The annual 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 located in the Archives and Special Collections of the Ursula C. Schwerin Library (Atrium Building, A543C, 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/.

CLOSURE: The Kiel University e-Journal for Comics Studies #5 (November 2018)
Open Section

In the fall of 2018, CLOSURE will once again offer a forum for all facets of comics studies. From literary, cultural, media, social and image research to the sciences and beyond: the fifth edition of CLOSURE continues our ongoing search for the best and most innovative articles and reviews representing the state of the art in comics research. We welcome detailed close readings as much as comics theory and pioneering approaches to the medium —our open section comprises a diverse range of interdisciplinary studies of all things ›comic‹.

Thematic Section: »Failure« The focus of the thematic section in CLOSURE # 5 is »failure«.

How do comics approach the habit of the ›best-laid plans of mice and men‹ to go askew? Whether things fall apart on the personal or the collective level: mishaps and deficits appear as an ineradicable shadow of perfectionism. Failure is a dogged reminder of the limits of growth, the flaws in a design — and the lopsided image in the nine panel grid.
For CLOSURE #5, we seek contributions that trace the ways in which comics address failing fortunes, regrettable calamities, and abject frustrations. The social and political dimension of failure can be addressed as much as formal and narrative failures. Whether Charlie Brown misses the football yet again, Maggie Chascarillo in Love and Rockets faces all-too realistic adversity or Admian Tomine traces the disappointments of his solitary figures — is there a form of failure specific to comics?

Possible topics for the thematic section include, but are not limited to:
• Failure as a narrative strategy
o Loss, victory, and perspective
o Fear of failure: the narration of emotion and empathy
o Thwarted evil plans: failure, (re-)narration, and seriality
o After failure: catharsis, apocalypse, and learning from mistakes
• Characterization and Representation
o The art of failure: hero’s journeys, myths, progress (and regression)
o Heroes and antiheroes, losers and outsiders
o Self-reference: interrogating the failures of comics in comics o Failing at conformity: queerness, heteronormativity, and the interrogation of failure
• Formal failure
o Comics, art, fragmentation
o Aesthetics and non-narrative
o The failure of form: thwarted closure, collapsing panels, text and image at odds
o Changing taste, shifting canon: ‘bad’ comics and their critics
• Intermedial failure o Publishing booms and busts: target audiences, ill-timed ventures, dead-ends
o Failed careers: exploitation, discrimination and the production of comics
o Failure as a matter of principle: DIY, Comix, Underground, Zines o A failing medium? Markets, value, cultural capital

Please send your abstract for the open section or the thematic section (~ 3000 chars.) as well as a short bio-bibliographical blurb to closure@comicforschung.uni-kiel.de until December 1st, 2017.

The contributions (35.000-50.000 chars) are expected until March 30th, 2018.
For more information about the e-journal CLOSURE and our previous issues, please visit www.closure.uni-kiel.de

Eaton Journal of Archival Research in Science Fiction

The Eaton Journal of Archival Research in Science Fiction is a peer-reviewed, open-access, online journal hosted by the University of California at Riverside, affiliated with the UCR Library’s Eaton Collection of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Graduate student editors run the Eaton Journal, with scholarly review provided by an interdisciplinary executive board made up of SF scholars, research librarians, and archivists.

The Eaton Journal creates a space for science fiction scholars to share their findings and their experiences within the several archives dedicated to science fiction found throughout the world. The Eaton Journal is also the only journal dedicated to providing a place for archival librarians to discuss the challenges of managing significant science fiction collections and to share their best practices for facilitating as well as conducting archival research in SF.

The Eaton Journal seeks articles that fall under one of three categories:

Scholarly Articles with a significant research component: These articles are not simply notes and speculations regarding materials in an archive but rather use archival materials to build critical arguments that go beyond the textual and theoretical claims of conventional literary research. While these articles must still be textually and theoretically sound, we provide a venue for research that makes archival evidence its primary focus.

Methods and Transformations Articles: This is a space for articles that seek to expand the bounds of the SF archive, exploring new mediums, materials, or discourses as sites for speculative fiction scholarship. These articles generally seek to retheorize, redefine, and/or reframe the SF archive. Such articles may look to understudied archives (music, fan work, internet sites, etc.), and underserved communities within science fiction (drawing on gender, race, and sexuality studies), or may focus on SF performances, practices, and participatory events that challenge traditional archival methods.

Articles spotlighting neglected authors, emerging archives, and other research opportunities: The third type of article featured in the journal is that which identifies newly discovered or undeveloped archival resources, or points to authors whose archival traces offer particularly rich opportunities for scholarship. Spotlights can include, but are not limited to, interviews, editorials, transcripts of roundtable discussions and multimedia and creative works.

For Submission Information and Formatting Guidelines, visit our website at http://eatonjournal.ucr.edu/guidelines.html

Articles submitted for publication in the Eaton Journal should be sent to the editors at: eatonjournal@gmail.com.

deadline for submissions:
October 28, 2017

full name / name of organization:
Robert Lively/ Truckee Meadows Community College

contact email:
rlively@tmcc.edu

In 1995, Star Trek: Voyager launched in a way very different from its predecessor series. Voyager took place thousands of light years from the Federation, and it contained a multi-ethnic crew with a female captain. Voyager, in a sense, encapsulated the American zeitgeist of the 1990s when major demographic changes were transforming the population of America, and the post-Cold War era left us wondering what strategic alliances would mean moving forward. The series challenged the nature of the American mindset at the time.

This edited collection attempts to ask the questions, what can we learn from Voyager looking back on the series, and in what ways does Voyager show us a path forward as the world is still changing demographically and politically? It is in this spirit that we invite proposals of 250-300 words dealing with literary, political, historical, and/or other critical interpretations of the series or characters.

McFarland Publishers has expressed strong interest in the collection.

Abstracts (300 words max) are due for submission on 28 Oct. 2017. Please send your abstracts, together with a short bio (100 words max), to the editor of the collection, Robert L. Lively/ rlively@tmcc.edu. Authors whose abstracts are accepted for inclusion will be notified by 30 Nov. 2017. Full chapters of 6,000-7,000 words in MLA format will be due on 1 May 2018.

Techniques of the Fantastic
Ninth annual conference of the Gesellschaft für Fantastikforschung
September 6th – 8th, 2018 at the University of Freiburg/Fribourg (Switzerland)

The techniques of the fantastic are primarily ssociated to futuristic stories and science fiction, in which mankind designs its world under utopic or dystopic conditions. The technologically explainable Wonderful generally seems to be defined as related to fantastic narration, like Tzvetan Todorov’s definition of the “merveilleux instrumental” suggests. Fantastic techniques, however, are also relevant in High and Urban Fantasy, in fantastic related genres such as horror and in Gothic fiction, and even in fairy tales and adventure novels. In many fantastic contexts, different techniques can be observed: to differentiate the fantastic from magic, as alternative forms of motivations of the Wonderful (cf. Uwe Durst), on the narrative scale as literary and aesthetic procedures, for example by using the technique of the unreliable narrator and other stylistic or (meta-)fictional strategies (cf. for example Denis Mellier; Christine Brooke-Rose), as a production-aesthetic aspect for the creation of fantastic worlds (special effects), as an integral component of fantastic narrative worlds, for example in the form of strangely soulful machines of the romantic period, or as ghostly gadgets and plot device of science fiction.

(1) First, technology can be examined as a motif and object of fantastic artefacts and/or narrative worlds. Originating from romantic topoi such as machines, mesmerism, ghostlike projections or scientifically occult motifs of Gothic literature (Frankenstein), technology has proven to be a means of surpassing the humanly possible. Furthermore, connections can be established to the technologies of inhabitants of fantastic narrative worlds such as the technophile dwarf peoples of the Tolkien-derived High Fantasy, but also those present in computer games), and to genres which are fully dominated by a certain type of technology (cyberpunk). The often-dialectic relation between technology and magic can serve as an input to reflection (for example in Auguste de Villiers-de l’Isle d’Adam’s L’Ève future or in Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race). The reference of magic technology to High Fantasy becomes apparent in the industrial destruction of nature by the magician Saruman in Lord of the Rings, but also in the techniques of switching between worlds (for example the “Hogwarts-Express”). This aspect is especially valid in what concerns science fiction, where techniques range from “warp drive” to thinking robots (for example in the works of Isaac Asimov and Stanisław Lem) up to the neuronal total simulation (cf. The Matrix). These techniques can be found in para-historical narrations (which are especially marked by technology, e.g., in the counterfactual narrative worlds of Christian Kracht’s Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten).

(2) Another main point would be the cultural and techno-historical relation between certain real historical developments and their fictional adaptation and/or anticipation. This interplay between real and fictional inventions plays an important historico-cultural role since the end of the 19th century (cf. the history of moving images or the discourse on trans- and posthumanism).

(3) Third, another main point of this year’s conference is the literary “technique” as an aesthetic procedure of fantastic artefacts. It deals with the means of representation and narration, such as unreliable or multi-perspectivist narration, narrative short-cuts such as metalepsis, epistolary novels or stories in fantastic narrations, the relation between the immersive realism of representation and fantastic worlds, and more recently, with the appearance of the postmodern-ironic “meta-fantastic”, as it can be found in Julio Cortazar or Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon and Ulrike Draesner.

(4) Furthermore, these topics refer to the used medial or artistic techniques of production. Audio-visual production techniques of the creation of the fantastic are worth taking a closer look at, especially concerning their historic and systematic perspectives. Media-comparative approaches (on special effects, CGI or augmented reality) would be particularly welcomed at this point.

(5) Finally, cultural techniques should be analysed in their receptive handling with the fantastic. This includes cultural processing techniques and ways of dealing, in confrontation with fantastic artefacts. This not only refers to known strategies such as the allegorising reading of the fantastic, but also to trans-fictional extensions of fantastic worlds, fan culture (Cosplay), the rabbit holes of the Alternate Reality Games-cultures, to name only a few examples.

The site of the conference, the University of Fribourg (Switzerland), is located at the language border between the French and the German speaking part of Switzerland. The conference is organized by the local German Studies Department in collaboration with the institute of general and comparative literature, and is especially dedicated to the comparative exchange. Therefore, this year’s abstracts and contributions will gladly be accepted in German, English and French.

Possible topics
• Technology as a motif and object of fantastic artefacts
• Technology as a literary/aesthetic procedure of the fantastic, particularly when taking narrative techniques into account
• Representation techniques of fantastic structures (individual reviews or theoretical considerations): Horror and Gothic, utopias and dystopias, science fiction, fantasy, Magic Realism, speculative fiction, (literary) fairy tales, fables, myths, etc.
• Medial production techniques used for the creation of the fantastic
• Media-comparative and techno-historical examinations about the interplay between Fiction and Faction
• Cultural techniques of the (interaction with the) fantastic, such as fan culture (cosplay) or other approaches to the techniques of fantastic structures (making-ofs, exhibitions, interviews, etc.)
• Media-specific or intermedial/transmedial techniques for the creation of fantastic worlds in films, TV, literature, computer games, etc.

As usually at conferences of the Association for the Research on the Fantastic (GFF), there will be an open track for all lectures which are not directly related to the topic of the conference. Hence, we are open to further proposals.

The GFF offers two scholarships of 250 euros each to students for them to cover their travel expenses to the conference. Should you be interested in this offer, please let us know when handing in your abstract.

The deadline for abstracts and short biographies is February 28th, 2018. Please send them to gff2018@unifr.ch

Conference board
Dr. Sonja Klimek, Dr. Tobias Lambrecht, Prof. Dr. Sabine Haupt, Prof. Dr. Ralph Müller, Prof. Dr. Michel Viegnes

CFP for CRAS, High Fantasy, Political Dreams, and the Mainstream: Reflections on Game of Thrones.

deadline for submissions:
December 15, 2017

full name / name of organization:
Canadian Review of American Studies

contact email:
jonathan.chau@carleton.ca

The Canadian Review of American Studies (University of Toronto Press) is seeking papers for a special issue on the Game of Thrones fantasy series.

With nearly 11 million viewers and a staggering one billion illegal downloads of the most recent season, HBO’s television adaptation of George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones series has entered the pantheon of cultural phenomena. Yet, the success of GoT belies the fact that its generic underpinnings have historically been considered a niche category of fiction, one that seldom dominates mainstream discourses. The popularity of GoT may thus suggest a cultural shift, particularly in the realm of prestige television, away from realist fiction, such as The Wire, Oz, and The Sopranos, and a turn towards explicit escapism. But what does GoT offer an escape from? What does GoT posit as an alternative? Or does GoT function as allegory, establishing a lens through which to re-contextualize the milieu in which its audience watches, discusses, organizes viewing parties for, and is otherwise consumed by the series?

With a focus on GoT, this special issue of Canadian Review of American Studies invites a reconsideration of the role of fantasy in the contemporary American moment.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

The politics of dreams and fantasy
The relationship between history, memory, and fantasy
Gendered violence and power (im)balances in fantasy
The role of the non-human in imagined pasts
Racial dynamics and representation
Spectacle and political intrigue
Affect and the ethics of representation

Please send inquiries for this special issue to the editors, Jonathan Chau and Chris Vanderwees.

Final papers due by December 15, 2017.

Planetary Cultural and Literary Studies: New Epistemologies and Relational Futures in the Age of the Anthropocene

deadline for submissions:
October 15, 2017

full name / name of organization:
Research Center for Planetary Literary and Cultural Studies, Université de Montréal

contact email:
heike.harting@umontreal.ca

**Le français suivra**

Co-chairs: Simon Harel, Heike Härting, and Imen Boughattas (Université de Montréal)

(An Interdisciplinary and Multilingual Conference on Planetary Literatures and Culture—March 22-23, 2018, Université de Montréal)

Planetary Cultural and Literary Studies has been an emerging field of research in the humanities over the past few years. Although closely related to the environmental and digital humanities and to global indigenous research agendas, the rise of planetary studies is also a response to the various ideological predicaments of cosmopolitan cultural studies, globalization and postcolonial studies. This conference seeks to disentangle these predicaments and to help articulate a number of approaches towards an institutional and communal practice of Planetary Cultural and Literary Studies. To this end, the conference explores new ways of thinking the planet, planetary life, space and time, human and non-human relations in the era of the Anthropocene.

The Anthropocene designates a fracture in planetary history. It is the first time in the planet’s history that humans are responsible for having changed its geological and ecological constitution. As a concept and geological era, the Anthropocene provides a direct link between human culture and behavior and the possible demise or survival of the planet. While this uncertainty of our planetary future has prompted a rise of scientific debates and conferences across the natural, social and hard sciences, the humanities have yet to engage in a sustained critical and interdisciplinary inquiry into the cultural and human consequences of the Anthropocene. If the Anthropocene requires us to rethink our inherited notions of time, it also invites us to rethink the tropes and narratives through which we understand and share the planet. As such theorists as Christian Moraru, Pheng Cheah, and Masao Miyoshi have suggested, the notion of the planet conceptually designates a relational world-system, a non-anthropocentric and open structure characterized by multiplicity, complexity, multifariousness, and constant metamorphosis. Thus, the planet emerges as an ethico-political and narrative project characterized by multiple indigenous and cultural adjacencies. It engages in discursive and aesthetic strategies of re-worlding space, language, and subjectivities. What this conference seeks to explore, therefore, are the ways in which literatures and art from various cultural contexts contribute to the making of multiple, relational, resisting and/or competing planetary futures and imaginaries.

Questions to be discussed include:

How do we imagine the ways in which cultural and social relationships that map the planet in myriad and often unequal ways are responding to and are changing at the dawn of this new planetary era? Do we find ourselves at the crossroads of the global and the planetary, the human and nature, or are we immersed in irreversible crises? How do we imagine planetary communities of the human and the nonhuman? How do we imagine the planet from the “brink” (Matthew Omelsky), through an apocalyptic abyss? How do we imagine new non-anthropocentric possibilities and futures? How does planetary time differ from global time and space? How do we imagine collectively shared, more justly distributed and inhabited planetary space? What constitutes a planetary consciousness? Who creates it how and to what end? How does a “postmodern planetary consciousness” (Paul Gilroy) differ from a postcolonial planetary consciousness? What does it mean to see and articulate the planet, as Spivak argues, as a figure of “alterity”? How do contemporary and period-based literary and cultural texts/ images configure planetary time, connectivity, crisis and reconstitution? What is the place of planetary cultural and literary studies in academic and public communities and institutions?

Keywords and topics to be addressed:

– Planetary futures and geological time in culture and literature (e.g., “postcrisis” narratives/fictions [Omelsky])

– “Archeologies of” Planetary “Futures” and “other Science Fictions” (Fredric Jameson)

– Literary, social and cultural imaginings and re-imagings of the Anthropocene (as theme, genre, and aesthetics)

– planetary modernities and/or beyond planetary post-modernism

– the “planetary geographical imagination” and “trans-local relationalities” (Tariq Jazeel)

– “geo-piety” (Gilroy) and “feeling planetary”/ the making of a planetary consciousness

– Afroplanitarity/ African Science Fiction

– “Species thinking” (Dipesh Chakrabarty) and interspecieism/ the human and the nonhuman/bioart

– Intersections of planetary and post-race epistemologies

– Cyborgs, bioconnectivity, and other genders in a planetary world

– The relevance or obsoleteness of area studies in relation to the rise of planetary studies

– Planetary urbanisms and digital commons

– Critical social and cultural relationality and translocal resistance movements

– Planetary philosophies and cultural practices from and through the brink (emphasizing indigenous and non-Western philosophies of the planet, universality, and relationality)

– Imagining social relationships through outer space exploration

Submission Guidelines:

Please submit abstracts of up to 300 words for 20-minute-long papers that address any of the issues or questions listed above. Abstract and papers may respectively be written and given in English or French. We also invite proposals for collaborative panels that take an innovative approach to the received conference format, individual performances, films, videos, short plays, or/and poster presentations. For collaborative panels we ask that a designated chair of the panel submit an abstract/rational for the panel as a whole and attach the abstracts of the individual panelists.

We will also organize a plenary session for current graduate work on the given topics and invite doctoral nearing the completion of their research project to submit an abstract of their work.

Deadline for all submissions: October 15, 2017

Submission address: imen.boughatas@umontreal.ca; heike.harting@umontreal.ca

Please submit your abstract via email and as a Word document attachment. Please do not include your name and institutional address on the abstract and use “PlanetaryFutures.2018-Abstract” as the subject heading.

Notification of acceptance: by October 31, 2017

*****

Appel à contributions

Études culturelles et littéraires planétaires: Nouvelles épistémologies et avenirs relationnels à l’ère de l’anthropocène

(Un colloque interdisciplinaire et multilingue sur les études littéraires et culturelles planétaires–– Les 22-23 mars 2018, Université de Montréal)

Coprésidents: Simon Harel, Heike Härting, and Imen Boughattas (Université de Montréal)

Les études culturelles et littéraires sur la planétarité constituent un domaine de recherche émergent dans les humanités au cours des dernières années. Bien qu’étroitement liée aux humanités environnementales et numériques et aux programmes de recherche autochtones mondiaux, l’émergence des études sur la planétarité est aussi une réponse aux différents problèmes idéologiques liés aux études culturelles sur le cosmopolitisme, à la mondialisation, et aux études postcoloniales. Ce colloque vise à éclaircir ces problèmes et à envisager un nombre d’approches vers une pratique institutionnelle et communale des études culturelles et littéraires planétaires. À cette fin, le colloque examine de nouvelles façons de penser la planète, la vie planétaire, l’espace et le temps, et les relations humaines et non-humaines à l’ère de l’anthropocène.

L’anthropocène désigne une fracture dans l’histoire planétaire. C’est la première fois dans l’histoire de la planète que les êtres humains sont responsables d’avoir changé sa constitution géologique et écologique. En tant que concept et ère géologique, l’anthropocène fournit un lien direct entre la culture et le comportement humain et la disparition possible ou la survie de la planète. Bien que cette incertitude de notre futur planétaire ait donné lieu à de nombreux débats et conférences scientifiques dans les sciences naturelles, sociales et exactes, les sciences humaines doivent encore se livrer à une enquête critique et interdisciplinaire soutenue sur les conséquences culturelles et humaines de l’anthropocène. Si l’anthropocène exige que nous repensions notre représentation du temps, il nous invite également à repenser les tropes et les récits à travers lesquels nous envisageons et partageons la planète. Comme le suggèrent des théoriciens tels que Christian Moraru, Pheng Cheah et Masao Miyoshi, la notion de « planète » désigne, sur le plan conceptuel, un système-monde relationnel, une structure non anthropocentrique et ouverte qui se caractérise par la multiplicité, la complexité, la pluralité et la métamorphose constante. Ainsi, la planète émerge-t-elle comme un projet éthico-politique et narratif caractérisé par de multiples contiguïtés autochtones et culturelles. La « planète » fait place à des stratégies discursives et esthétiques destinées à remondialiser (re-worlding) l’espace, le langage et les subjectivités. Cette conférence vise à explorer le rôle de l’art et des littératures de divers contextes culturels dans la conception d’avenirs et imaginaires planétaires multiples, relationnels, résistants, et/ou concurrents.

Les questions qui seront abordées incluent:

Comment peut-on imaginer les manières avec lesquelles les relations culturelles et sociales qui tracent la planète de façons multiples et souvent inégales sont en train de changer à l’aube de cette nouvelle ère planétaire? Est-ce que nous nous retrouvons à la croisée du global et du planétaire, de l’humain et de la nature, ou sommes-nous immergés dans des crises irréversibles ? Comment peut-on imaginer les communautés planétaires humaines et non humaines? Comment peut-on imaginer la planète en nous situant au « bord » (Matthew Omelsky) d’un abîme apocalyptique? Comment peut-on imaginer de nouvelles possibilités et des avenirs non anthropocentriques? Comment la temporalité planétaire diffère-t-elle de la temporalité et de l’espace de la mondialisation ? Comment peut-on imaginer un espace planétaire collectivement partagé et équitablement réparti? Qu’est-ce qui constitue une conscience planétaire? Qui crée cette conscience ? Comment la créer et à quelle fin ? Comment une « conscience planétaire postmoderne » (Paul Gilroy) diffère-t-elle d’une conscience planétaire postcoloniale? Qu’est-ce que cela signifie d’envisager la planète en tant que figure de «l’altérité,» comme l’affirme Spivak ? Comment les textes littéraires et culturels contemporains configurent-ils le temps, la connectivité, la crise et la reconstitution planétaires? Quelle est la place des études culturelles et littéraires planétaires dans les communautés et institutions académiques et publiques?

Mots clés et axes de réflexion:

Le futur planétaire et le temps géologique dans la culture et la littérature (par exemple, les récits de l’après-crise (postcrisis) [Omelsky])
« Archéologies du futur » planétaire et « de la science-fiction » (Fredric Jameson)
Les représentations et imaginations littéraires, sociales, et culturelles de l’anthropocène (en tant que thème, genre, et esthétique).
Les modernités planétaires et/ou au-delà du post-modernisme planétaire.
« L’imagination géographique planétaire » et les « relationalités translocales » (trans-local relationalities) (Tariq Jazeel).
La « géopiété » (Paul Gilroy) et le fait de « se sentir planétaire » (“feeling planetary”) / la création d’une conscience planétaire.
L’afro-planétarité et la science-fiction de l’Afrique.
“Species thinking” (Dipesh Chakrabarty) et “interspecieism” / l’humain et le non-humain / le bio-art
Les intersections entre les épistémologies planétaires et la théorie « post-race ».
Les cyborgs, la bio-connectivité, et autres genres dans un contexte planétaire.
La pertinence ou l’obsolescence des études régionales (area studies) par rapport à la montée des études planétaires.
Urbanismes planétaires et agoras numériques.
Relationalité sociale et culturelle critique et mouvements de résistance translocaux.
Philosophies et pratiques culturelles planétaires (mettant l’accent sur les philosophies autochtones et non occidentales de la planète, de l’universalité, et de la relationalité)
La représentation des relations sociales à travers l’exploration de l’espace.
Modalités de soumission:

Veuillez soumettre des propositions de communications d’environ 300 mots en français ou en anglais. Nous vous invitons également à soumettre des propositions de panels collaboratifs avec des approches novatrices (performances individuelles, films, vidéos, pièces de théâtre, présentations d’affiches, etc.). Pour les panels collaboratifs, nous demandons qu’un président désigné du panel soumette un résumé du panel dans son ensemble en y joignant les propositions des autres panélistes.

Nous organiserons aussi une séance plénière pour les travaux de recherche en cours qui portent sur l’une des thématiques mentionnées ci-dessus, et invitons les doctorants en voie de terminer leurs thèses à soumettre un résumé de leurs travaux.

Date limite pour toutes les soumissions: Le 15 octobre 2017

Veuillez envoyer votre proposition par voie électronique sous forme d’un document Word aux adresses suivantes : imen.boughatas@umontreal.ca; heike.harting@umontreal.ca

Votre nom et votre adresse institutionnelle ne doivent pas apparaître dans le document. Veuillez inscrire « FutursPlanétaires.2018-Proposition » dans la ligne Objet.

Décision du comité: Le 31 octobre 2017

CFP: Children and Popular Culture
by Patrick Cox, H-NET VP and Editor
CFP: Global Studies of Childhood

Special Issue: Children and Popular Culture

Guest Editor: Patrick Cox, Rutgers University

Childhood and youth are always contested notions, but perhaps nowhere more than in popular culture. Popular culture offers representations of children and youth as, among other things, wise, dangerous, evil, innocent, sexual, doomed, and in various states of “in progress.” Popular culture is also the broad site of much child agency, where children and youth produce texts from novels to YouTube channels to websites, blogs, and zines, frequently outstripping their adult contemporaries in technological savvy and communicative capability. Popular culture for children is by turns condescending to the youngest audience, crass, pedantic, and appropriated by adults for their own pleasure. Elements of popular culture are designed to educate and socialize children; others are manipulated by children as political activism. These turns call into question and trouble conceptions not only of “the child” but of “popular culture” itself and propose a compelling nexus of questions befitting both Childhood Studies and Popular Culture Studies.

In this special issue, authors are invited to consider intersections of popular culture by, for, and about childhood, both broadly construed. We will explore both the impacts of popular culture on youth and childhood and the very real impacts of children and youth on popular culture. All disciplinary approaches are welcome, including but not limited to textual and visual analysis, ethnographic work, studies of children’s popular material culture, historical readings, comparative analysis of texts, and consumer and communication studies.

Additionally, contemplations of the interstices between Childhood Studies and Popular Culture Studies as academic endeavors are encouraged. The two fields have been in limited conversation with one another, perhaps separated by epistemological and methodological concerns, yet the available data seems like a rich vein for insight. While both fields are multi-disciplinary and continuously evolving, Childhood Studies maintains very clear traces of its roots in social sciences, while Popular Culture Studies is still found more often housed in the Humanities. The two fields each have at their center subjects that have at times made it difficult for them to be taken seriously as sites of academic inquiry. With different questions at their core, how can the two fields interact? Put another way, how do we study this multitude of texts?

Topics for this special issue might include:

Popular culture and education, whether intentional or inadvertent;
Children’s popular culture as grown-up nostalgia;
Youth vs. adult perspectives on popular culture;
Children and youth as producers of popular culture;
New media as empowering or oppressive;
Capabilities for communication and interconnectivity;
Adult consumption of children’s popular culture;
Children’s consumption of decades-old popular culture;
Definitions of youth in popular culture;
Nostalgia through revivals and reboots;
Social media;
Diminishing space between children’s and adult popular culture.

The guest editor welcomes submissions of articles via the journal submission system on its SAGE Publishing site. See “Submission Guidelines” here: https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/journal/global-studies-childhood#description.

Deadline for submissions: December 1, 2017.

Please send any queries to guest editor Patrick Cox at patrick.cox@rutgers.edu

Economics and SF

deadline for submissions:
March 31, 2018

full name / name of organization:
Vector

contact email:
vector.submissions@gmail.com

How does SF represent and reflect on economic life?

How do finance, value, exchange, production, and the everyday economic reality of people’s lives appear in SF? How might SF contribute to the ongoing evolution of economics? And what might creators of science fiction, as custodians of radical visions of social organisation, learn from economics at this critical moment?

Vector is pleased to invite proposals for short articles (2,000-4,000 words) exploring science fiction in relation to any and all themes related to economics, as well as economic history, economic sociology, economic anthropology, economic humanities, finance, political economy, IPE, and other adjacent disciplines and fields.

Please submit abstracts of 200-400 words to vector.submissions@gmail.com by 31 March 2018.

We particularly welcome proposals to explore women’s writing and/or writing by BAME authors. As well as articles, we would also be interested in hearing ideas for unusual and/or innovative forms of contribution, and other informal thoughts and queries.

Here are just a few texts which may be worthy of consideration:

Margaret Atwood, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth
Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower
Cory Doctorow, Walkaway
Ursula K Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
Karen Lord, Galaxy Game
Kim Stanley Robinson, Mars Trilogy
Lionel Shriver, The Mandibles
Charles Stross, Neptune’s Brood
Starhawk, The Fifth Sacred Thing
Nalo Hopkinson, ‘Money Tree’
Tim Maughan, ‘Zero Hours’
Michael Swanwick. ‘From Babel’s Fall’n Glory We Fled…’
Frederik Pohl, ‘The Midas Plague’
Jo Walton, ‘The Panda Coin’
Although issue’s focus will mainly be science fiction, we are also open to other genre works, e.g. Max Gladstone’s Craft series, Anne McCaffrey’s Pern, Sherwood Smith’s King’s Shield, Terry Pratchett’s Making Money, Karina Sumner-Smith’s Towers trilogy, and themes such as magic and economics, economies of honour in epic fantasy, etc.

Is mainstream economics in crisis? The discipline is interrogating its own foundations with increasing ferocity. Pressure is growing, from inside economics, and especially from without, to diversify methods and perspectives — and perhaps even to think thoughts that economics has traditionally deemed unthinkable. In this connection, we would also love to see proposals from contributors from a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds — including, of course, economists — as well as interdisciplinary collaborative work.

Vector is the critical journal of the BSFA. It is edited by Polina Levontin and Jo Lindsay Walton. Please direct submissions to vector.submissions@gmail.com, and queries to vector.editors@gmail.com.

The Journal of Science Fiction is accepting submissions for a special issue on Afrofuturism to be published on January 31, 2018.

The Museum of Science Fiction’s annual convention, Escape Velocity, will be hosting literary programming on the subject at this year’s event (September 1-September 3, 2017), and due to the popularity of the topic and the research interests of the JOSF team, we have decided to compile a special issue aggregating essays on science and speculative fiction literature, film, comics, and popular culture which address the experience of blackness. We seek academic articles of 5,000 to 8,000 words, short reflection pieces of 500 to 1,000 words, and book reviews of 500-750 words.

We welcome submissions focusing on any and all aspects of Afrofuturist culture. We hope to include African, African-American, and Afro-Caribbean authors, texts, and perspectives. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

The nomenclature of Afrofuturism: the modern relevance of the term, its origins, and its history
The critical study of race theory, gender, and/or sexuality in Afro-diaspora texts
Authors (including but not limited to the following):
Steven Barnes
Octavia Butler
Maryse Condé
Samuel L. Delaney
Tananarive Due
Jewelle Gomez
Nalo Hopkinson
NK Jemisin
Nnedi Okorafor
Ben Okri
Ishmael Reed
Charles R. Saunders
Colson Whitehead
Ytasha L. Womack
Films, such as Marvel’s upcoming Black Panther, Coney’s Space Is the Place, Nance’s An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, Bodomo’s Afronauts, or Sayle’s Brother from Another Planet (to name only a few of the many possibilities)
Queer futurities
Neo-Slave Narratives
Dialect
Non-Fiction
Artwork
Music
Book Reviews
Interviews
Special consideration will be given to essays addressing literature, theory, and contemporary texts and trends. The deadline for submissions is October 9, 2017.

Please submit completed essays through the MOSF Journal of Science Fiction website, http://publish.lib.umd.edu/scifi/index. To submit your work, click “About” > “Submissions: Online Submissions”, create an account, and follow the submission prompts.

**We will also consider the submission of proposals (250-500 words), but preference will be given to drafts and completed pieces.**