International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts

We invite submissions to the 2017 Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA) Conference, held at the Marriott Riverside at the Convention Center and hosted by University of California, Riverside.

Our conference theme is Unknown Pasts / Unseen Futures and our keynote speaker is Nnedi Okorafor, author of fantasy, sf, and speculative fiction. Sf author Ted Chiang will also be in attendance for a special screening of Arrival (2016, dir. Denis Villeneuve), which is based on Chiang’s short story “Story of Your Life.” A Q&A with Chiang will follow the screening.

In her acceptance speech for the National Book Foundation’s medal for Distinguished Contributions to American Letters, Ursula K. Le Guin reminded us of the importance of the speculative imagination: such visions can help us recognize that social and political structures of our present are only one option among many rather than inevitable formations. In this spirit, we invite papers that explore science fiction’s pasts from innovative perspectives and that focus on its power to envision alternative futures that are more than just the intensification of urgent problems of the present.

Topics can include, but are not limited to:

– Science fiction without the label: speculative cultural productions that might be understood as part of an expanded frame for science fiction

– Neglected voices: authors or works once prominent in the field who have been forgotten

– New voices: works by the next generation of sf writers and creators and how their work is changing our field

– New methodologies: new ways of asking questions about and with science fiction

– Overlooked media: what other media can we think about in sf terms—visual art, performance art, and more?

– New futures: how can we think beyond or outside of the various crises—economic, ecological, social, democratic—in which we find ourselves in the twenty-first century?

– Reinventing sf: it has become axiomatic to say that the future resembles science fiction in reference to contemporary technology such as augmented reality or biotechnology; so if we are now living in the world as envisioned by Gernsback’s sf, what should be the project for another kind of sf for the twenty-first century?

Please send proposals of 250 words to sfra2017@ucr.edu by March 31, 2017. Proposals should include your name and affiliation, and be accompanied by a brief bibliography. Proposals can be made for pre-constituted panels and these must include email addresses for all proposed speakers.

The full CFP and information about registration, travel, accommodations, and more can be found on the SFRA website at http://www.sfra.org/SFRA-Annual-Conference.

We are still accepting proposals for a special issue of JLCDS on The Intersections of Disability and Science Fiction. Deadline is March 15th!

The CFP follows:

Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies

Special issue: The Intersections of Disability and Science Fiction

Guest editors: Ria Cheyne (Disability and Education, Liverpool Hope University) and Kathryn Allan (Independent Scholar, Canada)

“No other literary genre comes close to articulating the anxieties and preoccupations of the present day as clearly and critically as SF, making it a vital source of understanding advances in technology and its impact on newly emerging embodiments and subjectivities, particularly for people with disabilities.”
–Kathryn Allan, Disability in Science Fiction

Reflecting the status of science fiction as a genre that spans multiple mediums and audiences, this special issue of JLCDS seeks articles that explore the intersection(s) of science fiction, disability, and disability studies. What possibilities might science fiction or science fiction theory offer to disability activists and the field of disability studies? How might disability theory, or a disability-informed approach, enrich or transform our understanding of science fiction as a genre or as a mode of thought?

Topics might include, but are not limited to:

● Representations of disability in science fiction literature, comics/graphic novels, film, art, music, video games, or television, and their implications for our understanding of genre and/or disability.
● Science fiction fan culture (including conventions, fanfic and other forms of fan production).
● Science fiction and prosthesis.
● Science fiction and eugenics/genetic engineering.
● Science fiction and the posthuman.
● Accessibility and science fiction environments.
● The political and ethical consequences of imagining future worlds with or without disability.
● The figure of the alien or cyborg in science fiction and/or disability theory.
● Disability and queerness in science fiction.
● Disability and indigenous futures in science fiction.
● Science fiction, disability, and medical humanities.
● The influence of disability activism on professional or fan-based science fiction production.

Submissions that consider how disability intersects with other identity categories are particularly encouraged. The guest editors welcome contributions from independent scholars.

Please email a 500 word proposal to cheyner@hope.ac.uk and kathryn@academiceditingcanada.ca by March 15, 2017. Contributors can expect to be notified by April 26, 2017. Full drafts of the selected articles will be due by December 6, 2017. Please direct any questions to either guest editor.

NEW DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: March 30, 2017

UNIVERSITY OF AVEIRO, PORTUGAL

29, 30 June & 1 July 2017

Keynote addresses by:

Roz Kaveney, Author and Activist

Toby Miller, University of California Riverside & Loughborough
University London

The conference will deal with particular practices and topics in
contemporary media and culture. A fuller cfp can be found under the
CFP menu, but basically it will be divided into two sections:

Section 1: Formal and Commercial Issues

The formation of global conglomerates has created the commercial
conditions for ever more lucrative exchanges between different media.
Hardware, software and entertainment generation are now in lock-step,
and they are like this because it makes it easier to function in
global markets, working the magic transformation of your money into
their money. In this regard, Sony-Columbia’s exploitation of its
hoary 1950s product Godzilla is a quaint example of a practice now
brought to considerable refinement. The franchise, the sequel and more
recently the prequel, are now industry norms, lurching fastly and
furiously into online multiplayer gaming after-life.

With these and more issues in mind, papers are invited in the
following general areas:

transmedia synergies and convergences
innovative business practices in media and merchandising
fandom, community and popular culture
crossover forms and digital interactivities
resistances to and rejections of popular cultural forms
Section 2: Thematic Content

Transformation of bodies is now an ever-present theme. Bodies may
develop special abilities through forms of cod-scientific causes, such
as being bitten by a spider developed in a scientific experiment, or
through forms of more plausibly scientific explanation, such as
current research on genetics or prosthetics extended into imagined
future possibilities, or actually present technologies in the
realisation of gender affirming surgery. From superheroes to
cyberbodies to transsexuals may be a forced conjunction of disparate
phenomena. On the other hand, these phenomena may also be different
points on a paradigm in which the stability of bodies has been
overtaken by logics of choice associated with varying possibilities,
real or promised, in a battle of not just warring super and enhanced
figures, but of the models of desire they embody.

Accordingly, the conference invites proposals for papers dealing with
these and related thematic phenomena.

bodies which refuse to die
superbodies and ordinary worlds
rehearsing technologically altered bodies
genetics and special bodies
identical bodies
choosing bodies; control over bodies

Proposals of between 200 and 300 words should be submitted by March
30th 2017 along with a short bionote to both Anthony Barker:
abarker@ua.pt & David Callahan: callahan@ua.pt, specifying which
section you wish to present in. It may appear to be obvious but given
that everything solid changes into something else, including
conference papers, your paper might belong in both.

The conference language will be English.

TRANSFORMERS: all that is solid changes into something else

*Summer School on “Transnational Graphic Narratives” at the University of Siegen (Germany)*

Heads Up Comics Scholars

Call for Applications

Extended application deadline (March 31st) for an upcoming summer school on Transnational Graphic Narratives at the University of Siegen in Germany! We have an excellent selection of speakers from the US, UK, and Germany. If you are a comics scholar, you do not want to miss this!

Find updated info on application and funding details here: https://www.uni-siegen.de/phil/transnationalgraphicnarratives/

MLA panel on “Asian/American Utopias and Dystopias”

Please consider submitting an abstract by 10 March. Here’s as much detail as MLA’s 35-word limit allows us to provide:

Title of session: Asian/American Utopias and Dystopias

Submission requirements: 300 word abstracts

Deadline for submissions: 10 March 2017

Description: Utopian or dystopian thinking in Asian/American cultural production or theoretical frameworks. US-based or international. Social movements, speculative fiction, disaster narratives, migration, queer futurity, posthumanism, etc.

Email abstracts to: Christopher Fan (chrisfan@ucr.edu) and Erin Khue Ninh (ninh@asamst.ucsb.edu)

SFS is planning a special issue on “Science Fiction and the Climate Crisis” that we see as part of an urgent and ongoing conversation with colleagues in the humanities, the social sciences, and the sciences. In the energy humanities and other interdisciplinary fields, the climate crisis unfolds differentially as description, allegory, abstract model, immanent materiality, slow apocalypse, and the end of humanist philosophy. We welcome submissions that address the intersections of science fiction and the climate crisis in historical and/or theoretical terms and in multiple media forms from the pulps to science-fiction media and art. We encourage papers that reflect on and explore genre hybridity, including modalities such as climate fiction, petrofiction, and slipstream.

What does one look for when science fiction overlaps with the climate crisis? Is it the punctual events of the thriller genre or the slower pacing of a carefully considered longue durée that grabs critical attention? Moreover, how does climate figure in sf—as foreground or background? Which sf authors or texts stay nervous about the climate crisis? Is there a parallel between science-fictional estrangement and the defamiliarization of neologisms such as the Anthropocene, hyperobjects, necrocapitalism? Contributions might also consider how the climate crisis figures in sf in light of the energy regime. For instance, what differences obtain between figurations of coal crisis and depictions of nuclear disaster? How does the way we use energy affect the reach and scope of sf writing? Conversely, what impact, if any, does climate crisis have on our understanding of the role of science fiction in technoculture?

We are looking for submissions that contribute substantial overviews of the current situation and that explore a variety of sites and authors. In addition to papers focused on the ways in which sf engages the climate crisis, energy regimes, and multiple ecologies (real or imagined), we are interested in discussions that draw on feminist and queer futurities, swerve with the nonhuman turn, analyze the vicissitudes of capitalism’s secular crisis, and follow the utopian impulse. We see immediacy in climate crisis—we must act now—and yet we appreciate a long view of global warming as well—the slow accretion of carbon that has so recently tipped the atmospheric balance of the planet.

Please send proposals (300-500 words) by 1 Jun. 2017 to Brent Ryan Bellamy (bbellamy@ualberta.ca) and Veronica Hollinger (vhollinger@trentu.ca). Completed papers (6000-8000 words) will be due by 1 Dec. 2017.

Wiscon has just extended the submission deadline for their academic track to March 1st. More info here:

http://wiscon.net/programming/academic/

“WisCon is a 1,000-member science fiction convention with a feminist/social justice focus. Every year we celebrate, dissect, and transform speculative literature, television, film, comics, and games. We specifically aim to foster conversations about feminism(s), gender, race, disability, and class.”

Wiscon has a strong academic track as well as fannish programming. May 26-29 in Madison, WI.