Old and New Science Fiction Imaginaries in English-Speaking Cinema and Television (29th SERCIA Annual Conference).
Location and date: Careof, La Fabbrica del Vapore, Milano. 2-4 September 2024.
Deadline for proposal submissions: 20 May 2024.
Organisers
- Celestino Deleyto
- German A. Duarte
Keynote speakers:
- Pawel Frelik (University of Warsaw)
- Naomi Mandel (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Presentation
The 29th SERCIA Annual Conference intends to celebrate SF, both in its manifold 21st-century manifestations and by commemorating the old and long relationship between the genre and the cinematic image, from George Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon (1902) to current ergodic and interactive narratives such as Bandersnatch (2018). We, therefore, welcome not only studies of contemporary audiovisual manifestations of the genre but also critical re-evaluations of 20th-century landmarks. We would also like to extend the debate to the analysis of different forms of speculative audiovisual fiction in order to better understand the ways in which the two main instruments for the production of the social imaginary of the last century (film and SF) have familiarised us with technological devices, dystopian social scenarios, high-tech posthuman realities, extraterrestrial presences and non-material digital universes. In other words, we propose to explore the ways in which SF and the filmic image imagined the future during the last century and, in so doing, generated our present time and sparked our own future-directed imaginations.
We encourage proposals dealing with the following issues from a variety of perspectives (aesthetic, cultural, economic, historical, etc.) in English-speaking films and series of the new millennium:
- The history of SF, exploring and celebrating the enduring relationship between SF and film, the inscription of contemporary films and series in the aesthetic and ideological traditions of the genre, notably through comparative studies between literature and film, or between new and canonic works, as well as new perspectives on the classics of the genre.
- Mapping the present time, imagining the future: we encourage proposals that deal with the ways in which the future is imagined (and imaged) through SF. This is to say, how, in the course of the last century, SF territorialized our present time and, by extension, populated our daily lives with themes and devices that have built our present reality. We would like to discuss the ways cinema depicted the future in the past.
- Reformulating the genre: new media technologies generate transmedia and adaptative phenomena that naturally modify genres. From this perspective, proposals could analyze diverse forms of speculative fiction and/or attempt to identify new narrative forms and to map, in the genre’s universe, new topoi that could be identified as new declensions of SF.
- Adaptation, analyzing the ways in which the complex narrative structure of SF is adapted to the screen. Proposals that enquire into the transition of certain technological devices from a textual dimension to the image are also welcome.
- Cyberpunk: we would like to open a space for the discussion of social problems and phenomena related to technological developments. We encourage contributions that engage with the main topics of cyberpunk, and identify them in our current audiovisual production. We welcome analyses of the ways that the main cyberpunk topoi (e.g., dystopia, A.I. societal collapse, among others) have been reformulated after the Digital Revolution.
- Theoretical formulations and re-formulations of the genre, its limits and its intersections with other genres are also welcome.
Send proposals to German A. Duarte (GDuarte@unibz.it) and Celestino Deleyto (cdeleyto@unizar.es). Dealine. May 20, 2024.
Website addresses
Contact details
- German A. Duarte (GDuarte@unibz.it) and
- Celestino Deleyto (cdeleyto@unizar.es).
Posthuman Fictions: Rethinking “the Human” in Contemporary Culture.
Università di Genova. 19-20 September 2024.
Deadline for submissions: 7 July 2024.
Location: Scuola di Scienze Umanistiche, Università di Genova
Contributions by Peter Boxall (University of Oxford, UK); Sonia Baelo (Universidad de Zaragoza, España); Mónica Calvo (Universidad de Zaragoza, España); Alex Goody (Oxford Brookes, UK); Sebastian Groes (University of Wolverhampton, UK); Miglena Nikolchina (Sophia University, Bulgaria); Ivan Stacy (Beijing Normal University, China); Peter Childs (Birmingham Newman University); Aki Kawamura (Aichi University, Japan); Vanessa Guignery (École Normale Supérieure de Lyon); Rocío Carrasco (Universidad de Huelva, España).
In the age where human beings are extended by superintelligent technology and attitudes to the environment and specieshood are radically changing, who or what is ‘human’, as for instance Rosi Braidotti has argued, has become debatable. How do fictional narratives in contemporary culture interrogate this so-called “posthuman” condition within the Anglophone world as well as beyond? Can we uncritically embrace posthuman rhetoric generated from a position of privilege when many communities have not even had the chance to be human yet? This symposium challenges the utopianist rhetoric of late postmodernist conceptualisations of the ‘posthuman’ and hopes to start opening a new language that might reframe our thinking of the state of our early twenty-first century world in novel ways.
Computer-animated movies have sometimes been described as ‘creepy’ and ‘unsettling’ because they are too realistic to be enjoyable. How does literature reflect upon personhood and the boundary between life and death? How do literary texts imagine what lies beyond the human? What role do ethical concerns play? How is agency, human or otherwise, represented in relation to the performance of technoscience? Is the increasingly pervasive reality of ‘artificial life’ inspiring new and hybrid genres of writing? How can we learn from other animal species – as Donna Haraway’s new books suggest – to be human in new ways?
Cyborgs, robots and androids populate the pages of science fiction texts, but they are also increasingly present in what is marketed as ‘literary fiction’, as in Ian McEwan’s, Kazuo Ishiguro’s and Jeanette Winterson’s latest novels. In addition, the notion of the posthuman is being explored across the globe and in a range of cultural contexts: this is particularly true in the case of writers involved in the current Chinese sci-fi boom such as Chen Quifan, Hao Jinfang and Han Song.
We seek proposals for papers that address any aspect of the literary engagement with the cultural and social imaginaries affected by and, in turn, affecting scientific and technological developments in Western and non-Western texts. We also encourage explorations between contemporary literature, films and video games. Papers can address the posthuman condition also in relation to the environmental crisis, disaster narratives, post-apocalyptic visions of the future.
Topics to be explored include but are not limited to:
- Ethics
- Class and digital inequalities
- The Uncanny Valley: ghosts, androids and us
- Digital technologies, politics and permacrisis
- The nonhuman and digital enhancement
- AI and gender
- Divergent politics of nostalgia and hope
Convenors:
- Prof Laura Colombino, (Università di Genova, Italy);
- Prof Sebastian Groes (University of Wolverhampton, UK);
- Prof Ivan Stacy (Beijing Normal University, China)
Submissions: an abstract of 200 to 250 words should be sent by 7 July 2024
Contact: For more information, please contact
- Prof Laura Colombino (laura.colombino@lingue.unige.it) and
- Prof Paola Nardi (paola.nardi@unige.it)
(Posted 26 June 2024)
H. G. Wells and the Anthropocene: Time, Earth, and Us
The Art Workers’ Guild, London. Saturday 21 September 2024.
Deadline for proposal submissions: 25 June.
Organiser: H. G. Wells Society
Keynote speaker: Dr David Shackleton, author of British Modernism and the Anthropocene: Experiments with Time, University of Cardiff
Presentation
H. G. Wells’s work spans various genres and themes, but a common thread is his fascination with time. He explores different modes of time travel, temporal paradoxes, and historical narratives, always with an eye to the future of humanity. His stories challenge his characters and readers to confront the vastness and indifference of geological time, in which human existence is a brief and precarious episode. Some of his best-known works, such as The Time Machine, and some of his lesser-known ones, such as The Croquet Player, illustrate this theme of human vulnerability in the face of Earth time.
Wells’s engagement with Earth time makes his work relevant for the current discussions of the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene is a contested term that refers to the geological epoch in which human activities have a significant impact on Earth’s systems. This concept suggests that humans have transcended their natural limits as a species. They exploit the fossil fuels and alter the climate that have taken thousands of years to form. The effects of these actions will persist for thousands of years more, leaving a mark on the geological record beyond human history.
The Anthropocene poses urgent questions about how humans relate to time and how they cope with the environmental crises that unfold within it. We aim to explore these issues both in Wells’s own writings and through comparative studies including Wells, and invite proposals for papers on topics such as the following:
- Deep time and deep history;
- Posthuman and posthumous geology: the fate of Earth and its inhabitants;
- Nonlinear temporalities: time travel, parallel worlds, alternate histories, and temporal paradoxes;
- Human and nonhuman (co)evolution, degradation, and symbiosis;
- Capitalist extractivism and its damaging effects on the climate, life, and matter;
- Genetic engineering;
- The geoengineered Earth;
- The human and its extraterrestrial others.
In particular, we welcome proposals that consider visualizations of Wells’s work: How are Wells’s visions of a damaged Earth and the ‘good Anthropocene’ represented in visual and media adaptations of his writing?
Website address
Contact details
Please send your 150-250-word abstracts and short bio notes to Maxim Shadurski (Maxim.Shadurski@uws.edu.pl). The deadline for abstract submission is 25 June 2024. Notifications of acceptance and registrations details will be sent by 5 July.
For general enquiries, please contact the Hon. Secretary of the H. G. Wells Society, Brian Jukes, at secretaryhgwellssociety@hotmail.com.
(Posted 9 April 2024)
10th Biennial International Conference on the Linguistics of Contemporary English (BICLCE).
University of Alicante (Spain). 26-28 September 2024.
Extended proposal submission deadline: 15 January 2024.
Event organised by University of Alicante
Presentation of the event
We would like to invite researchers to submit their abstracts addressing every aspect of contemporary English, and especially encourage proposals that engage with variation in English, second language acquisition and development, learner corpora, discourse analysis and metadiscourse, constructions, metaphor, politeness, formulaic language, academic writing, language contact, corpus-based studies and statistical models.
Please note that any proposals on historical and contrastive topics should be related to the study of present-day English.
We are delighted to announce the following plenary speakers:
- Bernd Kortmann
- Monika Kavalir
- Elisa Mattiello
- Tony McEnery
Website
https://web.ua.es/es/biclce2024/
Contact details
CFP
CfP_BICLCE2024(Posted 7 September 2023. Updated 16 December 2023)
Lexical and Phraseological Neologisms in Contemporary English (Thematic workshop of the BICLCE-10 International Conference).
University of Alicante (Spain). 26-28 September 2024.
Deadline for submission of proposals: 15 December 2023.
Presentation of the event
The lexical dynamics of the English language lead to a constant ebb and flow of analogical formations, compounds, derivatives and innovations of all types giving rise to new words and phrases that fit novel situations in an ever-changing society or in specialized fields, and also to flash-in-the-pan coinages that reflect the high level of creativity of the general public and language professionals. This workshop welcomes papers that aim at identifying, analysing and studying both lexical and phraseological neologisms in 21st-century English and expects to contribute to an update on the state-of-the-art research into the various mechanisms of word-formation and lexical creativity.
Website
https://web.ua.es/es/biclce2024/call-for-papers.html
Contact details
- Ramón Martí Solano (ramon.marti-solano@unilim.fr),
- Raluca Nita (raluca.nita@univ-poitiers.fr),
- Vincent Renner (vincent.renner@univ-lyon2.fr)
(Posted 4 September 2023)
Breaking New Grounds: Democratising Gardens and Gardening in Great Britain, 19th-20th centuries.
Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, Montpellier, France. Date: 27 September 2024.
Deadline for proposal submissions: 15 May 2024.
Organisers: Clémence Laburthe-Tolra (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, EMMA) and Aurélien Wasilewski (Law & Humanities, CERSA, UMR 7106, Université Paris-Panthéon-Assas).
Presentation
This conference stems from a reflection on the social and political dimensions of gardens and gardening in Great Britain ranging from the Victorian and Edwardian eras to the post-war period. Pondering on “People’s Gardens,” Vita Sackville-West claimed that “we have been called a nation of shopkeepers; we might with equal justice be called a nation of gardeners” (Sackville-West 1939). Her assertion insists on a sense of community, portraying gardening as an inclusive affair spreading across the country to amateurs along professionals who undertook training in botany and horticulture. Yet, such inclusivity needs to be qualified and addressed, taking into consideration class and gender: how was gardening dependent on class in Britain in the 19th and 20th centuries? How did class condition gardening practices? How did men and women’s experiences of gardening or access to gardens differ?
Website address
Contact details
- Clémence Laburthe-Tolra (clemence.laburthe-tolra@univ-montp3.fr) and
- Aurélien Wasilewski (Aurelien.Wasilewski@u-paris2.fr).
Read more in the original CFP below.
(Posted 6 March 2024)