Drawing on huge interest in the upcoming collection Spaces of Surveillance: States and Selves, which is currently in press, this new collection seeks to merge cultural explorations of surveillance with the issue of race. We wish to examine how culture produces or reproduces power relations via the surveillant technologies which have captured the cultural imagination. Through a critical reading of contemporary and historic narratives of race and surveillance, we seek to illustrate the ongoing cultural fascination with technologies of control and surveillance. The current global moment is one  of extreme cultural upheaval; political populism, the ‘alt-right’ and the greatest movement of peoples since World War Two are coupled with the increasing salience of surveillant technologies and regimes. At this juncture in history, with exclusionary policies, increasing racism and growing xenophobia, the matter of race and its representation demand critical attention.

Some would argue that to discuss race is to construct it as a category, to collude in the biological myth of race. If whiteness is an ‘unmarked’ category, as some would suggest, how is surveillance complicit in the marking of race? We seek to examine how media and culture engage with surveillant technologies to represent race, to create a culture of differentiation. We are interested in all forms of surveillance; from wearable tech and health monitoring systems to wide scale population monitoring, biometrics and cybersecurity. We wish to examine all forms of cultural production which engage or have engaged with the topics of race and surveillance in culture; literature, poetry, painting, sculpture, photography, film and TV.

By examining perspectives on the issue of race and its surveillance in popular cultural products, Surveillance, Race, Culture seeks to attend to the politics of representation and the cultural encroachment of surveillance on racial identity. Considering the salience of surveillance in society, we seek to examine the manner in which race is pitted as a critical category of differentiation. We endeavor to look both backwards and forwards, elucidating a timeline of how race has been culturally understood, represented, and surveilled.

We seek original perspectives on the subject of cultural production, both historic and contemporary as well as visions of our cultural future. We are particularly interested in Western and American representations of race and the manner in which it is categorized. From Birth of a Nation (Griffith: 1915) to current divisive political rhetoric, literature, artistic and screen depictions of race and race studies, this collection wishes to explore the manner in which surveillance apparently allows us to see, categorize and measure race in cultural productions.

Topics may include (but are not limited to):

• Racial profiling and surveillance in popular culture

• Surveillance’s part in the production of the racial ‘other’

• 9/11, homeland security and racial monitoring in popular media

• Surveillance of race activists in narratives/biographies

• Screen representations of racial monitoring during migration or warfare

• Film, TV, and documentary narratives of race and surveillance

• Literature, poetry and creative narratives of race and surveillance

• Art which engages in issues of race, surveillance and profiling

• Cultural representations of the NSA’s surveillance of race

• Racialized security surveillance in popular narratives

The editors request that potential contributors send an abstract of no more than 400 words, explaining the scope of their paper, by March 10th. Please provide up to 5 keywords and use the subject line Surveillance, Race, Culture. Please also include a brief biographical note of no more than 300 words.

Contributors will be notified by March 30th. Full papers will be requested on or before July 15th.

Dr Susan Flynn, University of Arts, London. s.flynn@lcc.arts.ac.uk

Dr Antonia Mackay, Oxford Brookes University Oxford. antoniamackay@brookes.ac.uk

Editor: Rubén Cenamor

Traditionally, the relationship between the American male and nature has been that of the dominant and the dominated. From the real-life case of Teddy Roosevelt and his son Kermit to the fictionalized lives of cowboys, pioneers, and other western heroes, men have proved their masculinity by subduing nature to his will and by exploring, penetrating and conquering the ‘virgin land’. This subjugation has led ecofeminists to argue that women and nature share the same history of oppression by men (Gaard 1993).

Postmodernist literature, scholars argue, slowly began to question and problematize this relationship, eventually creating what Stefan Brandt calls “ecomasculinity”. The “eco-man” presents a subversive, more nuanced model of manhood which can embrace non-masculine traits and is also deeply conservationist (Brandt 2015). The works of Annie Proulx and Gretel Ehrlich, just to mention a couple of examples, depict this counter-discourse to the traditional rhetoric of masculine self-affirmation through the exploitation of nature. Indeed, their heroes no longer exalt and pursue hypermasculinity but rather try to find a balance between masculine and feminine qualities while embracing caring and nurturing attitudes towards the environment.

This panel seeks to further explore this new relationship between the American male and nature, and the challenges it poses to our times of economic, ideological and spiritual crisis. What kind of impact can ecomasculinity have in our globalized neoliberal capitalist world? What about gender relationships? How, if at all, can the “eco-man” pave the way to alternative models of masculinity and to more gender egalitarian societies?  

We invite proposals on these topics and welcome other themes related to:

• The potential of ecomasculinities for social changes

• Ecomasculinities and/in relation to natural disasters  

• Ecomasculinities and Feminist theory

• Theoretical approaches to Ecomasculinities

• Transnationalism and Ecomasculinities

• Politics/space/race and Ecomasculinity

• Examples of ecomasculinity prior postmodernism

• Big and small screen representations of ecomasculinity

• Real-life eco-men

This edited volume has received strong interest from the editor of the Ecocritical Theory and Practice series, published by Rowman & Littlefield’s imprint Lexington Books (US).

Proposals (300-400 words) should be send to rubencenamor@ub.edu along with a short bio (150 words) by March 15.  Candidates will receive a notification of acceptance by April 15, 2017. The deadline for first drafts (6,000-8000 words, notes and references included) is September 25, 2017. Final papers are expected by December 18, 2017.

GFF 2017: Realities and World Building

University of Vienna, September 20th-23rd 2017

The creation and experience of “new” worlds is a central appeal of the fantastic. From Middle Earth to variations of the Final Frontier, the fantastic provides a seemingly infinite number of fantastic “worlds” and world concepts. It develops and varies social and cultural systems, ideologies, biological and climatic conditions, cosmologies and different time periods. Its potential and self-conception between the possible and the impossible offer perspectives to nearly every field of research. The plurality and concurrent existence of different, even contradictory concepts of reality is an established topos in cultural and social sciences. In a similar fashion, scientific narratives can simultaneously coexist with fantastic ones within the cultural network of meaning – without creating an existential antagonism between them. The reason for that is not that one of these narratives is true while the other is not, but – following Hayden White, who assumed that scientific and literary narratives have more in common than not – because both of them are fictional. If a fantastic narrative is internally consistent, it is in a Wittgensteinian sense as true as Newton’s laws. This poses an existential problem for the fantastic: if it applies to every consistent narrative, what is the defining difference between fantastic and other narratives?

In our everyday practice, however, we seem to easily distinguish the fantastic from other aspects of reality. How is that possible? How can fantastic worlds emerge within and besides other multiple world-conceptions? What are the functions of fantastic worlds in the construction of reality? In designating texts as fantastic, we explicitly assert their fictitious character. Which practices do we employ to facilitate this designation?

We call narratives fantastic that violate our common reality consensus, thus establishing their counter-reality consensus – in other words, a different world. This is done in different ways, thereby defining fantastic genres: for example, science fiction uses key motives like objects and cultural practices (interstellar travels, wormhole-generators, etc.) for world-building that belong to a realm of conceivable future possibility. While the modern scientific reality consensus does not categorically preclude beaming, it does deny the very possibility of a demon summoning. In order to serve as a foil to the real, the fantastic has to play an ambiguous role: key motives of its multiple worlds have to be recognizable as imaginary, but at the same time at least some of these elements have to be linked with common reality consensus. A typical strategy for achieving this ambiguity is the incorporation of cultural practices that remind us of established perceptions of history, most prominently perhaps the European Middle Ages. Thus, a perceptible distance between the narrative and the recipient’s common reality consensus is established, while utilizing parts of this very consensus to render the narrative comprehensible.

Wolfgang Iser considers the “fictive” to be an intentional act, and the “imaginary” the recipient’s conception of the fictionalization’s effects. World Building is part of every narrative, but as a result of variable cultural contexts, every narrative is involved in different modes of production and perception. The conference aims to emphasize and reflect these very acts of fictionalization used to build fantastic worlds – in different media, and on theoretical as well as methodological levels.

Accepted Keynotes:

Stefan Ekman (University of Gothenburg, Sweden)

Farah Mendlesohn (University of Stafford, UK)

Possible Topics:

• Intermedia (and media-specific) features and indicators of fantastic worlds in film, TV,

literature, (digital) games, etc.

• How does the extradiegetic constitute fantastic worlds and vice versa? Social and cultural

systems, ideologies, biological and climatic conditions, cosmologies, etc.

• World-building methods and practices: reflections on economic and technical resources;

transparent world-building (Making-ofs, exhibitions, interviews, etc.)

• Construction plans: sourcebooks, world editors, Table-Tops, miniatures, dioramas,

LARPs

• We are of course open to further suggestions.

The conference will also feature an “Open Track” for presentations beyond the scope of this CFP.

The GFF awards two stipends to students to help finance traveling costs (250 Euro each). Please indicate if you would like to be considered.

CALL HAS BEEN EXTENDED TO February 28th 2017

Please send short bio & abstracts (500 words max.) to thomas.walach@univie.ac.at

Liverpool Hope University, June 21^st-22^nd 2017

The Popular Culture Research Group at Liverpool Hope University is delighted to announce its seventh annual international conference, ‘Theorising the Popular’. Building on the success of previous years, the 2017 conference aims to highlight the intellectual originality, depth and breadth of ‘popular’ disciplines, as well as their academic relationship with and within ‘traditional’ subjects. One of its chief goals will be to generate debate that challenges academic hierarchies and cuts across disciplinary barriers.

The conference invites submissions from a broad range of disciplines, and is particularly interested in new ways of researching ‘popular’ forms of communication and culture. In addition to papers from established and early career academics, we encourage proposals from postgraduate taught and research students.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Film and Television
• Media and Communication
• Politics and Populism
• Literature (Fiction and Non-Fiction)
• Music
• Drama and Performance
• Fan Cultures and Audience Research
• Sport
• Celebrity
• Social Media
• Gender: Feminism/Femininities/Masculinities/Queering/Sexualities/Representations of the Body
• Language/Linguistics

The conference will be held at Liverpool Hope’s main campus, Hope Park. Situated in a pleasant suburb of Liverpool, just four miles from the city centre, Hope Park offers superb facilities in beautiful surroundings.

Papers should be 20 minutes in length. Please send abstracts of 300 words to Dr Jacqui Miller and Dr Joshua Gulam (ttpconference@hope.ac.uk) by March 17^th 2017. The abstract should include your name, email address, affiliation, as well as the title of your paper.

Successful abstracts will be notified by April 3^rd 2017.

Conference fees: £100 for both days, including lunch and all refreshments (£80 for students).

Theorising the Popular 2017

ttpconference@hope.ac.uk

University College Cork, Ireland

Established in 2002, the TSA is a broad network of scholars who use the ‘transatlantic’ as a frame of reference for their work in political, economic, cultural, historical, environmental, literary, and IR/security studies.

All transatlantic-themed paper and panel proposals from these and related disciplines are welcome. This conference thus welcomes papers in the following areas:

1. History

2. International Relations and Security Studies

3. Literature, Film and Culture

4. Planning and the Environment

5. Economics

6. Proposals that investigate the ‘transatlantic’ and explore it through frames of reference such as ideology, empire, race, religion, migration, political mobilisation, or social movements

7. Proposals that incorporate perspectives that involve north-south and south-south transatlantic connections, as well as north-north

Both panel proposals and individual papers are welcome. Panel proposals are encouraged to include a discussant. New members and junior scholars are especially welcome.

Please send individual paper proposals (a 300 word abstract and brief CV) and complete panel proposals (300 word overview and 300 word abstracts for the papers and brief CVs) to the conference email: tsacork2017@gmail.com.

Deadline for panel and paper proposals: 3 February 2017