Category: Calls for Papers

Heidelberg Center for American Studies 20th Annual Spring Academy Conference (20–24th March 2023)

Posted on by Jack Heeney

Heidelberg Center for American Studies 20th Annual Spring Academy Conference

Heidelberg, Germany, 20–24 March, 2023

*Call for Papers * 

The twentieth HCA Spring Academy on American Culture, Economics, Geography, History, Literature, Politics, and Religion will be held from March 20-24, 2023. The Heidelberg Center for American Studies (HCA) invites applications for this annual one-week conference that provides twenty international Ph.D. students with the opportunity to present and discuss their Ph.D. projects.

The HCA Spring Academy invites participants to work closely with experts in their respective fields of study and offers workshops held by visiting scholars.

We encourage applications that pursue an interdisciplinary approach and range broadly across the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Papers can be presented on any subject relating to the study of the United States of America. Possible topics include American identity, issues of ethnicity, gender, transatlantic relations, U.S. domestic and foreign policy, economics, as well as various aspects of American history, literature, religion, geography, law, musicology, and culture. Proposals should include a preliminary title and run to no more than 300 words.

Participants are requested to prepare a 20-minute presentation of their research project, which will be followed by a 40-minute discussion. The presentations will be arranged into ten panel groups.

In addition to cross-disciplinary and international discussions during the panel sessions, the Spring Academy aims at creating a pleasant collegial atmosphere for further scholarly exchange and contact.

Accommodation will be provided by the Heidelberg Center for American Studies.

Thanks to a small travel fund, the Spring Academy is able to subsidize travel expenses for participants registered and residing in soft-currency countries. Scholarship applicants will need to document the necessity for financial aid and explain how they plan to cover any potentially remaining expenses. In addition, a letter of recommendation from their doctoral advisor is required.

 

START OF APPLICATION PROCESS:                                          August 15, 2022

DEADLINE FOR APPLICATIONS:                                                November 15, 2022

SELECTIONS WILL BE MADE BY:                                                January 2023

PLEASE USE OUR ONLINE APPLICATION SYSTEM:             www.hca-springacademy.de

MORE INFORMATION:                                                                 www.hca.uni-heidelberg.de

FOR FURTHER QUESTIONS:                                                        springacademy@hca.uni-heidelberg.de

CFP: Eye/I on Canada: Exclusion and Inclusion, University of Bialystok, Poland, 21st-23rd Sept 2022

Posted on by Sarah McCreedy

Eye/I on Canada: Exclusion and Inclusion Voix/Voie du Canada: Exclusion et Inclusion

The 9th Congress of Polish Canadianists / 9ème Congrès des Canadianistes Polonais

21-23 September 2022 / 21-23 septembre 2022 University of Białystok, Poland / Université de Białystok, Pologne

Call For Papers

In the midst of global Covid-19 pandemic, not only Canada, but all the states, experienced challenges they had never faced before. The crisis forced individuals, communities and countries to rethink and question the way modern societies operate on manifold levels. The strain put on health care, education and welfare systems has significantly reshuffled the workplace and family dynamics, exacerbating existing inequalities related to gender, class and ethnicity and affecting communities of colour, as well as other disadvantaged, marginalized and excluded groups in a disproportionate manner. Confined to their homes, many people have found perpetual isolation overwhelming and experienced long-term psychological impacts. As a response to these feelings of exclusion, on both individual and collective levels, new ways of connecting with others have emerged, giving rise to as varied new phenomena as zoom meetings, online panel discussions, workshops and conferences, virtual support groups, and digital cultural initiatives, including exhibitions, concerts, performances and other live-stream events. The economic discrepancies and social injustice aggravated by the pandemic as well as attempts to foster a sense of belonging make us reflect upon past and present forms of exclusion and inclusion.

The organizers of the 9th Congress of the Polish Association for Canadian Studies (PACS) are pleased to invite scholars working across various disciplines, as well as writers and artists, to submit paper and panel proposals which consider the broadly-understood issues of exclusion and inclusion in the Canadian context. We are interested in bringing together scholars from various fields, especially but not exclusively, politics and public policy, international relations, social studies, history, literature and the arts, cultural and media studies, linguistics, etc. We encourage interdisciplinary and comparative perspectives and welcome abstract submissions from postgraduate students.

Though the following list is not exhaustive, papers and panels may address the following themes:

  •   representations of inclusion and exclusion in the arts, literature, film, theatre, the media, etc;
  •   making and revising the literary canon; genre fiction vs. the canon, etc.;
  •   instances of censorship;
  •   historical narratives: silencing/recovering the past;
  •   political, social and communal practices of exclusion and inclusion;
  •   linguistic practices of exclusion and inclusion;
  •   relationships between the centre and periphery (in both literal and metaphorical sense);
  •   conflicting values: individualism vs. communitarianism;
  •   isolation and alienation;
  •   solidarity and participation;
  •   othering and/or belonging (migrants and refugees; racial, ethnic, religious, gender and LGBTidentities);
  •   Indigenous experiences of exclusion;
  •   Quebecois separatism / sovereignty;
  •   representations and discourses of disability;
  •   race, gender, LGBTQ+, age (in)equality;
  •   marginalization and discrimination;
  •   opportunities and challenges of diversity;
  •   borders and barriers (geographic, political, social, economic, etc);
  •   Covid-19-related experiences of exclusion and inclusion, pandemic literature, etc;
  •   digital inclusion/exclusion (new media technologies and platforms, podcasts, blogs, socialmedia, etc.);

    Individual proposals, in English or French, should be 300-400 words long. Please attach a short bio (max. 200 words) to your conference paper proposal. For panels, in English or French, please send the title of the panel and a 250-word presentation explaining the overall focus, together with a 300-400- word abstract and 200-word bio for each participant.

    Deadline for abstracts: February 28, 2022
    Notification of acceptance: March 15, 2022
    Proposal submission address: 9ptbkcongress@gmail.com

    Regular fee (non-PACS members): 600 PLN / 135 EUR / 200 CAD / 160 USD Reduced fee (PACS members): 450 PLN / 105 EUR / 150 CAD / 120 USD Student fee: 350 PLN / 80 EUR / 120 CAD / 90 USD

    Organizers:

    Sylwia Borowska-Szerszun (conference secretary for English-speaking section) Ewelina Feldman-Kołodziejuk (head of the organizing committee)
    Weronika Łaszkiewicz
    Małgorzata Kamecka

    Edyta Sacharewicz (conference secretary for French-speaking section)

    Credits
    The conference organizers would like to thank Justyna Fruzińska for allowing us to include her logo Eye on Canada in the conference materials.

CFP: POETRY AND/AS CRITICISM

Posted on by Catherine Gander

How might we understand the at times fraught, at times generative relationship between poetry and criticism?

What does it take for poetry to be, as Matthew Arnold proclaimed, “a criticism of life”, or as Audre Lorde insisted, “a vital necessity… toward survival and change?” And what steps must we take to, in the words of Adrienne Rich, “enter an old text from a new critical direction”?

How might epigraphs function as critical measures of the poem which follows? Is there a different rhythm for reading reviews in the same magazine as we encounter poems? How does the poet-critic negotiate the demands of both roles in relation? And what work can poetry criticism do to bring about cultural awareness and even change?

One day symposium

Maynooth University, 21st March 2022.

 

Our chiasmus takes account of the symbiosis that exists between poetry and criticism, seeking to explore the reciprocity and tensions therein. Poems such as Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Criticism (1711), Anne Carson’s Glass Essay (1994), W.H. Auden’s The Sea and The Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1944), and Vahni Capildeo’s reviews-in-verse in Skin Can Hold (2019) melt the distinctions we usually make between verse and prose, poetry and criticism, into air. Essays such as Sandeep Parmar’s ‘Not a British Subject: Race and Poetry in the UK’ (2015) and ‘Still Not a British Subject: Race and UK Poetry’ point to the work to be done in addressing the structures of whiteness in Anglophone poetry criticism, and “expanding the definition of innovative or avant-garde to account for challenges to the expressive and individual lyric mode posed by poets of colour.”

 

Whatever the relationship between poetry and criticism, it is one of vital importance, shaping how poems are written and received, canons formed, interrogated, and reformed, and poetic energies unleashed in both verse and prose.

This one-day symposium on March 21st at Maynooth University, Ireland, seeks to address such questions, and more, bringing together scholars working on poetry, poetics, literary studies, and other relevant areas. We especially welcome work from BAME/BIPOC scholars, poets and writers.

We are honoured to host Professor Sandeep Parmar and Dr Mary-Jean Chan as our joint plenary speakers.

While we hope this symposium will be in person (abiding by the Covid-19 measurements required by the Government of Ireland, which includes mandatory mask-wearing), we reserve the right to pivot online in the interests of public safety.

Please send us an abstract along with a brief biography to Dr Karl O’Hanlon and Dr Catherine Gander at poetryascrit@gmail.com by January 15th 2022.

Possible topics might include, but are not limited to:

 

  • Critical poetic forms (e.g. poetic essays, odes and palinodes, elegies, epistles, parody, burlesque, reviews-in-verse)
  • Public-facing critical cultures (platforms, media, audience)
  • Poetry criticism and race
  • Poetry criticism and gender
  • Poetry criticism and ‘craft’
  • Poetry responding to criticism and vice versa
  • The social function of poetry
  • Reviewing and rhetoric: critical arguments in the ‘poetry wars’
  • Canon formation, occlusion and marginalisation
  • The role of the poet-critic
  • Lyric subjectivity and new lyric studies
  • The roles of various reviewing platforms
  • Literary politics, self-fashioning and critical reputations
  • Prose criticism and style

Get Started

 

CFP: Transatlantic Studies Association 20th Annual Conference

Posted on by Sarah McCreedy

Transatlantic Studies Association
20th Annual Conference
University of Kent, Canterbury
4-6 July 2022

_________

Call for Papers

Submissions are invited for the 2022 Annual Conference

KEYNOTE LECTURES

Professor Jussi Hanhimäki (Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies)

“Pax Transatlantica: America and Europe in the Post-Cold War Era”

AND

Dr Sarah Meer (University of Cambridge)

“American Claimants: Transatlantic Tales of Humility and Grandeur”

AND

Professor Mark Webber (University of Birmingham)

“NATO in a Tripolar World: Does the New Strategic Concept Deliver?”

 

PLUS

A Roundtable discussion on:

The End of an Era? The Transatlantic Alliance in International Politics from 9/11 to Covid-19
_________

 

The TSA is a broad network of scholars who use the ‘transatlantic’ as a frame of reference for their work in a variety of disciplines, including (but not limited to): history, politics and international relations, and literary studies. All transatlantic-themed paper and panel proposals from these and related disciplines are welcome.

The conference is organised around a number of subject themes, each of which is convened by members of the conference programme committee. If you would like to discuss your paper or panel proposal prior to submission, please contact the relevant programme committee members. This year’s subject themes are:

Diplomatic and international history
David Ryan, david.ryan@ucc.ie, Chris Jespersen, christopher.jespersen@ung.edu

Political and intellectual history
Joe Renouard, jrenoua1@jhu.edu, Gaynor Johnson, G.L.Johnson@kent.ac.uk

Social, cultural and religious history

Finn Pollard, fpollard@lincoln.ac.uk, Kathryn Gray, kathryn.gray@plymouth.ac.uk

International Relations and Security Studies

Michele Testoni, mtestoni@faculty.ie.edu, Joe Renouard, jrenoua1@jhu.edu

Literature, film, and theatre
Donna Gessell, donna.gessell@ung.edu, Finn Pollard, fpollard@lincoln.ac.uk

Transatlantic memory and heritage 

 Kristin Cook, kc31@soas.ac.uk, Kathryn Gray, kathryn.gray@plymouth.ac.uk 

Latin America in a transatlantic context         

 Robert Howes, robert.howes@kcl.ac.uk, Thomas Mills, t.c.mills@lancaster.ac.uk

Ethnicity, race and migration 

Thomas Mills, t.c.mills@lancaster.ac.uk, Tony McCulloch, tony.mcculloch@ucl.ac.uk

Special subject theme:

 The TSA is pleased to join SOAS and the University of York in welcoming proposals that seek to better understand the UK-US nuclear relationship as enshrined in the 1958 Mutual Defence Agreement (MDA). This arrangement formalizes the US support for the UK’s nuclear weapons system, and regulates exchanges of sensitive nuclear materials and know-how between the two countries. The Mutual Defence Agreement has been regularly renewed since its inception, with the next renewal due in 2024.

 

While the nuclear relationship is commonly thought of as being at the heart of what is referred to as the “special relationship”, there is no academic centre in either the US and UK that has a sustained focus on this topic, and scholarly literature about it is sparse. The TSA thus encourages proposals for papers that elucidate and interrogate the Mutual Defence Agreement and UK-US nuclear relationship, drawing on traditional strategic studies, peace studies and critical perspectives.

 

For queries, please contact Professor Dan Plesch: dp27@soas.ac.uk

 

Conference Format

The TSA fully intends to hold its 2022 annual conference as a full in-person meeting. If there are unexpected and significant limitations on gatherings and international travel, the TSA Management Committee will reconsider the format accordingly. While primarily an in-person meeting, we will reserve a limited number of slots for online panels. These panels must be wholly online (i.e. all presenters and the chair will participate online); individual paper submissions will not be considered for online delivery. If you wish your panel to be delivered wholly online, please explain briefly when making your submission why this needs to be the case and/or why the panel would benefit from this format of delivery. Please note that panels and papers accepted for in-person delivery will not subsequently be considered for online delivery.

 

Other formats

In addition to the subject themes above, we welcome papers and panels on any aspect of transatlantic studies. Interdisciplinary papers and panels are particularly welcome, as are innovative formats, such as roundtables, workshops or multimedia presentations.

 

Submission Instructions

Panel proposals should constitute three or four presenters and a Chair (as well as a discussant if desired). Panel proposals should be sent by email as one document attachment to tsakent2022@gmail.com, and include:

  • 300-word overview of the panel theme;
  • 300-word abstracts for each of the papers;
  • 100-word author biographies;
  • 2-page CVs for all participants.

 

The subject line of the email for panel proposals should read: ‘TSA Proposal-[Last name of panel convenor]-[Subject theme]’ (state ‘Other’ if not falling under listed themes) (E.g. ‘TSA Proposal-Smith-Diplomacy and International History’).

 

Individual paper proposals should be sent by email as one document attachment, and include:

 

  • 300-word abstract for the paper
  • 100-word author biography;
  • 2-page CV.

 

The subject line of the email for paper proposals should read: ‘TSA Proposal-[Last name of presenter]-[Subject theme]’ (state ‘Other’ if not falling under listed themes) (E.g. ‘TSA Proposal-Smith-Other).

 

Please note: all submissions must come to the conference email address to be considered by the programme committee.

Travel Grants

The TSA particularly welcomes proposals from new members and junior scholars. Travel grants of £150 each are available to support early career scholars presenting a paper at the conference. As a result of funding from the Halle Foundation, the TSA is able this year to offer a number of additional travel grants to support early career scholars presenting a paper on any aspect of relations between the United States and Germany.

 

If wishing to apply for a travel grant, applicants should indicate this in the body of the email when submitting their paper or panel. If papers are believed to qualify for Halle Foundation funding, this should be indicated. In addition to the materials requested above, travel grant applicants should include a brief statement explaining why it is important for them to attend the TSA conference. For further details about TSA travel grants, see the TSA website: www.transatlanticstudies.com.


Deadline for panel and paper proposals: 15 January 2021
All paper and panel proposals, and travel grant applications, should be sent to the conference email:

tsakent2022@gmail.com.

 

Contact details

Chair of TSA: Thomas Mills: t.c.mills@lancaster.ac.uk

 

Vice-Chair of TSA: Kristin Cook: kc31@soas.ac.uk

 

Local Organiser: Gaynor Johnson, G.L.Johnson@kent.ac.uk

 

TSA Charity Number: SC039378

www.transatlanticstudies.com

Extended Deadline: Emily Dickinson International Society Conference, 2022

Posted on by Sarah McCreedy

Extended Deadline

 

The 2022 Emily Dickinson International Society Conference, “Dickinson and Foreignhood,” and the Dickinson Critical Institute in Seville

 

The Emily Dickinson International Society is extending its deadline until November 20 for proposal submission to its international conference, “Dickinson and Foreignhood,” and to its Critical Institute, both to take place at the College of Philology, University of Seville, Spain. The conference will go from Tuesday, July 12, to Thursday, July 14. The Critical Institute will be on Monday, July 11.

The Dickinson Critical Institute helps graduate students and early career scholars develop their work in collaboration with established Dickinson specialists. For more information about the Critical Institute in Seville, please see the conference website (https://edisforeignhoodconference.org/). To apply to the Institute, submit a one-page cv and a 500-800-word description of your project to Eliza Richards (ecr@email.unc.edu) and to Karen Sánchez-Eppler (kjsanchezepp@amherst.edu) no later than November 20. Use the subject heading “[Last Name] Dickinson Institute Application,” and attach your application materials as Word or pdf documents. Decisions on acceptance will be made by December 15.

The EDIS International Conference “Dickinson and Foreignhood” takes its cue from “A South Wind – has a pathos” (c.1864), where the poet refers to “much not understood – / The fairer – for the farness – / And for the foreignhood.” These lines represent the unknown as more beautiful when distant and unfamiliar, or foreign. The conference seeks to develop knowledge of how Dickinson understood the foreign, how she has been understood as foreign, and how foreign peoples have understood her.

The Program Committee welcomes all work on configurations of the foreign, broadly understood, in Dickinson’s writing, including:

• Conceptions of the foreign (or what we might call otherness) in Dickinson’s culture and historical moment

• Discussions of race, ethnicity, class, disability, gender, sexuality, and other categories that have historically been associated with alienation and cultural disenfranchisement

• Dickinson, geography, navigation, and foreign travel

• Parts of Dickinson’s environment, culture, or identity that seemed foreign to her

• Immigration, emigration, and exile

• Dickinson’s reception abroad

• Dickinson, foreign languages, and translation

• Lyric alienation and the poetics of estrangement

• Invasion, contagion, and infection as encounters with the foreign

Finally, regardless of theme, all proposals engaging serious scholarship on Dickinson’s work are welcome. Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words, along with a brief biography of 100 words maximum, to Jefferey Simons (dickinsoninseville@dfing.uhu.es) and to Cristanne Miller (ccmiller@buffalo.edu) before November 20. Please specify if you plan to present virtually rather than in person. The conference Program Committee will respond by December 15.

For further information, please see the websites of the conference (https://edisforeignhoodconference.org/) and of The Emily Dickinson International Society (http://www.emilydickinsoninternationalsociety.org/).

CFP: Cormac McCarthy International Conference

Posted on by Sarah McCreedy

Call for Papers

 

Cormac McCarthy

International Conference

 

Sponsored by

Trinity College Dublin

in association with

the Cormac McCarthy Society

 

Topics open,

with special interest in

Cormac McCarthy’s relationship to Ireland and Irish heritage

 

June 14-17, 2022

Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

 

Send brief proposals for 15-20-minute presentations or complete panels by April 1, 2022 to:

 

Steven Frye, President of the Cormac McCarthy Society cormacmccarthysociety@gmail.com

 

email proposals only

Provide contact information including email address and region

CFP: Heidelberg Center for American Studies Conference

Posted on by Sarah McCreedy

Heidelberg Center for American Studies 19th Annual Spring Academy Conference

Heidelberg, Germany, 21–25 March, 2022

Call for Papers

The eighteenth HCA Spring Academy on American Culture, Economics, Geography, History, Literature, Politics, and Religion will be held from March 21-25, 2022. The Heidelberg Center for American Studies (HCA) invites applications for this annual one-week conference that provides twenty international Ph.D. students with the opportunity to present and discuss their Ph.D. projects.

The HCA Spring Academy invites participants to work closely with experts in their respective fields of study and offers workshops held by visiting scholars.

We encourage applications that pursue an interdisciplinary approach and range broadly across the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Papers can be presented on any subject relating to the study of the United States of America. Possible topics include American identity, issues of ethnicity, gender, transatlantic relations, U.S. domestic and foreign policy, economics, as well as various aspects of American history, literature, religion, geography, law, musicology, and culture. Proposals should include a preliminary title and run to no more than 300 words.

Participants are requested to prepare a 20-minute presentation of their research project, which will be followed by a 40-minute discussion. The presentations will be arranged into ten panel groups.

In addition to cross-disciplinary and international discussions during the panel sessions, the Spring Academy aims at creating a pleasant collegial atmosphere for further scholarly exchange and contact.

Accommodation will be provided by the Heidelberg Center for American Studies.

Thanks to a small travel fund, the Spring Academy is able to subsidize travel expenses for participants registered and residing in soft-currency countries. Scholarship applicants will need to document the necessity for financial aid and explain how they plan to cover any potentially remaining expenses. In addition, a letter of recommendation from their doctoral advisor is required.

 

START OF APPLICATION PROCESS:                                          September 30, 2021

DEADLINE FOR APPLICATIONS:                                                November 15, 2021

SELECTIONS WILL BE MADE BY:                                                January 2022

PLEASE USE OUR ONLINE APPLICATION SYSTEM:             www.hca-springacademy.de

MORE INFORMATION:                                                                 www.hca.uni-heidelberg.de

FOR FURTHER QUESTIONS:                                                        springacademy@hca.uni-heidelberg.de

 

Popularizing STEM | Science and Technology in 21st-Century US Popular Culture

Posted on by Sarah McCreedy

Popularizing STEM | Science and Technology in 21st-Century US Popular Culture 15-19 November 2021 (hybrid format conference)

Confirmed keynotes: Gerry Canavan, Charles Adler, Stina Attebery, André Brock, Emily Cox- Palmer-White, J. Jesse Ramírez.
Follow further updates on Twitter or the official conference website!

In 1959, British physicist and novelist C.P. Snow delivered a lecture in which he highlighted the increasing intellectual separation between the humanities and the sciences—the emergence of “two cultures.” While his arguments were clearly anchored in British society, he nevertheless suggested that this emerging chasm was “a problem of the entire West.” To present the argument in a perhaps even more exaggerated manner than Snow did: Not even the most highly educated humanities scholars can comprehend basic physics, while what we today would refer to as STEM professors don’t read “highbrow” literature. Snow came to understand that the situation was not quite as black-and-white as he suggested, which is why he anticipated the emergence of a “third culture” a few years later.

Of course, much has happened in the sixty-plus years since Snow’s iconic lecture. And, indeed, scholars such as Rachel Holland have diagnosed the emergence of a “third culture” and, along with it, third-culture cultural objects. In her recent book Contemporary Fiction and Science (2019), Holland argues that the increasing presence of science in fiction (and, by extension, popular culture) “is, in part, a response to the upsurge in interest […] in popular science.” Holland identifies a “new strand of fiction” that engages with “elements of popular science in a number of ways. These include: researching and relaying information gleaned from scientific publications; challenging or promoting ideas presented by science writers; exploring the moral and ethical implications of these ideas; and testing the limits and capabilities of the novel in relation to scientific discourse.” As some of the elements in this list suggest, science is a tool of power; science is purported to be objective and, hence, often serves as a purveyor of Truth. As such, it has been (ab)used in a variety of ways in the course of history–among others, scientific curiosity drove (and technology made possible) the exploration and colonization of foreign lands, science explained the inferiority of non-white peoples, iconic Nazi doctor Josef Mengele experimented on humans in the name of scientific progress, etc.

Holland’s elaborations also indicate that science and technology have taken an integral place in global society—and the ongoing pandemic has brought this process to the fore. Due to the proliferation of science and technology on television, in films, video games, and other popular media and the attendant use of YouTube and other platforms by STEM fields, it is important to study the dynamic and complex interrelationship between science & technology and popular culture. Indeed, science & technology has infiltrated popular culture. However, this is not a one-way street! “The cultural products that scientific discoveries and developments sparked have become significant parts of the discourse surrounding science,” as Steven Gil rightfully stresses in the opening editorial of the Journal of Science & Popular Culture.

We are particularly interested in presentations that seek to engage with questions of intersectional discrimination in STEM representations in popular culture, spanning from cultural products aimed at dissemination and debate on STEM to texts such as films, TV series, comics and graphic novels, genre fiction, video games, new media narratives.

Suggested fields of analysis might include but are not limited to:

  • STEM dissemination in popular culture: storytelling strategies, (in)accuracy, multimedia programs and projects promoting access, flexibility, and adaptability in STEM education and knowledge, deconstructing the existing barriers within the field and building equality in legitimacy
  • Interrelationship between STEM and Popular Culture: Using popular culture to teach/educate on STEM (i.e., in STEM programs) and teaching about STEM via popular culture
  • Economic discourses and the challenges of capitalism related to STEM in US popular culture and media
  • Representation of STEM in popular culture aimed at children and young adults
  • Intersectionality versus marginalization in the dissemination and communicationof science and technology
  • STEM and Gender Studies :  the portrayal of masculine, feminine, and gender non-conforming individuals in STEM-centered popular media narratives
  • Science, tech, and race/ethnicity: Afro(Latinx), Indigenous, and Chicana Futurism(s), minority perspectives, alternative narratives, borderland spaces
  • Digital technology and virtual realities as safe spaces for marginalized groups
  • The use of science and technology in depictions of the future as critiques or reevaluations of current realities: tech-noir and sci-fi utopias, dystopias, post/apocalyptic scenarios, and retrofuturism 
  • Cyborgs, AI, and the human: representations, conflicts, and horrific developments
  •  Health and technology: care robots and the representation of disabilities, human aging, biomedical issues
  • Representations of surveillance, biometrics, and biological citizenship
  • Tech, science, and the (non)human body: narratives related to experimentation,bioethics, artificial monstrosity, transhumanism, biopunk
  • Pop depictions of STEM: (in)accuracy, “prediction” of future technologies, breaking down the science and tech behind superhero narrativesDeadline for submission: August 31, 2021.Submit your abstract proposal (~ 300 words) at popmec.stem@gmail.com as an attachment, including name, affiliation if any, and contact email. Depending on the proposals and participants’ response, an editorial project might originate from the conference.

The conference will take place on the days 15-19 November 2021 in mixed format:

  • ONLINE | panels and main keynotes
  • IN PRESENCE at Universidad de Alcalá, historical campus, Friday 19 November |2 keynotes + workshop/seminars. If it will be feasible considering the changing COVID-19 related measures, we will allow selected panels to be carried out in person (if their participants wish to do so)Participation fees:
  • FREE for PopMeC members (membership yearly fees: 12€ students / non-tenured / unwaged / retired, 20€ regular)
  • Non-members: 15€                                                                 

 

The conference is organized by the PopMeC Association for US Popular Culture Studies, in collaboration with the Instituto Franklin-UAH located in Alcalá de Henares (Madrid, ES) and the academic research project Fiction Meets Science.Organizing committee: Michael Fuchs and Anna Marta Marini (coordinators), Laura Álvarez Trigo, Paula Barba Guerrero, Paul Mitchell, Dina Pedro, Erika Tiburcio.
On-site organization: Francisco Sáez de Adana, Ana Serra, Carlos Herrero (Instituto Franklin- UAH).