science and culture

An Edited Volume by
Ruchika Hooda
Assistant Professor at Maharishi Markandeshwar (Deemed to be University), Ambala

Ms. Diksha
Assistant Professor in the Dept. of English at Chandigarh University, Chandigarh

Abstract 

In the United States, our lives are marked by an abundance of convenience. From fresh produce year-round to two-day shipping, convenient choices feel soft, easy, and frictionless, as they have specifically been engineered to feel. Until relatively recently, it has been possible to maintain a cultural and systemic sense of alienation that makes the cost of our convenience invisible to us—to localize all of the necessary precarity and exploitation for convenience “somewhere else,” (often in the Global South) and then to ignore it. 

“Did I request thee, Maker?”: Contemporary Cyborgs and Androids and Their Pre-Modern Antecedents

Appropriately for a word broadly defined as “having a mixed character,” the idea of “hybridity” has elicited contradictory interpretation since its inception in the Greek word hybris. While the word could mean miscegenation, shame, wantonness, outrage, and even violence, the term carried the alternate but equally valid connotation of thinking and moving beyond human limitations. Despite a shift fromclassical beliefs through Christianity, hybrid figures such as the centaur and satyr continued to proliferate throughout the Renaissance, evoking both wonder and terror. While sometimes considered blasphemous, these classical hybrids were also allegorized to fit into Renaissance ethical and religious frameworks.

Panel: Technoscience in Literature and Culture (special session)

(SUBMISSION DEADLINE EXTENDED TO SAT, JULY 25, 2026)

2027 Imagining Sustainable Worlds Online Symposium, 12–13 May 2027

We invite proposals for 2027 Imagining Sustainable Worlds, an annual online symposium in the Common Ground Imagining Futures Series, taking place 12–13 May 2027, online on CGScholar.

The symposium brings together scholars, researchers, designers, planners, educators, policy thinkers, practitioners, health and care professionals, environmental researchers, and community-engaged professionals working across questions of sustainability, climate, infrastructure, food systems, mobility, aging, health, wellbeing, and the built environment. We welcome proposals that explore how sustainable worlds are designed, inhabited, maintained, challenged, and transformed.

CFP Reminder:

Special Session: Cultural Patrimony in Wartime: Destruction, Protection, and the Question of Ruling Classes

123rd Annual Conference, Seattle, Washington / Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA)

Submission process:
Please send a 300-word abstract and a short bio (100 words) to amazuet@stanford.edu.

Final extended submission deadline: July 15, 2026.

About the Book

Indian Cultural Heritage: Perspectives is an edited volume that invites interdisciplinary scholarship on the diverse and dynamic dimensions of India's cultural heritage. The volume welcomes original contributions exploring tangible and intangible heritage, indigenous knowledge systems, languages, literature, folklore, performing arts, architecture, material culture, cultural memory, museums, heritage conservation, digital heritage, and contemporary issues of identity, sustainability, and cultural preservation. By bringing together diverse academic perspectives, the volume seeks to advance critical understanding of India's rich cultural traditions and their continuing significance in a rapidly changing world.

Reflection is a key part of Community-Engaged Learning (CEL), but it is not always used in ways that fully support student learning. This panel will look at how reflection can be designed more intentionally to help students think more deeply about their experiences in community settings. Rather than simply describing what they did, students can use reflection to connect their experiences, academic learning, and larger social issues.

CFP: Smell Studies Journal

General Editors: Will Tullett, University of York and Manon Raffard, University of Manchester.

Editorial board: Andrew Kettler, Chanelle Dupuis, Jayanthan Sriram, Ally Louks, Hsuan Hsu, Sandra Barré.

Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature invites article submissions on the topic of “planetary precarity” for its Winter 2027 issue. This special issue will consider how precarity is produced on both local and global scales. As we confront our own possible extinction-level threats caused by climate disaster and, supposedly, a future dominated by artificial superintelligence, we seek to investigate how the Victorians reconceived their own precarity in the face of extractive capitalism and ecological crisis.

This panel considers the often overlooked presence of flora and fauna in early modern print, whether they appear as marginalia, within printers’ ornaments, or as materially integral to books. Animals and plants always carry symbolic value—a single image sometimes carrying diametrically opposed values—and participate in a broader network of signification through emblems, printers’ ornaments, marginalia, and engraven images. Do those values come into tension with each other via the margin, the marginal, and the marginalized? In what ways do peripheral plants and animals comment on questions of identity, like gender, race, or disability?

International Conference

The Artificial Mind: Art and Philosophy after AI

24-25 September 2026

National Gallery of Art

22 Konstitucijos Ave. 

Vilnius, Lithuania

The title “Artificial Mind” references Claude Lévi-Strauss’ The Savage Mind (La Pensée sauvage (1962), a foundational work in anthropology, in which he argues that “savage” and “civilized” thought share the same epistemological architecture – differing not in structure but in mode of operations. While the “civilized” engineer works with purpose-built concepts and tools toward a specific end, the “savage” bricoleur thinks with whatever is at hand, constructing new meanings from fragments.

IV. International Symposium on Clothing Culture in Social Sciences btw. 21.–23.10.2026 at the Marmara University, Istanbul

Planned as a continuation of the SOBİTÜRK Symposium, the SOBİTÜRK 2026 themed around Clothing Culture aims to examine the phenomenon of clothing from a multidisciplinary social sciences perspective. Among the primary objectives of the symposium are to investigate the transformations of clothing culture throughout cultural geography from past to present and to discuss the interaction between traditional clothing patterns and modern/global fashion understandings.