science and culture

Mapping the Impossible: Journal for Fantasy Research is pleased to announce an open call for papers on all things fantasy and fantastic!

Mapping the Impossible: Journal for Fantasy Research is a peer-reviewed, graduate student-run, open-access publication supported by the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic at the University of Glasgow. We publishe on all types of fantasy media! Our issues have included articles on topics from Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita to the Horizon video games. We accept academic articles between 3000 and 5000 words, excluding the bibliography.

Society for the Study of Affect (SSA)
#MAKE: Methods, Atmospheres, Knowledges, Energies
Vancouver, BC, October 23 to 25, 2026

Abstracts due May 29, 2026
Submi here: https://affectsociety.com/make/conference/?submit=paper&stream_id=10

S16. Insurgent Residues of Extraction

Literature, Technology, and the Body 

PAMLA 2026, Seattle, November 12-15

https://www.pamla.org/pamla2026/

This panel invites papers that examine any aspect of literary treatments of the human body in relationship to technology—especially medical and industrial technologies—past and present. In particular, the panel is interested in literary interrogations of the ways that technology mediates the subject of the body into the public-political and manages populations of subjects/bodies.

Short Stories (Fiction/Non-fiction) INVITED for

Climate Change, Disasters, and Global Narratives: Collection of Short Stories

Edited by:

Dr. Gurpreet Kaur

Assistant Professor & Head

Post Graduate Department of English

Sri Guru Teg Bahadur Khalsa College

Sri Anandpur Sahib, Punjab, India

and

Jacobus Bracker

Hamburg University of Technology,

Twenty-Fifth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities, University of Split, Croatia, 30 June - 2 July 2027

Founded in 2003, the New Directions in the Humanities Research Network is brought together by a common interest in established traditions in the humanities while at the same time developing innovative practices and setting a renewed agenda for their future. We seek to build an epistemic community where we can make linkages across disciplinary, geographic, and cultural boundaries. As a Research Network, we are defined by our scope and concerns and motivated to build strategies for action framed by our shared themes and tensions.

PAMLA 2026 Seattle: “Our Ruling Classes: Culture, Power, Conflict”; Venue- Seattle, Washington, Nove 12-15, 2026.

This session invites papers that examine how contemporary climate fiction (cli-fi) reimagines ruling classes, leadership, and social hierarchy under conditions of ecological crisis. In line with PAMLA 2026’s theme, “Our Ruling Classes: Culture, Power, Conflict,” the panel explores how environmental breakdown reshapes the distribution of power, producing new elites and intensifying conflicts over authority, survival, and governance.

Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present

October 15-17, 2026   |   Madison, WI

https://www.artsofthepresent.org/conference/362/

- Call for Papers - 

Panel: “Electric Séance: Conjuring Between the Archive and the Machine”

Animal Studies Panel, MMLA ("After the Archive") Chicago November 12-14 Sea Creatures, Then and Now“When the abyss stares back, it demands recognition.” Stacy Alaimo’s newest book—The Abyss Stares Back: Encounters With Deep-Sea Life—challenges us to explore encounters with marine life, intimacies partly enabled by science but offering opportunities for literature and art. This panel seeks papers on any aspect of creaturely marine life and its myriad relationships with human existence. Although traditional AV will not be available for this panel, participants are both allowed and encouraged to share a QR code through which audience members may access their presentations.

Workshop and Special Issue of Atlantic Studies: Global Currents

Title: “Seeds of Empire, Roots of Change: Botany and the Atlantic World.”  
 
Location: Saint Louis University Campus, Madrid, Spain (March 11–12, 2027)

Organizers: Atlantic Studies: Global Currents, The Center for Iberian Historical Studies, and Saint Louis University, Madrid.

Call for Papers: Autumn 2026: Biophilia: The Shape of the Future
Coreopsis

A Multidisciplinary Journal of the Mythic Arts

This journal accepts papers from many disciplines and is welcoming of all faiths and philosophies. We publish about 5 papers per issue that have been peer-reviewed according to academic standards. Final submissions should be 3000 to 10,000 words. 

If you have a finished paper ready for submission, send it directly to coreopsisjournalofmyththeatre@gmail.com

“Italian Ecocriticism” Panel at the 2026 PAMLA Conference in Seattle, OR.12-15 November, 2026 in Seattle, OR.

“Literary texts are not, of course, merely passive conduits. They actively shape what the technologies mean and what the scientific theories signify in cultural contexts […] culture circulates through science no less than science circulates through culture.” (Hayles How We Became Posthuman 21) We can expand this view beyond science and technology. All aspects of human cultures circulate in artistic productions, most notably in prose fiction, and in return, fiction has the potential to influence cultures and to inspire innovations.

A Matter of Life and Death

Call for Papers: Victorians Institute Conference 2026

September 11-13, 2026, Crowne Plaza Hotel, Knoxville, TN

Following along from the urgency of last year’s theme, Victorian Studies: Who Cares? this year’s theme asks conference participants to consider matters of life and death in the Victorian era. What did it mean to live and die in Victorian England? How are matters of life and death reflected in the literature of the time?

Speculative fiction (broadly defined as an umbrella genre encompassing science fiction, fantasy, and horror, among others) offers powerful tools for interrogating systems of authority, social hierarchy, and cultural possibility. By constructing alternative worlds, speculative narratives illuminate the structures that govern our own, revealing how power operates through technology, empire, class, race, gender, and the environment. This session invites papers that explore how speculative fiction critiques, reimagines, or destabilizes ruling systems and dominant ideologies. Possible topics include dystopian governance, resistance and revolution, speculative visions of justice, and the cultural work of world-building.