In video games such as Life is Strange, the Witcher series, and Telltale’s The Walking Dead, multiple story choices are offered that are the purview not of the protagonist but of the player, who may be forced to choose from a limited set of outcomes but is still in control of the narrative’s pace and flow. Unlike traditional narratives in which the writer is in control of the characters’ choices and their outcomes, video game narratives involve the participant in an interactive shared story with multiple possibilities.

One immediate side-effect of the current ominous economic climate and general uncertainty of our times has been a downturn in traditional publishing. Even before the COVID-19 crisis, consolidation of publishing houses, the closure of brick-and-mortar bookshops, and the supremacy of Amazon had begun to permanently alter the way creative writing is published. At the same time, creative content on the internet has never been so abundant, with poetry, film, and fiction being shared and streamed in ways that create a flourishing if generally nonremunerative cultural climate. This panel looks at options available to creative writers in the wake of the decline of traditional publishing options.

While universities have long been a space for cultivating generations of academics, researchers, and intellectuals, they have never been exempt from the dynamics of power that underlie any institution based on interpersonal relations. Recent strides at improving inclusivity—for example: greater diversity among faculty and student populations, or increasing numbers of sociopolitically- and culturally-cognizant programs—belie the reality that universities operate along ideological lines that can (re)produce inequities and social hierarchies.

While the overarching narrative that frames scholarship on body modification seems to reduce it—especially in the case of tattoos—into what Matthew Lodder calls a “chronological tourism,” that is, that every tattoo merely speaks of “internal truths” that chronicle milestones in one’s personal mythmaking (as a response to questions like “What does your tattoo mean? What were you going through when you got it?”), such a view eschews the discursive potential of body modification as a social act in favour of pure radical individualism.

This panel seeks papers on narrativizations of mental health, "madness," and neurodivergence in the fiction of women and non-binary people. As Baerman, Herman et al have noted, “madness has been an important thematic pawn in many literary texts” (2009, 283).

José Esteban Muñoz’s ground-breaking work Cruising Utopia has sought to unite scholarship from the disparate fields of queer and utopian studies by contending that “queerness is primarily about futurity and hope” and “queerness is always on the horizon” (Muñoz 11). Aside from this, it has also powerfully contested the academic pessimism toward utopian political idealism that was becoming a dominant feature in queer theory at this time. Drawing on Muñoz’s work, this panel invites paper abstracts about queer utopias and queer utopian possibility demonstrated in literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

Abstracts due July 15, 2020

The Graduate School Press of Syracuse University invites submissions for a contributed volume titled A Quit Lit Reader, to be published by the Graduate School Press and distributed by Syracuse University Press. The editors welcome contributions from graduate students, faculty, and administrators working within academia, while especially seeking reflections of those pursuing careers mostly or wholly outside it.

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

“Trans Media Pedagogy” 

Journal of Cinema and Media Studies Teaching Dossier section

Edited by Dr. Dan Vena (Carleton University/ Queen’s University) and Dr. Nael Bhanji (Trent University) 

For this issue we have something entirely new in store. 

Do you remember a time in college or in grad school where you read a piece of critical theory, then thought: 

Wait a minute. If I’m being honest with myself, did I really understand that? If I had to summarize what I just read in a few words, would I be able to? 

In this issue, we want to see you grappling with some of your favorite critical theory texts. 

Vernon Press invites chapter proposals on the theme: “A Hero Will Endure”: Essays at the Twentieth Anniversary of Gladiator for an edited collection.

Martin M. Winkler edited a collection about Gladiator regarding its historical and media aspects. There are also several single essays about psychological (Skweres), political, or cultural issues related to the film. Nevertheless, there have been no other collections on the cultural and social impact of the film since its release. The twentieth anniversay has just passed, and the time is right for presenting new insights about this award-winning film.

Specific topics that the editor is seeking to round out the collection include:

What makes us happy and content in our life? Some people may point to fabulous fame, fortune, or money. Some may say that the key to happiness are interpersonal relationships. But what if someone is alone? Is loneliness really disastrous? Are there any benefits of loneliness? Can loneliness become an epidemic? In order to answer such questions, during our conference we will have to concentrate on many particular issues. Thus, we are interested in all aspects of loneliness in the past and in the present-day world.

Commitment—a concept which names the title of Theodor Adorno’s 1962 critique of a text’s thematic engagement with politics—entails a work’s capacity to mark a site of historical intervention. “When I am committed,” says Jean-Paul Sartre, “I reveal the situation by the very intention of changing it…I strike at its very heart, I transfix it, and I display it in full view…with every word that I utter, I involve myself a little more in the world." For scholars of the modernist documentary, commitment serves as a starting point for attempts to better understand the historical import of literary experiments in reportage.

 CFP: Media, Materiality and EmergencyThe deadline for full submissions is extended to 31st July 2020 (for submission in Nov 2020)

MAST: The Journal of Media Art Study and Theory

Guest editor: Timothy Barker (University of Glasgow)

In what ways do questions of materiality matter in a time of crisis? What does it mean to explore the matter of things at a time when we are threatened with the annihilation of that matter, its disappearance, or its disintegration? In this issue, MAST journal seeks to answer and further explore these questions through essays from arts practitioners and theorists.

for more details please see: http://mast-nemla.org/cfp-issue-2/

Ever since Charles Taylor (A Secular Age) and Talal Asad (Formations of the Secular) questioned the supremacy of secularization, scholars in the fields of philosophy, sociology, and anthropology have used post-secularism to analyze gender, state violence, religion, pain, the senses, and more. This perspective has helped us to consider how secularization has been accepted as normative and inevitable, and how it functions as a disciplinary apparatus or as a constructed ideology.