Deadline: Submissions due has been extended to October 15, 2025 to invisible.culture@ur.rochester.edu. 

It feels only appropriate, given the recent UR graduate worker strike, that Issue 41 of InVisible Culture focus on the problem of labor. Amid the erosion of labor protections in academia, increasing challenges faced by immigrant workers in the US, and global labor conflicts in fields like healthcare and agriculture, this moment calls for a reconsideration of what labor is and how its value is structured.

From Indigenous testimonies about extraction economies to eco-dystopian manga, comics across the world function as powerful visual laboratories for engaging with the natural world. The graphic form—with its unique interplay of word and image, its use of framing, juxtaposition, and sequentiality—stages ecological questions in ways prose often cannot. By dramatizing the temporality of both sudden catastrophes and slow processes of degradation, comics enable us to see environmental crises unfolding across multiple scales of time and space. They ask us to imagine multispecies entanglements, toxic futures, and alternative modes of dwelling, while also foregrounding human complicity in environmental collapse.

The Music Graduate Student Organization at the University of Pittsburgh welcomes proposals for 20 minute paper presentations, performance demonstrations, or work that integrates research and practice for its 2026 conference, “Sonic Power: Speculation, Surveillance, and Strength.” We invite students, researchers, musicians, sound artists, and practitioners from diverse disciplines to consider how sound organizes power and how people reorganize power through sound. Sonic life shapes worlds, whether in the hush of archival erasure, the loudness of protest, or the sorting of listening within media infrastructures.

Call for Papers
Coming of Age, Coming Undone: Abortion, Adolescence, Teen Pregnancy, and Reproductive Justice in Global Popular Culture

Audience: Media Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, Youth Studies, Reproductive Justice, Popular Culture, Girlhood Studies, Global Health, Queer Studies

Do Humans Also Dream of Electric Sheeps?
Technoscientific, Cultural, and Cognitive Challenges of AI

International Conference – Rome, February 27-28, 2026

Organized by:

• University of Rome Tor Vergata
• Res Viva – Interuniversity Research Center on the Epistemology and History of Life Sciences
• Italian Society for the History of Science (SISS)
• With the support of CNR – Institute for the History of Philosophical and Scientific Thought in Modern Age (ISPF), Naples

Conference theme

The Center for the Advancement of Women at Mount Saint Mary’s University, Los Angeles

Collectif Research and Writing Anthology 2027 Call for Papers

Do you want to forge community and ignite your scholarship? Connect with scholars, activists, artists, and others passionate about the advancement of women? Impact a wider audience? By publishing in Collectif, Mount Saint Mary’s University’s interdisciplinary journal of research, writing, and art, you will reach 50,000 potential readers. To celebrate the issue’s release, The Center for the Advancement of Women will host a salon, where contributors can share their work and connect with the Center community.

2027 Theme and Call

CFP: Sensation Fiction and the Health Humanities

A VPFA Study Day

Loughborough University, 27 March 2026

“When seeking knowledge of a work of art or an art form, it never proves useful to take the receiver into account”: thus begins Walter Benjamin’s foundational essay on the study of translation. This seminar proceeds against Benjamin’s injunction, paring translation studies with recent inquiries into reading practice and readerly attention to ask how modernist writers use translation to modulate readerly difficulty. How do modernist translators adjust difficulty both to safeguard and to enhance the reader’s imagination of an original text from which they are withheld? Do moments of difficulty in translated modernist texts – whether Victorian archaisms in C.K.

In a recent article (2021), Sue-Im Lee observes a rising phenomenon in Asian American formal criticism: the proliferation of aesthetic concepts such as “opaque, transparent, fragmented, linear, nonlinear, discordant, or lyrical” (690).

Call for Papers for the 15th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Music, Sound, Art and Design (EvoMUSART) · Please distribute · Apologies for cross-posting
------------------------------------------------

The 15th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Music, Sound, Art and Design (EvoMUSART) will take place on 8–10 April 2026, in Toulouse, France, as part of the evo* event.

South Atlantic Review Special Issue

In The Time of Man and Beyond:

Rethinking Elizabeth Madox Roberts for the 21st Century

Proposals due November 21, 2025

Guest Editors:

James Stamant, Agnes Scott College

Amanda M. Capelli, New York University

Goretti Benca, Marist College

CFP: Naming and Classifying

in the Long Eighteenth Century

Call for Abstracts for Edited Volume

Urban Waters in South Asian Literary Cultures

The 2026 CLA Online Research Conference, co-sponsored by the Children's Literature Assembly of NCTE and the Mary Frances Early College of Education at the University of Georgia, will be held on Friday, February 20th, 2026. The theme of the conference is Care, Advocacy, and Children's Literature Research in Theory and Praxis.

The conference will feature research presentations, a journal editor session, and a keynote talk from Dr. Jonda McNair, Charlotte S. Huck Endowed Professor of Children’s Literature, The Ohio State University.

Editors of this issue:
Salomé Honório (University of Lisbon, Portugal)
Lamiae Bouqentar (University of Toronto, Canada)

Representation matters – but to whom? And how?

This iteration of the Critical Approaches to Black Media Culture conference considers the ongoing significance of representational analysis as well as the critical possibilities enabled by the turn to resonance in Black media and cultural studies. Our theme, Representation and Resonance, invites original research into images and storytelling, circulation and flows, and reception practices.

While we especially invite papers on this topic, we are open to any and all critical inquiry into Black media culture, broadly defined. Our hope is to bring together any and all scholars interested and invested in Black media culture, regardless of discipline or method.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: SPECIAL ANTHOLOGY OF ONE-MINUTE PLAYS / MONOLOGUES ‘REWRITING SHAKESPEARE’ (Volume 2) 

Website: Fresh Words: An International Literary Magazine - Announcements

Deadline: October 28, 2025

FRESH WORDS – An International Literary Magazine is thrilled to announce the call for submissions for Volume 2 of its acclaimed special anthology: ‘Rewriting Shakespeare’—a curated collection of bold, inventive, and contemporary one-minute plays and monologues that reimagine the timeless works of William Shakespeare.  

This special issue of Public Art Dialogue invites scholarly contributions (research articles, short essays, and artists’ projects) that examine the enduring visual, spatial, and ideological legacies of colonialism in public spaces across the Pacific world. It seeks to explore how imperial legacies forged transoceanic connections that continue to shape the public sphere through means including but not limited to monuments, architecture, civic rituals, theater, dance, street art, and performative acts.

What stories can we tell of the vanishing mediator? Is it an irreducible kernel of transition between two different configurations of the social structure, or is it only imagined retrospectively, as the transient possibility of another world? Fredric Jameson shows, paradigmatically, that the Protestant ethic functions as "the vanishing mediator" in Max Weber's historical narrative between medieval society and modern capitalism, the "catalytic agent which permits an exchange of energies between two otherwise mutually exclusive terms." Slavoj Žižek adopts the term for his conception of subjectivity, where the subject exists as the transcendental excess of its symbolic universe—as an irremediable gap and a site of transformation.

This panel is interested in the close historical association between the discourse of fetishism in anti-capitalist critique, and representations of Indigenous peoples. William Pietz argues that, prior to the adoption of the fetish as an object of anthropological inquiry in the 19th century, the discourse of fetishism emerged as an offshoot of the Christian theory of idolatry. Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism, in turn, “was a vivid way of suggesting to his readers that the truth of capital was to be grasped from a perspective alien to that of bourgeois understanding, which knows capital exclusively through its own categories” (Pietz).

NeMLA’s 57th Annual Convention (Virtual Session)

Conference Date: March 5-8, 2026

Abstract Submission Deadline: September 30, 2025

All presentations will be delivered via Zoom.

Session Title: Touching the World at the Speed of Light: Community and Conflict in the Global Village

Howells Society CFPs for ALA 2026 (Chicago)

The W.D. Howells Society will host two panels at the American Literature Association’s 37th annual conference, which will meet at the Palmer House in Chicago, May 20-23, 2026 (Wednesday through Saturday of Memorial Day weekend). 

PANEL 1: HOWELLS & MEDIA

PCA True Crime CFP 2026 

Abstract Submission Deadline: November 30th, 2025 

PCA/ACA will be held from April 8-11th, 2026 in Atlanta, GA 

True Crime typically focuses on investigative journalism used to present a mystery or attempt to understand the psychology of a crime/perpetrator. It may include narratives of a case, victimology, forensics, or analysis of evidence, although each case is different. Much of True Crime focuses on serial killers/killings, although subsets of the genre may delve into topics such as kidnappings, cults, wrongful convictions, advocacy, white-collar crimes, trial proceedings, prevention of crime, survivor stories, or sensationalism/entertainment. 

Popular Culture Association: British Popular Culture 

Call for Papers

The British Popular Culture area of the Popular Culture/American Culture Association (PCA/ACA) is now accepting submissions for the 2026 national conference to be held April 8-11, 2026, in Atlanta, GA at the Atlanta Marriott Marquis!

Academics at all stages in their careers, as well as independent scholars, are encouraged to apply. We particularly encourage submissions by graduate students.