Algorithmic technologies are nowadays proliferating in various sectors of the economy and, more generally, in society. Yet, while their widespread development already occupies several areas of contemporary life, their material configuration often remains opaque and difficult to comprehend, especially when it comes to how algorithms shape the futures of people and societies at large. Often, algorithms and AI technologies are conceived by their users and creators as “magic” that is beyond comprehension — an understanding that has a range of political and cultural implications for society (Campolo & Crawford, 2020) and has been consequently recognized in the theorizations of economy and politics (Pignarre & Stengers, 2012).

The College English Association solicits abstracts from its members for the 2023 MLA conference from January 5-8 in San Francisco, CA.

The book provides an in-depth analysis of global perspectives on advancing public and social gender policy worldwide; it also examines women’s political representation and participation in peace processes in the context of their community, emphasizing existing cultural norms with biases, questioning societal prejudices toward women, for example, in STEM and creative economies. The volume covers several domains presenting a wide range of important issues that demonstrate gender inequality, discussing a wide range of cultural and geographical realities.

“Geographies of the Fantastic and the Quotidian”

Canadian Literature and Authors at the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA) 2022 Conference: UCLA Luskin Conference Center and Hotel in Los Angeles, California

November 11 - 13, 2022 

Panel Organizer: Shawna Guenther shawna.guenther@dal.ca

Margaret Atwood’s works are replete with significant spaces: the forest in which Lucy disappears in “Death by Landscape,” Iris’s mansion in the fictional Port Ticonderoga of The Blind Assassin, Offred’s room, haunted by the Offreds who came before her, in The Handmaid’s Tale, Aunt Lydia’s hiding place in Ardua Hall in The Testaments, the rooftop gardens of the MaddAddam trilogy, Kinnear’s basement in Alias Grace, and more. We’re in a Renaissance of Atwood scholarship, prompted in part by contemporary parallels to the events in her dystopias and to the Hulu and Netflix adaptations of The Handmaid’s Tale and Alias Grace, respectively.

We are seeking proposals for an edited collection tentatively titled Television Comedy & Cultural Crisis. Chapters should focus on a specific television series, and address how that series engages with the discourse of a particular cultural crisis through comedy. The function of comedy should be foregrounded, as the collection will be held together through the central question of how humor acts as space through which we can resist normative ways of thinking about these cultural crises. 

Contributors might consider humorous depictions of, but are not limited to:

• The afterlife/faith

• Environmentalism/climate crisis

The Fury of Achilles: The Faces of War

International Conference

29 and 30 September 2022

University of Aveiro

http://furiadeaquiles.web.ua.pt/index.php/presentation-2/ 

The International Conference “The Fury of Achilles: The Faces of War” will be held in the Department of Languages and Cultures of the University of Aveiro, Portugal, on 29 and 30 September 2022. It will be a presential event.

Book editor: Roshni Sengupta

Both “culture” and “people” are largely undefined and inherently diverse forms, susceptible to malleability and appropriation to suit different agendas. Considering popular culture as a field of struggle leads us to a distinction between popular forms of control as well as participation. Popular culture therefore remains tied to questions of representation, enactment, regulation and control. Reading the form requires the deployment of modes such as symbols and codes (semiotics), apparatus of production (political economy approach), audience and consumer response as well as through studies of the social life of cultural forms and their political frames.

In the inaugural issue of The Global South, Arif Dirlik notes the fundamental instability of the journal’s core concept: “like all geographical designations of ideological and political spaces and projects,” the geography of the Global South “is much more complicated than the term suggests, and subject to change over time.” “[T]he ‘South’ of the contemporary world,” Dirlik reminds us, “may be significantly different in its composition and territorial spread than the South” of past historical moments.

Issue 9.2 Culinary Cultures on the Move

Edited by Krishnendu Ray (NYU), Jooyeon Rhee (PSU), and Tina Chen (PSU)

verge@psu.edu | Extended Deadline | May 15, 2022

Department of English

Jadavpur University

Presents

“Queer Political Assemblages 2.0”

7 March 2022

Co-ordinated by:

Dr. Kaustav Bakshi, Associate Professor, Department of English, Jadavpur University

“Queer Political Assemblages”, a national students’ seminar, is a platform for conferring on diverse issues related to the intersectionality of sexuality identity politics, as the name clearly suggests. After a year’s break, the seminar is being revived, though in an online mode. This year’s theme is “Queer homing desires”.

Call for papers

The Pennsylvania College English Association (PCEA) invites proposals from faculty members, graduate students, and independent scholars for its 2022 Annual Conference on the theme of recovering lost writers and lost texts. We are especially interested in recovering marginalized voices, finding reasons for their disappearance, and charting a path to bring their writing and lives back into the light of current scholarship. Lost or forgotten work by canonical authors would also be welcome subjects of literary inquiry as part of this call, as would be papers that trace the evolution of a literary text from manuscript to magazine publication to book form if the changes are radical.

Reconfiguring Digital Spaces: GLO Conference 2022

If the pandemic has taught us anything, it is that we have become painfully aware of how highly dependent we are on networked computers in most facets of our everyday lives. Shuffling from Zoomiverse to Metaverse and everything in between, computers remain the focal point of interactivity in life, entertainment, scholarship, and labor as in-person activities become increasingly constricted. Alternatives must be found; and even though dreams of totally transferring consciousnesses to digital avatars remain deeply rooted in the literary cyberpunk imaginaries of the 1980s and 90s, the pandemic brings us closer to realizing them in surprising ways.

Extended for Abstracts until April, 9, 2022: Voicing the Less Dead: Unheard, Unseen, Unknown, an edited collection (in-process)