This special issue centers Blackness in fandom studies. Fandom studies has gestured toward race generally, and Blackness in particular, from its alleged white center while always keeping race at its margin. It has largely co-opted the language of race, difference, and diversity from the margins and recentered it around white geeks and white women. Indeed, fandom studies has done lots of things—except deal with its race problem. But as Toni Morrison (1975) asserts, that is the work of racism: it keeps those at the margins busy, trying to prove that they deserve a seat at the center table.

Complicity rhetoric is frequently adopted in public and political discourse. For example, Joe Biden has repeatedly used the formulation ‘silence is complicity’ as a call for the defence of human rights. Yet, in an ever more interconnected and globalised world, identifying and tracing the often complex relationships of cause and effect that comprise complicity is more and more difficult. The notion of collective complicity seems to be increasingly applicable to phenomena that define the contemporary world, such as the effects of global capitalism and the climate emergency (and has been elaborated, for example, by Christopher Kutz in Complicity: Ethics and Law for a Collective Age (2000)).

“Whenever we try to envision a world without war, without violence, without prisons, without capitalism,” writes Walidah Imarisha, “we are engaging in speculative fiction. All organizing is science fiction.” This panel seeks to bring together critics probing historical, present, and possible future relationships between speculative fiction and social justice. The emergent concept of “visionary fiction,” developed by Imarisha and adrienne maree brown, articulates radical and generative connections between speculation and social movement work.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Rethinking Body in Medical Humanities

The George Saunders Society invites prospective participants for one or two panels at the 2023 American Literature Association conference in Boston, MA, to be held May 25 to 28, 2023. We are interested in presentations on any aspect of George Saunders’s life and work; in this, our fourth year of activity at ALA, we are particularly interested in papers that challenge, complicate, or go beyond the most common (particularly religious, ethical, or new sincericist) readings of the author’s work in the critical literature to this point. The topic is therefore open, but possible approaches might include:

The "Learn Your Sisters' Stories" podcast series seeks to inform those inside and outside of academia of the challenges and rewards black women scholars face. It will also help create a community for black women students and professors currently in the academy as they find solidarity with one  another, and offer tools and support on how to navigate academic culture. Finally, it will help those who are considering going to graduate school know more about the process.

North American Ethnic Literatures in the 21st Century:

Intersectional / Transatlantic Perspectives

An International Symposium

25-26 de mayo de 2023

Universitat Jaume I - Castellón (Spain)

Call for Papers: Volume 5, Number 1, 2023

Themed Issue on

“Futuristic Epistemology and Scientific Dimensions: Neo-perspectives in Science Fiction”

To be edited by 

Niladri Mahapatra & Akasdip Dey

PG Department of English, Bhatter College, Dantan 

 Call for Papers: Special Issue, The Comparatist

Topic: Anger

General Editor: Zahi Zalloua (Whitman College)

LONDON CONFERENCE IN CRITICAL THOUGHT 2023

June 30th and July 1st, 2023

Call for Presentations – deadline March 13th, 2022

The Call for Presentations is now open for the 10th annual London Conference in Critical Thought (LCCT), hosted and supported by the School of Social Sciences and Professions at London Metropolitan University. This will be an IN-PERSON conference, occurring at the Holloway Road (North) campus of London Metropolitan University.

Poetry is a constant, being produced by all known civilisations from ancient to modern times. Throughout its extensive history, the individual art of high emotions sublimated into perfect language has approached a vast array of subject matters, including love, war, social issues, the beauty of nature, etc. A particular exercise of the mind and soul, and a unique way of apprehending reality, poetry is a self-sufficient universe that intensifies and enlarges life experience. Pointing to inner knowledge rather than real circumstance, it activates different layers of perception, sweeps away human thoughts, feeds emotions and soothes suffering.

Dante Alighieri expressed the transcendence of the human condition beyond its limitations through the verb trasumanar in Paradiso 1. It is rare evidence that Alighieri had thought of a kind of "transhuman" change in the early 1300s. In the past years, we witnessed the change raised by the feminist movements, especially the last wave called ''transfeminism'', which pointed out how ''being human'' it is not enough for the subjectivities in order to be recognized by politics. For this reason, the word ''posthuman'' was used to show how monsters can be active participants in our society, being part of us.

CALL FOR PAPERS -- EAA 2023 -- BELFAST

Avner Goldstein and Eleanor March invite abstract submission to session #107 ("The Materiality of Religion on the Atlantic Edge") at the 2023 annual meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists in Belfast. Please see the text below for further details. Any questions may be addressed to the main session organiser at avner.goldstein@bc.edu.

Session Title and Number:
#107. The Materiality of Religion on the Atlantic Edge

Organizers:
Avner Goldstein (Boston College, USA)
Eleanor March (University of Exeter, UK)

Deadline:
9 February 2023

Discussions around reproduction in the contemporary era have usually been bound up with debates around abortion rights and pro-life/pro-choice campaigns. From the UK’s proposals to create buffer zones at abortion clinics to prevent protests, to increased legalisation of abortion rights in several Latin American countries over recent years. Yet the conflict between continued restrictions in some countries and the relaxing of abortion laws in others continue to dominate the debate.