popular culture

Faster than society gathers wisdom: Video games and/as speculative Fiction

(McFarland, Studies in Gaming Series)

 Editor:

 Marc A. Ouellette, Old Dominion University (mouellet@odu.edu)

Concept Note:

Storytelling, from the metamorphic narratives of the Indian epics such as the Mahabharata and the Ramayana and Ovid’s ancient transmutations to the evolving interfaces of the present, has been an act of survival through transformation. Metamorphosis is the underlying imperative of the twenty-first century; it is not just a biological inevitability but a relentless ontological pulse beating beneath the surface of our global narratives. We inhabit a world amid a grand moulting, where the traditional mediums of storytelling, like the printed page, the physical body, and the ancestral soil, are being reshaped under the pressures of a planetary crisis.

Call for Papers: The Legacy of Norman Bates: Essays on the Psycho Franchise

Editor: Shane H Weathers, Bowling Green State University

Editors Introduction:

Fusion or Fracture in the Hundred Acre Woods: Community in Adaptations of Winnie-the-Pooh (Virtual)

Co-organizers Michael A. Torregrossa and Carl B. Sell

Sponsored by Monsters & the Monstrous Area of the Northeast Popular Culture Association 

Call for Papers - Please Submit Proposals by 30 September 2026

58th Annual Convention of Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)

Salve Regina University (Newport, RI)/Online.

Hybrid event: 6-9 March 2027

This session’s modality is Virtual Only, meaning all presentations will be delivered via Zoom regardless of whether the presenters are in-person.

Religion, Morality, and the American Presidency: The West Wing at 30
Edited by Ilaria W. Biano

Deadline: September 30, 2026

Premiering in 1999, The West Wing quickly became one of the most influential television portrayals of American political life. Through its depiction of the Bartlet administration, the series offered a powerful narrative of the presidency as a site of moral deliberation, civic responsibility, and public leadership. The show remains a significant reference point in discussions of political authority, democratic institutions, and the ethical responsibilities of governance.

In 1996, Carl Sagan warned us of a time when people would lose their ability to question, “when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few . . . when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.” Maybe Mr Sagan was somewhat pessimistic when writing The Demon-Haunted World. But then again, in times of conspiracy theories, Ancient Aliens, Antivaxxers, and Holocaust Deniers, the Age of Information appears just as capable of spreading dangerous frauds and charlatans as it is of disseminating reliable scholarship.

Autism did not exist at the beginning of the world. Who we would now recognize as autistic people existed, yes. But autism itself is undoubtedly new, born in the 20th century clinic and doggedly taken up in popular discourse ever since. Autism did not exist at the beginning of the world, but now, it's hard to imagine a world without it. Despite, or perhaps because of this, autistic characters frequently feature in speculative and post-apocalyptic media—stories which take place at the end of the world but are often based on or extend from of our own reality.

About the Conference
In light of our deeply polarized times, the American Academy of Religion, Western Region (AAR/WR) invites scholars, practitioners, educators, and community leaders to submit proposals for its Annual Conference. This year's theme is Moving Beyond Boundaries and Silos Toward Interconnection. It reflects AAR/WR's foundational commitment to inter-religious, inter-disciplinary, and inter-generational dialogue.
 

Call for Papers - Enthymema Special Issue (December 2027)

Matter, Materials, and (Un)Natural Resources in Science Fiction

Guest editors: Marco Malvestio (University of Padova) and Valentina Romanzi (University of Verona)

This creative session invites scholars, writers, and hybrid practitioner-theorists to explore liminal dialogue as a form of literary creation in which unlikely, displaced, or structurally incompatible voices are brought into conversation. Drawing on the centrality of dialogue in literary and dramatic traditions, this panel reimagines conversational form as a site of constraint-based experimentation, where meaning emerges through the collision of discourses that would not ordinarily coexist. Rather than focusing on artificial intelligence as a technological subject, this session treats AI-assisted generation as a formal device for producing estranged adjacency between voices, genres, and epistemologies.

CFP – “BLACK ESSAYSM: FORMAL EXPERIMENTATIONS IN BLACK CREATIVE/CRITICAL PRACTICES”

liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies 12, no. 1, Spring 2028

Guest editor: Walton Muyumba

Submissions due: January 30, 2027

2026 Imagining Creative Worlds Online Symposium, 11–12 November 2026

We invite proposals for 2026 Imagining Creative Worlds, an annual online symposium in the Common Ground Imagining Futures Series, taking place 11–12 November 2026.

The symposium brings together scholars, researchers, artists, designers, educators, publishers, museum professionals, media makers, and cultural practitioners working across creative fields and practices. We welcome proposals that explore how creative worlds are made, shared, interpreted, circulated, and transformed.

For 2026, The Arts in Society Research Network serves as the host Network, helping shape the symposium’s emphasis within the wider theme of Imagining Creative Worlds.

This panel proposes a revaluation of boundary-making between early modern and modern generic and affective registers in South Asia. While there is a consensus that genres of composition and cultural sensibilities did not change radically with the coming of print—“print did not so much produce new books as more old books” (Blackburn, 2002)—the precise sites of continuity/rupture differed widely based on the region and language in question.

58th NeMLA Convention
Newport, RI

Format: In Person Only

This panel builds off feminist science fiction studies’ investigation of the role of gender in speculative texts by expanding the field of inquiry to the role of nonbinary characters and even nonbinary worldbuilding in contemporary speculative fiction. It asks how both science fiction as a genre and feminist science fiction as a field have transformed with the emergence of new gender subjectivities. How do these fictions empower trans and nonbinary communities?  How must the methodological tools for studying SF change to meet this moment?