popular culture

Copyright and Intellectual Property Area

As our day-to-day lives depend increasingly on creating “content,” the often misunderstood rules of copyright and intellectual property have an important effect on us. The Copyright and Intellectual Property area seeks to foster an interdisciplinary discussion about the tumultuous cultural battle raging over how we understand the production and distribution of knowledge.

The Popular Arts Conference (PAC) invites submissions for our 19th Annual meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, September 3-7, 2026.

PAC is an annual academic conference for the studies of the popular arts, including science/speculative fiction and fantasy literature, film, and other media; comic books and graphic novels; anime and manga; tabletop and video gaming; etc., presented to a mixed audience of scholars and fans. The mission of PAC is to promote scholarship on popular culture and to encourage engagement between scholars and fans in order to deepen our understanding of the popular arts. PAC presentations are peer reviewed, based on scholarly research.

NETSOL: New Trends in Social and Liberal Sciences 

An Interdisciplinary Journal - ISSN 2469-4002

http://www.netsoljournal.net/

CALL FOR PAPERS 

Faculty-owned and faculty-run interdisciplinary journal NETSOL welcomes submissions from all scholars in the humanities and social sciences.  

NETSOL has been housed at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley since 2016.

NETSOL is a peer-reviewed biannual academic e-journal publishing original research articles and book reviews. All articles go through a double-blind peer-review process.

For the Annual Conference in Atlanta, April 8-11, 2026, PCA will be piloting poster sessions.  Poster sessions allow scholars to share their research and ideas in a less formal setting compared to traditional presentations while still being part of the program.  

If the proposal is accepted, presenters should create a poster presentation that visually summarizes their topic, highlighting such things as their main argument, their research methods, and overall conclusions.

Poster sessions will be scheduled in a four hour block (8 a.m. - 12 p.m. or 1 p.m. - 5 p.m.).  Presenters should be ready to set up and take down at those times and will need to schedule a 90 minute block in which to be with their posters.   

Call for Papers American Literature Association (ALA) 2026, Chicago

The American Humor Studies Association (AHSA) plans to offer two panels.

One panel, “Teaching with Humor” will explore, through specific examples, how humor, in its many forms—literary, visual, performative—can enhance the learning process and make it vivid and more engaging. The panel will examine the multiple ways that teachers in disciplines such as literature and other humanities can employ the humor found in literary texts, cartoons, films, songs, memes and media for a richer understanding of the subject matter. 

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

‘Stars and Screen’
Cinema and Media History Virtual Symposium 
May 16, 2026 
https://starsandscreen.blogspot.com/?m=0

The ‘Stars and Screen’ Cinema and Media History Virtual Symposium is an Interdisciplinary Symposium dedicated to Film History, Archival Research, Cinema and Media History.

The Comics Arts Conference is now accepting 100- to 200-word abstracts for papers, presentations, and panels taking a critical or historical perspective on comics (juxtaposed images in sequence) for a meeting of scholars and professionals at WonderCon, in Anaheim, CA, March 27–29, 2026.  We seek proposals from a broad range of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives and welcome the participation of academic and independent scholars.  We also encourage the involvement of professionals from all areas of the comics industry, including creators, editors, publishers, retailers, distributors, and journalists.  The CAC at WonderCon does not accept virtual submissions.  The CAC is designed to bring together comics scholars, professionals, critics, and historian

Visual Cultures of the Medical Modern

A two-day conference to be held at Azim Premji Bengaluru, 19th - 20th February, 2026 co-

organized by the English and Media Studies group

About the conference:

CALL FOR BOOK CHAPTERS
(To be Published by the National Publisher AUTHORSPRESS INDIA with ISBN and DOI)

Extended Deadline- 15th November 2025

ART, AESTHETICS, AND VISUALITY IN CULTURE AND LITERATURE

The International Crime Fiction Association is delighted to announce the thirteenth Captivating Criminality conference, held from Thursday, 25 June to Saturday, 27 June 2026 at Bamberg, Germany, with a workshop for ECR/PGR on Wednesday, 24 June 2025. This year’s topic, crime fiction, conflict, and representation, attempts to appeal to researchers of crime fiction in all its variety and presented on various media, ranging from the “classical” detective novel via filmic representations of crime to podcasts and social media. As a genre of fundamentally human expression, much of crime fiction from all places and times is concerned with discussions of both conflict and representation.

We invite scholars in religious studies and related fields to submit proposals for chapters
that will contribute to an edited volume on Metamodern Spiritualities. 
This volume will be the first of its kind to explore metamodernism as manifested in 21st century
religious/spiritual institutions, beliefs and practices. We seek contributions from
different disciplinary perspectives that critically adopt or adapt Vermeulen and Van den
Akker’s theory of metamodernism to contemporary religious/spiritual phenomena. We
welcome submissions that include, but are not limited to, theories and case studies of:

Call for Papers:

Black Performing Arts: Sound, Movement, Image, Text

Submission Deadline: November 1, 2025

Despite the outsized influence of technology on everyday cultural practices and classrooms, its role has never been more contested. Indeed, even in the case that such practices are not digitized, our societal roles are increasingly governed by systemic expectations, rules, and algorithms. These expectations create hierarchies, enforce boundaries, and classify individuals and their work.