science and culture

Conspiracy Theories in the Wake of Disaster

Matthew N. Hannah

Associate Professor

Department of Communication Arts

University of Wisconsin—Madison

mhannah2@wisc.edu

Zachary Loeb

Assistant Professor

Department of History

Purdue University

zloeb@purdue.edu

We're excited to announce that the DIY Methods Conference is back for another year! Pitches are due by April 20th, 2026. Please don't hesitate to email us (annepasek@trentu.ca and trentwintermeier@utexas.edu) if you have any questions.

Finnish Literary Research Society Annual Conference 2026

 May 20-22, 2026

Online Panel: Indigenous Futurisms Beyond the West: Arab and Global South Speculative Fiction

CFP - MLA 2027, "Science and Intellectual Emancipation in Italian Literary and Cultural History”

Panel Sponsor: Forum on 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-Century Italian

Call for Book Proposals: Secrecy in Literature and Culture Secrecy in Literature and Culture (Edinburgh University Press) Series Editors: Simon Cooke (University of Edinburgh) and Natalie Ferris (University of Bristol) We invite proposals for critical studies exploring the pivotal role of secrecy in literature and culture, with interdisciplinary, international and transhistorical scopeThe ‘secret’ is a concept of pivotal importance across a range of disciplines – from political studies of espionage and the ethics of intelligence work to law, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and literary and cultural studies – inflected by diverse cultural and historical contexts, and in terms of gender, sexuality, race and cla

Call for Chapters

Evident Tongues, Evident Bodies: Language, Sense, and Proof in the Early Modern World

Editors: Dr Mary Katherine Newman and Dr Rana Banna

What counted as evidence in the early modern world? 

How did language itself – spoken, written, translated, or performed – shape conceptions of proof? 

And how did sensory experience lend authority, or uncertainty, to what language claimed as true?

Oxford Literary Review 49.2: SETI and the Cosmic Turn in the Environmental Humanities, Edited by Timothy Clark and Philippe Lynes

OLR devotes itself to outstanding writing in deconstruction, literary theory, psychoanalytic theory, political theory and related forms of exploratory thought. OLR 49.2, to be published by Edinburgh University Press in late 2027, is planned to direct the journal’s distinctive mode of enquiry on the philosophy, culture and assumptions of SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

https://www.euppublishing.com/loi/olr

Call for Papers: Special Issue on Digital Marginalisation, AI Bias, and Cultural Representation in South Asia

UPDATE: DEADLINE EXTENDED UNTIL 07 February 2026

DEADLINE EXTENDED to 15 February 2026

Conference: Contagion, Information, Territory

Leiden University (Leiden, the Netherlands), 17-19 June 2026

Keynote speakers:

Dr. Ramon Amaro (Design Academy Eindhoven)

Prof. Dr. Jasbir Puar (University of British Columbia)

Journal Cedoua

2026 – n.º 52

The Cedoua Journal (RevCedoua), published in digital and open-access format, is issued annually by the Centre for Studies on Spatial Planning, Urbanism and the Environment of the Faculty of Law of the University of Coimbra. The Journal is dedicated to the publication of original scholarly works of a legal or interdisciplinary nature that reflect advanced research on issues related to spatial planning, urbanism and the environment, contributing to the identification and proposal of solutions to relevant problems in these fields.

JOCPC is now accepting articles for the Summer 2026 issue focusing on the topic of children and health. We have kept this theme open-ended and invite works across a wide range of disciplines where researchers are addressing children’s health within various media including literature, film and television, video-sharing platforms, gaming, photography, art, folktales, advertising. This may include but is not limited to:

Children and disease

Child mortality

Histories of children’s health

Historical fiction and child health/wellbeing

Culturally specific practices

Family remedies

Gendered approaches to child health

Roles of race and class in access to healthcare

Neglect and abuse

Accelerationism Revisited

15 June 2026, University College Dublin, Ireland

Guest Speaker: Hari Kunzru, interviewed by Mark O’Connell

Further speakers TBC

Perhaps the most relevant question we are facing today, both in and out of the university, is how to deal with AI. In academia, different disciplines handle this question in a myriad of ways, some insisting that to not embrace AI in the classroom is harmful to the students, while others believe the utilization of AI must weaken critical thinking skills. Regardless of the differing opinions on how to use it appropriately, no one disagrees that it is here to stay. Living through the development of this world-changing technology means that we are the ones facing the question of what it means to live well in the age of AI.

Science Fiction & Fantasy (SFF) continue to offer new ways of considering the relationships between gender and genre. This conference is interested in how women – writers, characters, fans – use, negotiate, and operate in SFF.

We are particularly interested in papers that have an interdisciplinary and/or creative focus. We welcome papers which consider how this operates across multiple forms, including text, film, TV and videogames.

This conference is open to students and researchers at any stage of their career.