science and culture

MMLA (Midwest Modern Language Association) – November 15-18 Kansas City

Consumerism and Science Fiction: From Modernism to Postmodernism

Food media have become exponentially popular throughout the 21st century, with growth in the production and consumption of digital ‘food porn,’ cookbooks and content in the food blog- and vlogospheres. Across these diverse formats, food media have long been recognized as artifacts that reference culturally- and historically-specific ideals of gender at the same time that they offer instructional food pedagogies. For instance, scholars have pointed out the links between food preparation rituals and the performance of gender from the hypermasculinization of barbeque to the feminized daintiness of baking desserts, and from ideas about the gendered organization of food labor to the embodied pleasures of food porn.  

I am working to organize a panel proposal for this year's American Academy of Religion conference for the Religion and Science Fiction Unit. In particular, I am looking for fellow panelists interested in presenting papers on the topic "Transposition of Religious and Theological Concepts Through Worldbuilding." If you are interested, I would need your 1,000-word proposal and 150-word abstract by February 23rd so that I can draft a cohesive 1,000-word panel proposal before the final deadline. Please reach out to me if you are interested.

The growing quantification of social behaviours changes those behaviours. Extensive data collection alters the way we view our bodies, habits, environments, relationships, and society at large. Big data architectures are increasingly determining classificatory systems in the social, political, and corporate realms, transforming political questions into ‘technical management’. Promises of a cyborgian existence, free of patriarchal, capitalist, social, gender, and racial oppression (Haraway) here stand in stark contrast to the steadily proliferating forms of digital surveillance and control. Data, and their multiple arborisations, have become new epistemic landscapes. They have also become new existential territories (Guattari).

The University of North Alabama English Department

Announces the 9th Annual Alabama Regional Inter-Disciplinary Graduate Conference

March 8-10th, 2018

Our Dying Earth: A Journey through Ecocriticism

“Do not go gentle into that good night; Old age should burn and rave at close of day. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” – Dylan Thomas