science and culture

“I canna’ change the laws of physics”: Depictions of Science in Popular Culture

PopCRN (the Popular Culture Network) is back with a free virtual symposium exploring science in popular culture. To be held online on Thursday 16th and Friday 17th of October 2024.

Posthuman Fictions: Rethinking ‘the Human’ in Contemporary Culture

19-20 September 2024

Deadline for submissions: an abstract of 200 to 250 words should be sent by 7 July 2024.

Conference venue: Scuola di Scienze Umanistiche, Università di Genova, Italy

Supported by the Wellcome Trust-funded Future of Human Reproduction Project

In-Person: Thursday 24th October 2024

Online: Monday 28th October 2024

Keynote: Heather Latimer, University of British Columbia

This conference takes place over two days: one day in-person at the University of Lancaster, and one day online. This is to maximize accessibility and international engagement.

The editors of the volume are calling for chapter abstracts for a volume focused on the representation of disability in superhero film and media, with a particular focus on intersectional discourses of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, power, and beyond. The volume will provide perspectives on the growing field of superheroes and disability by placing a specific focus on screen representations. As such, the collections will engage with critical debates over super-identities and super-bodies as politicized spaces in the 21st centuries. 

One of the primary challenges in confronting the climate crisis is effectively representing its magnitude and impact on both the environment and humanity. The quest for a sustainable future cannot be fulfilled without the capacity of imagining one. As Timothy Clark argues in his work on scale framing (Ecocriticism on the Edge, 2015), the act of imagining requires placing concepts within specific temporal and contextual frameworks. Envisioning the complex effects and mechanisms of climate change necessitates grappling with unprecedented and expansive scales. Environmental fiction has emerged as a literary field that attempts to capture these scales and their interplays.

The Margaret Cavendish Society will sponsor two or more sessions (panels or roundtables) at the Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting in Boston, MA. The RSA conference in 2025 will be held jointly with the Shakespeare Assocation of America. 

As an aesthetic and cultural movement, Afrofuturism began with Mark Derry’s 1993 essay, “Black to the Future.” Derry poses a difficult question: “Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures?” The clear answer is a resounding, “YES!” Not only can Black folk imagine possible futures, but they can also write, paint, and sculpt them into being. In this special issue we invite contributors to explore what these possible futures look like. How do Afrofuturist artists reimagine a world where Black folks can be/are free? What is the cost of such freedom? 

With the advent of capitalism, always gendered and racialised, as a mode of production, profound changes have taken place in the ways in which various societies, human relations and ecosystems have evolved (Moore, 2016, Kaplan 2009). Technological development has always been integral to the directions and configurations of capitalism, as it has evolved over the last three centuries. Further, the globalisation of capitalism, with the imperialist phase of European expansionism, followed by US-American expansionism as well as later, in the emergence of Chinese state capitalism, has brought technology to the front and centre of social, economic and political relations at every level (Lewis, 2022).

Call for Papers

The International Margaret Cavendish Society biannual conference will be held on the 12th and 13th of December, 2024, at Universidad de Sevilla (Spain).

FAME: “Absence and Death are much alike”

Fame is a report that travells far, and Many times lives long, and The older it groweth, The more it florishes, and is The more particularly a mans own…

The Worlds Olio (1655)

[W]ho knows but after my honourable burial, I might have a glorious resurrection in following ages, since time brings strange and unusual things to passe.

The Northeast Popular Culture Association (NEPCA) will host its 2024 annual conference this Fall as a hybrid conference from Thursday, October 3 – Saturday, October 5. Virtual sessions will take place on Thursday evening and Friday morning via Zoom, and in-person sessions will take place on Friday evening and Saturday morning at Nichols College, Dudley, Massachusetts.

Screen Bodies invites submissions to be considered for a forthcoming general issue. We are particularly interested in research on:

• Cyberfeminism

• Health Humanities

• Biomedical Ethics / Bioethics

• Ethics of AI

Research articles are typically between 6k–9k words. Please see our website for details about the inclusion of artwork/images (www.berghahnjournals.com/submissions).

Sophia Lucid invites academic research papers from teachers and researchers across universities, colleges and research institutes in India. The fourth issue (Volume IV, Issue I) on “Artificial Intelligence, Technology and Society” invites scholars to rethink the existing paradigms, perspectives and compendium of knowledge on this broad area, through the disciplines of humanities, social sciences and natural sciences. An interdisciplinary discussion of ideas and concerns is highly recommended. Moreover, paper submissions must be original, contemporary and relevant, in providing a quality contribution to the existing body of knowledge. A list of suggestive areas is given below.

Sub themes:

Feminisms in the 21st-Century Science Fiction Novel; PAMLA (Nov. 7-10, 2024)

The 121st annual conference of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA) will be held from Thursday, November 7, to Sunday, November 10, 2024, at the Margaritaville Resort, Palm Springs, California.

Feminisms in the 21st-Century Science Fiction Novel:

 –deadline extended to May 13th– 

UCL Graduate Conference 2024

Close Reading in the Digital Age