Call for Papers: DEADLINE EXTENDED
COMICS STUDIES SOCIETY CONFERENCE, JULY 28-30, 2022
In collaboration with Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI

ABSTRACT: This session offers a panel on the study of multispecies entanglements—the adaptive, relational co-becoming between people and the other-than-human world that is increasingly urgent given the climate crisis. This session welcomes works on traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), environmental humanities, animal studies, magical realism, Indigenous wonderworks, collaborative works, and creative projects on the entanglement between humans and the other-than-human.

The MMLA 2022 conference call for papers states that “we invite our members to a collective discussion of the role of humanities post-now in an emphatic call for immediate changes to allow a fundamentally different future.” The popular culture panel will address this call by investigating both the dystopian and utopian potential of our new reality as expressed in media and other forms of popular culture.

We are seeking proposals for an edited collection tentatively titled Television Comedy & Cultural Crisis. Chapters should focus on a specific television series, and address how that series engages with the discourse of a particular cultural crisis through comedy. The function of comedy should be foregrounded, as the collection will be held together through the central question of how humor acts as space through which we can resist normative ways of thinking about these cultural crises. 

Contributors might consider humorous depictions of, but are not limited to:

• The afterlife/faith

• Environmentalism/climate crisis

The Fury of Achilles: The Faces of War

International Conference

29 and 30 September 2022

University of Aveiro

http://furiadeaquiles.web.ua.pt/index.php/presentation-2/ 

The International Conference “The Fury of Achilles: The Faces of War” will be held in the Department of Languages and Cultures of the University of Aveiro, Portugal, on 29 and 30 September 2022. It will be a presential event.

This roundtable panel invites discussions on the contemporary politics of the “safe animal” in media—in all the registers and valences of “safe.” Safe animals are constantly in demand across various forms of popular media: animal memes and pet-related small talk are the safest conversation starters, “cute” cat pictures always promise to comfort, and ample cultural scaffolding is in place to help us stick to animals that are safe. For example, the website Does the Dog Die, a crowdsourced platform for “emotional spoilers” about movies and other popular media, promises to protect viewers from “upsetting” material including the death of animals.