Punk Scholars Network USA and Canada 3rd Annual Conference

Call for Papers

March 2 & 3, 2025

The Punk Rock Museum – Las Vegas, Nevada

Theme: Punk on Display

Following the success of our second in-person conference in August 2024, we are excited to announce our third in-person conference sponsored by PSN Canada and PSN USA. This year, the conference will be held on March 2 and 3 at The Punk Rock Museum in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The 32nd Annual NINE Spring Training Conference (March 5-8, 2025) invites original unpublished papers that study all aspects of baseball, with particular emphasis on history, literature, and social policy implications. Abstracts only, not to exceed 300 words, should be submitted by November 11, 2024, to co-directors Willie Steele (wdsteele@lipscomb.edu) and David Pegram (david.pegram@paradisevalley.edu) for the abstract committee’s consideration. Following the submission deadline, authors will be notified as quickly as possible whether their papers have been accepted.

Communities and the discourses they foster play a crucial role in shaping how games are both designed and experienced. Salen and Zimmerman (2004) describe how games are cultural artefacts engaged with dynamic exchanges of meaning with their surrounding cultural contexts. These open cultural contexts influence can transform both games and their environments. Consalvo (2007) expands this understanding by discussing how videogame paratexts, such as guides and fan-created content, serve as vital pedagogical tools that shape how players approach and engage with games.

There is no denying that contemporary audiences have an insatiable appetite for killers: myth, legend, and reality. The soaring success, and continued demand, for fictions and nonfictions that document the dealings of serial killers and murders provide ample evidence for this. We are fascinated by their narratives and by their psychologies, and it is perhaps this need or want to understand the killer’s thinking that, in part, makes them so attractive to read and view. However, delineation between fiction and nonfiction continues to be a greyscale area. There are no longer certainties in crime fiction, nor in true crime writing, when it comes to the factual and the fictive.