The American Humor Studies Association (AHSA) is putting together a pre-constituted panel for submission to the 2025 Console-ing Passions conference, held at Georgia State University in Atlanta from June 27-29, 2025. Console-ing Passions emphasizes feminist scholarship on issues of television, culture, and identity—you can read more about the organization here.

This call for papers invites you to submit an abstract for a paper/presentation on the Console-ing Passions theme of Reproduction, especially as that theme relates to humor, comedy, laughter, and other funny business. The conference organizers invite papers on “Reproduction and any other aspects of television, video, audio, or new media through gender, sexuality, race, and/or other systems of inequality.” 

If you’d like to join in on our AHSA sponsored panel, please submit a 250-300 word abstract for a paper that engages with Reproduction & comedy, broadly construed. Such topics could include (but not limited to):

— Comic reproductions of cultural norms, identities, &c. in various media (e.g., film, TV, social media, video games, podcasts, stand-up, improv, media platforms, etc.);

— Specific comic feminist/queer/trans & BIPOC comic interventions in racist, heteropatriarchal, hegemonic norms of reproduction;

— Humor and its relation to labor, materiality, and the human body, including how the comic intersects with disability scholarship/activism & mental health representation;

— Comedic performances and artifacts as capitalist phenomenon entangled with class inequity and pro- and anti-capitalist critique

— The reproduction of “common sense,” subjectivities, and/or critical thought in humorous media;

— Comc reproduction as the export of cultural/national values by other means than diplomacy, conflict, war, etc.;

—  The reproduction of climate crisis denial and/or cynicism in humorous media, op-eds, etc.

include your full name and your organization

Submit your submissions to M Dalebout at daleboum@whitman.edu

deadline for submissions is December 1, 2024

Please circulate widely. Anyone can submit materials, though all selected presenters must be current AHSA members by no later than June 2025. Responses to individual submissions for this panel (including acceptances and/or calls for revision) will be sent out by December 10th. Accepted presentations will then be submitted together as a panel in advance of the Console-ing Passions 2025 submission deadline.

Please direct any questions you might have to M Dalebout, VP of the AHSA (daleboum@whitman.edu)!