popular culture

Call for Papers

War & Culture

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)

2026 SWPACA Summer Salon

June 25-27, 2026

Virtual Conference

https://swpaca.org/

Submissions open on March 30, 2026

Proposal submission deadline: April 27, 2026

The following is a cfp for a roundtable session at the forthcoming PAMLA 2026 conference to be hosted in Seattle, Washington, U.S. from Nov 12-15, 2026. 

Please contact Noah Gallego @noahrgallego for inquiries.

All abstracts must be submitted through the PAMLA submission portal. 

The deadline is May 15, 2026

This roundtable invites scholars across the disciplines and different stages in their academic career with an interest in horror to undertake critical investigations into specifically male-centered horror media. By “male-centered,” I am referring to texts that spotlight male identity and the male body, cis-, queer, and trans- included, as sites of fear and monstrosity.

This edited volume is an offshoot of a panel that I proposed and chaired earlier this year (https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/12/08/infrastructural-flesh-the-plural-body-in-the-global-city). Due to the stellar response to that CFP, and from the conversations we had around the theme, it was decided that we will plan an edited volume around the theme.

Volume Rationale

We are inviting select chapters at this stage as majority of the entries for the volume have been finalised. Apart from the topics mentioned below, prospective contributors are free to propose other topics, but if we have already finalised paper/s on said area, we may have to decline such proposals. For details regarding the concept and theme of the volume, please visit the-handbook-of-bengali-cinema, the original CFP for the volume. Priority will be given to quality proposals in the below areas:

Thematic:

Nandan and the Politics of State Support for Culture

Bengal-isms in Cinema in Bengali

Genres/Movements:

Trans embodiments have been lived and conceptualized in multiple ways throughout the long and complex history of Southeast Europe. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, state institutions – through legal and medical frameworks grounded in early sexology – largely criminalized and pathologized transness. These classifications often entailed invasive and frequently involuntary legal and medical interventions, and were accompanied by profound social marginalization. At the same time, the reception and dissemination of sexological and juridical knowledge across Southeast Europe remained uneven, shaped by the divergent historical trajectories of the region’s post-imperial formations.

**DEADLINE EXTENDED to 13 April 2026**

Call for Papers: 

Listening to Possible Worlds 

Sound and Music in Speculative Literature and Culture 

22-23 October 2026, Leiden University, the Netherlands (in-person) 

Confirmed keynote speakers are Anna Snaith (King’s College London) and Chris Tonelli (University of Groningen) 

The Journal of Therapeutic and Applied Geek and Gaming Culture (TAGGC) is a new academic journal for professionals studying the intersections of Geek and Gaming cultures and mental health to share their work. 

The way our current globally interconnected and digitally enabled capitalist formation continuously reshapes itself to reinforce categories of class and overarching capitalist structures requires analyses that engage and critique these adaptive forces of capital. Responding to this need, this seminar seeks to examine the relationship of texts to a global capitalist economy by asking how class and capitalism function within and exert force upon texts and their contexts—in film, literature, art, video games, social media, and other extratextual spaces such as fan sites. In concert with this year’s theme, we also invite examinations of representations of the capitalist ruling class and the material and ideological effects of these representations.

The Dance and Movement Analysis Section of the American Folklore Society is looking for papers, panels, workshops, and lec/dems for the 138th AFS Annual Meeting, to be held at the Renaissance Asheville Downtown Hotel in Asheville, North Carolina from October 27–31, 2026. Deadline is April 6, 2026 for emailing us with ideas and questions, at dance.section@afsnet.org.

See below for a call for papers to the upcoming ASAP (Association for the Arts of the Present), which takes place in Madison, WI on October 15-17, 2026. We invite contributions on the narrative dimensions of any contemporary "brainrot" or "slop" media- with particular interest in genre, grand narrative, minimal narrative, short form, segmentivity, seriality, plot, character, etc.

Futures and Frontiers of US American Culture(s) International Conference

30 September – 2 October 2026

John-F.-Kennedy-Institut für Nordamerikastudien, Freie Universität Berlin

he Jagiellonian University’s Comparative Civilization Studies Research Club cordially invites you to the International Academic Conference titled “In the Shadow of the Sky — speculative worlds, xenolinguistic futures, and UFO imagery in postmodern media.”

Date and venue: May 29–30, 2026, at the Institute of Comparative Studies of Civilisations, Jagiellonian University, 52 Grodzka Street, Kraków
Format: hybrid, May 29–30, 2026 

estrema: interdisciplinary journal of humanities, a digital and open access journal from the Centre of Comparative Studies, at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Lisbon (CEComp-FLUL), has an open call for submissions for the 1st issue of its 5th volume, until June 9th 2026. The previous issue featured reflections around the theme of Speculative Fiction. In 2026, we are launching estrema’s first call for papers specifically oriented towards the potentialities of art and images in technical contemporaneity.

shooting

1. the action of filming or photographing a scene, film, etc.

Afrofuturism in African Literature
Edited Volume — Call for Contributions