popular culture

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.

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.

We are delighted to invite chapter proposals for our upcoming edited volume:
Sociolinguistics of Emojis: Implications for Customer Psychology and Behavior
(Under consideration with Springer, Edward Elgar, and Bentham Science)

This book explores how emojis function as sociolinguistic tools in digital communication—shaping tone, politeness, stance, and perception across platforms like customer service chat, CRM, B2B messaging, influencer ecosystems, and D2C apps. We are especially interested in work that links language use to outcomes such as trust, persuasion, complaint resolution, and user experience.

We welcome submissions across:

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.

"I don't know what Christmas is, but Christmas time is here": Santa Claus, Christmas, and Implicit Religion in SFF 

Abstracts (250 words) are invited for papers exploring Santa Claus and/or the Christmas holiday in science fiction, speculative fiction and fantasy literature, film, and graphic novels.  Considerations of the interrelation of secular and religious themes in SFF Christmas, implicit religion, and contemporary ritual welcome. 

MLA '27 held in LA in January; for more information on the conference see https://www.mla.org/Events/2027-MLA-Convention  

Deadline:  March 25, 2026

 Contribute to a Special Issue of the Pop Culture Studies Journal on TOYS!

Volume Editor: Jonathan Alexandratos

Abstract: ~500 words due by April 25th to the editor via email at jsalexan@gmail.com.

Overview:

Paper. Film. TV screen. Sound recording. Internet. These are common ways popular culture reaches us. However, while scholarship around comics, movies, TV shows, music, and online media expands, one pop culture area too often remains under-explored: toys.

This seminar will convene a chorus of new approaches to the study of poetry and global pop music, sister arts dynamized by dizzying asymmetries. Where and when they are practiced as distinct or differently mediated forms of cultural expression, poetry and popular song are linked by histories both long and recent, by subject matter, by patterns of figural and prosodic design, and by their shared claims to those effects some call “lyric.” At the same time, the trajectories of literary modernism and commercial music refract this common ground beyond recognition. In 1939, Clement Greenberg could decry a self-evident chasm of cultural difference between “a poem by T. S.

Call for Papers

SHONDALAND

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)

48th Annual Conference, February 17-20, 2027

Marriott Albuquerque
Albuquerque, New Mexico
https://swpaca.org
Submissions open: September 1, 2026
Proposal submission deadline: October 31, 2026

Call for Papers

Apocalypse, Dystopia, and Disaster

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)

47th Annual Conference, February 25-28, 2026

Marriott Albuquerque

Albuquerque, New Mexico

https://www.southwestpca.org

Submissions open: September 1, 2026

Proposal submission deadline: October 31, 2026

Dystopian literature is replete with examples of both individuals who resist and communities of resilience and resistance which model values and activities that stand in contrast to and in spite of the dystopian settings of the story. This panel seeks to bring together critical investigations of dystopian literature which attempt to bring to the fore lessons that can be learned to help us (re)imagine just communities amidst a world of political, economic and ecological decline and regression.

Mode of Presentation: Hybrid: The session will be held in-person but a few remote presentations may be included.

La Roche University in Pittsburgh, PA, is pleased to announce its conference on Artificial Intelligence and Faith, to be held on campus November 6, 2026. The conference will feature keynote speaker Dr. Noreen Herzfeld, Professor Emerita and Director of the Program in Benedictine Spirituality and the Environment at Saint John's School of Theology and Seminary, and Senior Research Associate at the Institute for Philosophical and Religious Studies (ZRS) in Koper, Slovenia. Dr.