Please join us for ICFA 40, March 13-17, 2019, when our theme will be “Politics and Conflict.”
We welcome papers on the work of: Guest Scholar Mark Bould (Reader, University of the West of England; winner of the SFRA Pilgrim Award; author of several books on sf including Science Fiction: The Routledge Film Guidebook) and Guest Author G. Willow Wilson (winner of a PEN Center award; writer of the Hugo-Award-winning series Ms. Marvel, author of Alif the Unseen). Speculative texts have a tremendous power to help us envision how the world might be otherwise and to see the historical contingencies that have given us the world as we find it. Fantastic genres allow us to imagine other paths that history might have taken and to explore the power dynamics of conflicts among competing factions, from the local scale of family and gender arrangements to the global scale of transnational trade and migration. Such texts can often articulate critiques that would have been silenced by censorship of realist genres in times and places of government, religious, or other oppression. We invite papers that understand the concept of politics very broadly, from international relations and structures of governance, through to the politics of everyday life. If at times the genres of the fantastic can be complicit in naturalizing and perpetuating dominant power structures and the politics they endorse, more often they provide a rich set of tools for telling such stories from marginalized perspectives, visions that cannot be captured by a realism that is structured by default ideological assumptions. We also welcome proposals for individual papers, academic sessions, creative presentations, and panels on any aspect of the fantastic in any media. We will gather in 2019 to question, celebrate, argue over, and deduce speculative fiction’s contributions to thinking through the politics and conflicts of our past and its capacity to guide us toward more inclusive futures.
The deadline for proposals is October 31, 2018. We encourage work from institutionally affiliated scholars, independent scholars, international scholars who work in languages other than English, graduate students. Artists are encouraged to submit proposals for our Creative Track, which features sessions on writing, art, music, and poetry, as well as panel discussions on topics of interest for creative professionals.
For more information on the IAFA and its conference, the ICFA, see https://www.fantastic-arts.org/.
The Submissions Portal opens on September 1st. To submit a proposal, go to https://www.fantastic-arts.org/icfa-submissions/.
To contact the Division Heads for help with submissions, go to https://www.fantastic-arts.org/about/governance/division-heads/.
For more information about the Creative Track, go to https://www.fantastic-arts.org/annual-conference/creative-track/.