International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts

CALL FOR PAPERS

Children’s Literature and Climate Change

Special Issue of The Lion and the Unicorn

Guest Editors: Marek Oziewicz, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities Lara Saguisag, College of Staten Island-City University of New York

We seek essays on how children’s literature empowers young people to productively engage with the challenges of climate change. After decades of climate change denial and toothless mainstream response, young people are angry. In response to climate change illiteracy and the impotence and negligence of adult-led institutions, teenage activists such as Xiuhtezcatl Martinez and Greta Thunberg are calling for radical and immediate action. How does children’s literature and media stoke this transformative anger and inspire young people to address the climate crisis and fight for their fundamental rights to life, health, and sustenance? How can educators and scholars of children’s literature support this fight? What new concepts, approaches, and narratives are needed to accelerate the sociopolitical revolution that will dismantle the status quo, or what Amitav Ghosh calls “the Great Derangement”? In this issue, we intend to bring together innovative research on children’s literature that attends to multiple facets of climate change and advances a conversation about the planetary future we can and want to create.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• The role of children’s literature on climate change in raising young people’s awareness about their responsibility to the biosphere;

• Depictions of climate change across various genres and forms, including picturebooks, chapter books, comics, short stories, and novels;

• Films, apps, music, and games that engage with climate change and seek to mobilize youth action;

• Constructions of childhood in climate change narratives and discourses;

• Climate change and youth participation in community protests, political campaigns, nonviolent civil disobedience, ecotage (ecosabotage), and ecorism (ecoterrorism);

• Climate change narratives about and by Indigenous youth and youth of color, who are often at the forefront of climate justice initiatives and whose communities are disproportionately threatened by climate change;

• Children’s and YA books that link responsibility to climate change with, in the words of Kim Q. Hall, “commitments to futures that are queer, crip, and feminist”;

• Depictions of environmental racism and classism as facets of climate change;

• Climate change and human migrations, including stories about climate refugees; • Comparative studies of children’s and YA literature on climate change published in the global north and the global south;

• Visions of climate futures, including discourses of hope or despair;

• Reimagining and restructuring institutions of children’s literature that depend on, profit from, and support polluting, extractive industries;

• Intersections of critical discourse on climate change and children’s literature scholarship, including new taxonomies and emerging genres apposite to the challenges of conceptualizing climate change, from environmental literature and cli-fi to eco-fiction and beyond;

• Reevaluations of existing literary traditions through new theoretical concepts or approaches such as energy humanities, environmental humanities, indigenous futurisms, the Anthropocene, ecocritical posthumanism, and other lenses.

Essays should be sent to guest editors Marek Oziewicz and Lara Saguisag at LU.Climateissue@gmail.com by July 15, 2020. Submissions should be in the range of 4000 to 8000 words (although we will also consider shorter, forum-length essays). Accepted articles will appear in The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 45, no. 2 (2021).

Call for Papers

International Conference for Early Career Researchers
held by the DFG-funded Research Training Group “European Dream Cultures”

from the 10th to the 12th of February 2020 at Saarland University

Dreaming with all Senses.
Sensory Perception in Aesthetic Dream Representations

In her memoirs (1903), deaf-blind author Helen Keller writes: “In my dreams I have sensations, odours, tastes, and ideas which I do not remember to have had in reality.” In fact, dreams cannot be reduced to their visual and verbal dimension but include other forms of perception and experience: Neuroscientific research shows that dreaming involves all our senses (Bulkeley 2009, Schredl 2008). Above all efforts in psychoanalysis, hermeneutics or the natural sciences to ascribe functions and meanings to dreams, they are an elementary body experience: From the weightlessness of flying to the experience of paralysing stillness, from erotic excitement to physical impulses of anger or fear – dreaming takes place on the dimension of bodily and sensory perception.

Sensory perception itself opens up a vast field of possibilities for the arts. From the allegorical representation of the five senses in Flemish painting in the seventeenth century to the clarinet concerto D’om le vrai sens (2011) by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, from the late medieval tapestries La Dame à la licorne (sixteenth century) to Jeremy Podeswa’s episodic film The Five Senses (CAN 1999) or David Mackenzie’s science fiction drama film Perfect Sense (UK/DK/SE/IE 2011), the five sensory organs themselves often become the subject of aesthetic representation. Furthermore, synesthetic experiences – from Richard Wagner’s idea of Gesamtkunstwerk to Wassily Kandinsky or installation art – have become a way for the arts to transcend their sensory and medial limitations. Finally, it seems fitting to point to the thesis of philosopher Otto Friedrich Bollnow, stating that the sensory organs only become “real human senses” through art, which affirms the pedagogical and political function of the interdependency between aesthetic artefacts and sensory perception (Bollnow 1988: 31).

Even though dreams and aesthetics are both rooted in bodily experience and sensory perception, there has been little research on this topic. Some disciplines, such as phenomenologically oriented film studies (Barker 2009, Casetti 2008) or interdisciplinary approaches like the so-called somaesthetics (Shusterman 2005, 2012) have recently tried to analyse the interrelation of aesthetic artefacts and their bodily dimension. The DFG-funded Research Training Group “European Dream-Cultures” (“Europäische Traumkulturen”, GRK 2021) has already held a conference on dreams as liminal experiences related to birth and death. It has also dedicated an anthology to their representations in literature, art, music and film (Bertola/Solte-Gresser 2019). The questions raised here will be considered at the planned conference by extending the thematic scope to sensory perception in dreams but at the same time by focussing on the specific characteristics of the aesthetic representation of such experiences. We welcome contributions analysing the presence, modes of representation and functions of dreams in art. According to the concept of the “European Dream Cultures” (Oster/Reinstädler 2017), the conference will pursue its subject across different cultures, eras, media and disciplines.

Examples for possible contributions include:

Individual and/or collective sensory perceptions in aesthetic dream representations, relating to war, trauma, violence, colonial or postcolonial oppression, liberation.

Use of dreamlike logic as a way of depicting sensory experiences that cannot be narrated conventionally or communicated in a logical/discursive manner.

Design of innovative aesthetic forms or the challenging of traditional norms of representation and/or genres by means of a ‘different’ logic that focusses on the sensory perception in dreams.

Synesthetic dream experiences and their representations in art.

Sensory experiences of alterity in dreams (Doppelgänger, shifting into another person or transformation into animals and/or objects) and their aesthetic depiction.

Aesthetic representations of dreams involving liminal experiences or transgressions related to the body or the senses, such as self-distance, changes of location, outer and inner spaces of the body, experiences of unusual or impossible body movements.

Similarities and differences between the aesthetic representation of dreams during sleep and other dreamlike phenomena such as hallucination, ecstasy, visions, prophecies, traumatic flashbacks.

Smelling, feeling, touching, tasting, seeing or hearing objects in their materiality and their aesthetic representation in/as dreams.

Aesthetic representations of sensations in dreams, such as fear, joy, sensuality, uncanniness, or of the experience of time, space, sound and colour across different media.

Following the concept of the Research Training Group “European Dream-Cultures” (http://www.traumkulturen.de/forschung-publikationen/forschungsprogramm.html#acc-2790), this call is addressed to early career researchers (doctoral candidates and postdoctoral researchers) from the disciplines of art, theatre, film, media, music and literary studies, as well as history, philosophy and other related studies.

Please submit your proposal as a Word file to traumkulturen@uni-saarland.de by the 3rd of November 2019. Please describe your project – in English, German or French – in an abstract not exceeding 3,000 characters and include a short CV.

The languages spoken at the conference will be German, English and French. Following the conference, we plan to include selected contributions in a volume of the series Traum – Wissen – Erzählen, published by Fink (Paderborn).

Selected Bibliography
Barker, J. M. (2009). The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience. Berkeley.
Bertola, M. / Solte-Gresser, C. (2019). An den Rändern des Lebens. Träume vom Sterben und Geborenwerden in den Künsten. Paderborn.
Bollnow, O. F. (1988). Zwischen Philosophie und Pädagogik. Aachen.
Bulkeley, K. (2009). Seeking patterns in dream content: A systematic approach toward searches. Consciousness and Cognition, 18, 905-916.
Casetti, F. (2008). Eye of the Century. Film, Experience, Modernity. New York.
Oster, P. / Reinstädler, J. (2017). Traumwelten. Interferenzen zwischen Text, Bild, Musik, Film und Wissenschaft. Paderborn.
Schredl, M. (2008). Traum. München.
Shusterman, R. (2005). Leibliche Erfahrung in Kunst und Lebensstil. Berlin.
Shusterman, R. (2012). Körper-Bewusstsein. Für eine Philosophie der Somaästhetik. Hamburg.

Imagining Alternatives – Speculative Fiction and the Political

11th Annual Conference of the Gesellschaft fuer Fantastikforschung (GFF) in cooperation with the German Popular Culture Studies Association (GPCA)

September 10-12, 2020, University of Augsburg, Germany

Author Ian McEwan’s recent claims that Science Fiction is not political enough are not only elitist, but also could not be farther from the truth. After all, any Speculative Fiction, no matter if it is Science Fiction, Fantasy, the Gothic, Horror, or any other variation of the fantastic, has always been political in that they make it possible for us to imagine alternatives to the lives we live – whether it is the warnings of dystopian works such as George Orwell’s 1984 or more recently, Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale and its adaptation into a TV series that have resonated at times of #metoo and Trump. Alternate histories such as Man in the High Castle continue to keep audiences similarly engaged, while Harry Potter’s allegory on fascism has served as inspiration for political protest against right-wing voices, particularly for the millennial generation that has grown up with it. Star Trek’s humanist utopia is still going strong after 50 years, and its most recent installment, Star Trek: Discovery may in many ways be its most political yet – particularly given the controversies its spiked for its strive for diversity, bringing to the forefront larger issues surrounding certain sections of SF fans that want to claim the genre(s) as mere escapism without political ideology.

SF has also been used for political (Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged) or religious (scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard’s works or Tim La Haye’s Left Behind series) propaganda, further showing the cultural capital of speculative fiction. Jurassic Park has warned us of the ills of consumerism driving science, Tolkien’s works are not just ecocritical but also anti-fascist, and Doctor Who’s titular character continues to not only fight the Daleks, a thinly-veiled Nazi allegory, but has also recently visited Rosa Parks. Additionally, the recent surge in Climate Fiction, a genre originally advanced by hard SF writers, has built up optimism about the ability of popular culture to not only portray but also ignite eco-political engagement.

This conference thus calls for papers on all forms and genres of speculative fiction and their engagement with the political, be it novels, film, television series, or immersive media such as games or theme parks.

There is generally an open track to submit papers on any SF-related topic, however, we specifically welcome discussions of such issues as:

political ideology in works of SF, incl. fan-produced content based on them
the relevance of works of SF for resistance movements
utopia, dystopia, and the continued project to imagine the future
depictions of minorities in SF and their political implications
general debates surrounding the politics of SF, transnational differences/similarities

Please send abstracts (in English or German) of 300 words plus bio blurbs of 150 words to gff2020conference@gmail.com by January 15, 2020.

The GFF will offer travel grants of 250 Euros each for two (graduate) students attending the conference. Please let us know if you want to be considered when applying.

A conference homepage with more information will follow over the coming months. The conference Twitter handle is @GFF_11th.