*CFP* "THE AESTHETICS OF CREATIVE ACTIVISM", SPECIAL ISSUE, JOURNAL OF AESTHETICS AND ART CRITICISM

As both a field of study and form of practice, creative activism seeks to understand how artistic forms can serve the ends of activist interventions.

 

To date, most emphasis has been on the activism component, drawing on theories of social movement formation, participatory action, and community organising. While there has been passing mention of aesthetics (relying heavily upon Rancière) the ‘creative’ term in creative activism remains woefully undertheorized. There are some scholars who have asked important questions about affect and effect, but overall, creative activism is ripe for deeper research into and theorisation of its aesthetic forms. Key questions include how creative activism differs from other activism, what makes it creative, and how (whether) the artistic components function effectively to achieve or enhance social change.

The Editors welcome submissions on any philosophically informed exploration of artistic forms as activist interventions, including, but not limited to:

• Ethics and morality in and of artistic activism

*CFP* LLAMADA A PARTICIPACIÓN, XXI CONGRESO DE LA ASOCIACIÓN INTERNACIONAL DE HISPANISTAS

XXI Congreso de la Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas (AIH)

Neuchâtel, del 11 al 16 de julio de 2022

Université de Neuchâtel

 

La Université de Neuchâtel y la Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas invitan a participar en este congreso que se celebra del 11 al 16 de julio de 2022 en Neuchâtel (Suiza).

Se aceptarán comunicaciones referidas a los ejes temáticos que tradicionalmente han sido tratados en los Congresos de la AIH: literaturas hispánicas (géneros, períodos, temas, autores, lectura y recepción, literatura oral, escritura femenina y estudios de género, etc.); lingüística hispánica (diacrónica y sincrónica); enseñanza del español; cultura hispánica (arte, historia, cine, etc.). En el marco de esta amplia convocatoria, se prevén ejes temáticos específicos que serán anunciados próximamente.

El evento se desarrollará en seis jornadas, que integrarán:

*CFP* "LA IGUALDAD DE GÉNERO: UNA LUCHA CONSTANTE", NÚMERO 22, COMMUNICATION PAPERS: SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH JOURNAL

“La Estrategia Europea para la Igualdad de Género presenta actuaciones y objetivos políticos para avanzar de forma sustancial hacia una Europa con mayor igualdad de género de aquí a 2025. La meta es una Unión en la que las mujeres, los hombres, los niños y las niñas, en toda su diversidad, dispongan de libertad para seguir el camino que elijan en la vida, gocen de las mismas oportunidades para prosperar y puedan conformar y dirigir por igual la sociedad europea en la que vivimos”. Esta declaración es el punto de partida del Call for papers de este Número 22 que esperemos no acabe en un brindis al sol.

Aunque la presencia cada vez mayor de las mujeres en el mercado de trabajo y sus logros educativos y de formación son tendencias alentadoras, persisten las desigualdades entre hombres y mujeres, manifiestas en la brecha salarial, en la infrarrepresentación en los puestos de responsabilidad, en los estereotipos presentes en los relatos mediàticos y, en general, en todos esos sesgos que las discriminan y las invisibilizan.

El peso de la sociedad patriarcal ha conllevado una visión androcéntrica, normalizada durante muchos años, que penetra en las rutinas de trabajo y se transmite a través de la comunicación. La incorporación de la perspectiva de género en la comunicación, y la normalización y el equilibrio de la representación que, desde los medios de comunicación, se hace de mujeres y Hombres, son elementos básicos para poder llegar a una sociedad igualitaria y libre de violencias machistas.

*CFP* "POST-CONFLICT CULTURES IN ASIA", MAJOR VOLUME, THE STUDIES IN POST-CONFLICT CULTURES SERIES

Critical, Cultural and Communications Press (London) announces the publication in early 2023 of a major volume focusing on post-conflict cultures in Asia.

The Studies in Post-Conflict Cultures series, which was inaugurated in 2006, has to this date published ten anthologies and three monographs exploring the cultural consequences of conflict across the globe. This is an ongoing series, originating in an Anglo-Italian Leverhulme-funded project, examining the specifically cultural aftermath of periods of national or international conflict, understood as war, civil war, dictatorship, terrorism, revolution, colonialism or persecution. 

No chronological or disciplinary boundaries are applied. Studies may be historical or contemporary, and may fall within any subject field. The ten volumes so far published have brought together international experts from disciplines as diverse as Political Science, History, Law, Media Studies, Cultural Studies, Critical Theory, Semiotics, Geography, Film Studies, Anthropology and Literature Studies. CCC Press intends to publish a major volume of papers on post-conflict cultures in Asia in the first half of 2023. 

*CFP* "HUMANISM AND THE FICTIONAL REPRESENTARIONS OF MONARCHS IN LITERATURE, ARTS AND MEDIA", BOOK CHAPTER

When Gilgamesh rejected the advances of Ishtar and refused to do what his father did, he renounced the status of the chosen lover and champion of the Goddess and (unwittingly) decided to be human. The death of Enkido made him realize that he is no longer favored by the Gods. His failed attempt to reach immortality can be read as an attempt to regain the former status he renounced. The epic of Gilgamesh, like other epics, anounces the severing of the connection between the divine and the human in the political realm. After Gilgamesh, the biographies of Mesopotamian rulers started to seem more human despite the formulaic presence of the divine. In ancient Egypt and ancient Greece, Monarchs were either gods or descendents of gods. In the Medieval age, he devine right of kings replaced the old myths about the divine lineage of monarchs. Machiavelli's realpolitiks and the advent of Renaissance humanism put the concept of divine right in question. The human rather than the divine started to define the monarchs in the West. In the East, however, while Europe was restricting its monarchs, the Meiji restoration puts the emperor at the center of the political system in Japan. The Victorian and Edwardian ages are the last literary periods to be named after monarchs. They both witnessed the rise of Gothic literature. The figure of Dracula strikes the reader as a monarchic figure. But this monarch is a posthuman figure cursed with immortality and a hunger for human blood. In recent years, the gothic and horror genres have gained remarkable popularity in cinema and popular culture. The figures of the Mummy and the vampire are usually depicted as monarchic figures that seek revenge for past wrongs. Revenge is closely related to the theme of royalty. In classical and Renaissance, modern and contemporary revenge narratives where loyalty to a deceased patriarch gives legitimacy to the actions of their heirs. Indeed, revenge narratives in Shakespeare and beyond are generally based on father-son emotional dynamics. These emotional dynamics are described as monarchic by Martha C Nussbaum in her book Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice. In Victorian and contemporary horror fiction, the father-son dynamics are more complex as the royal father is the past self of the revenant. 

*CFP* "FANTASY ACROSS MEDIA", GIFCON 2022

The Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic is pleased to announce a call for papers for Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations (GIFCon) 2022 with the theme of 'Fantasy Across Media'.

Much of fantasy studies has focused on the genre’s presence in literature, with histories and theoretical frameworks often either implicitly or explicitly centring the written word. In some cases, academic, critic, and fan responses to the genre outside of literature even go so far as to erase or question the possibility of the genre’s existence in other media, perhaps most famously embodied in J.R.R. Tolkien’s insistence in ‘On Fairy-stories' that some media, such as drama, are fundamentally incompatible with fantasy. These types of responses fail to account for the medium-specific benefits and challenges that different media pose for depictions of the impossible, serving to establish hierarchies between media, exclude non-literary media from analyses of the genre, and potentially limit a full understanding of the genre’s history.

Fantasy and the fantastic have had long, rich histories outside of literature, playing a central role in the development of theatre, film, and comic books, and celebrating a more recent boom on the small screen. Furthermore, from the innumerable reimaginings of the Arthurian tradition, to The Wizard of Oz, to manga and anime, to contemporary multimedia franchises and cinematic universes, fantasy texts have been integral to the history of transmedia storytelling, allowing their rich storyworlds to expand across multiple media. 

*CFP* "FROM CINEMA CULTURE TO CINEMA MEMORY", THREE-DAY CONFERENCE

‘From Cinema Culture to Cinema Memory’

6 - 9 April, 2022

Lancaster University, UK

 

‘From Cinema Culture to Cinema Memory’ is a three-day conference that invites speakers to discuss a range of themes relating to cinema culture and cinema memory. The conference will mark the climax of a 3-year AHRC-funded project, ‘Cinema Memory and the Digital Archive: 1930s Britain and Beyond’ (CMDA). The project gathers together a range of material relating to cinema memory in a comprehensive digital archive, a vast amount of which has been made available to view freely online for the first time. Information on this project can be found here. The relationship between cinema culture and cinema memory is explored in ‘From Cinema Culture to Cinema Memory: a Conceptual and Methodological trajectory’ (Kuhn, upcoming)

Key themes to explored at the conference are:

*CFP* "DRACONES IN MUNDO: DRAGONS IN LITERATURE, FILM, AND POP CULTURE", A SERIES OF EDITED VOLUMES

As the popularity of mythical creatures in films and literature grows, there is one creature that remains prominent: the dragon. Dragons have become most visible recently in the cinematic versions of The Hobbit and in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones Series). However, there are other films, such as Dragonslayer (1981), Reign of Fire (2002), Dragonheart (1996), and the How to Train Your Dragon series (2010-2019), and numerous adult and children’s literature series that feature dragons.

This call for papers will result in several themed volumes under each of these main headings:

 

Full volume(s):

• Wings, Wonders, and Warriors: Dragons in Children’s Literature and Graphic Novels

*CFP* "NATIONHOOD, IDENTITY, AND SPECULATIVE FICTION", BOOKS BEYOND BOUNDARIES CONFERENCE

Books Beyond Boundaries Conference: Nationhood, Identity, and Speculative Fiction

15th-16th January 2021,

Ulster University, Belfast Campus

 

'Culture is the context within which we need to situate the self, for it is only by virtue of the interpretations, orientations and values provided by culture that we can formulate our identities, say ‘who we are’, and ‘where we are coming from’ (Benhabib, 2000:18)

From C.S. Lewis to James Shaw, Northern Irish and Irish fiction is best known for its imagined histories, futures, and alternate realities. However, speculative fiction from writers of colour and ethnic minorities have been notably absent from the literary canon. While the island of Ireland has continued to grow more culturally diverse in the twenty-first century, there has been little engagement with how the cultural identity of Northern Ireland and Ireland has been transformed through immigration.

*CFP* "EPIC AND ICONIC: ESSAYS ON THE WORK, INFLUENCE, AND LEGACY OF ALEX ROSS", BOOK CHAPTER

Nelson Alexander Ross, better known as Alex, has exerted nearly thirty years of profound influence upon sequential art storytelling. Ross emerged into the comics world in the early 1990s with his work on Terminator: Burning Earth, Marvels, and Kingdom Come, immediately establishing his photorealistic style of painting, influenced by Norman Rockwell, Salvador Dali, and Andrew Loomis, among others.

In the years since, Ross has drawn and painted nearly every recognizable character in the Marvel and DC universes, expanded the storytelling capacity of the graphic novel form, and taken home numerous Eisner and Harvey awards. His prolific output can be found across media platforms, from traditional comics to art galleries, from film and television to magazines, toys, and video games.

Given Ross’s substantial and acclaimed level of production, it is no exaggeration to consider him among the most important commercial artists of his generation – and yet, his work has garnered little academic interest. In this collection, we hope to curate the first definitive set of scholarly perspectives on Ross’s creative approach, his interventions into sequential art narrative and aesthetics, and his lasting influences upon popular culture and the creative community.

*CFP* LLAMADA A PARTICIPACIÓN, III CONGRESO INTERNACIONAL DE COMUNICACIÓN Y REDES EN LA SOCIEDAD DE LA INFORMACIÓN

III Congreso Internacional de Comunicación y Redes en la Sociedad de la Información

Universidad de Salamanca

3 y 4 de marzo de 2022 (presencial)

 

El impacto de las redes sociales ha continuado creciendo de forma espectacular en la última década, tanto en número de usuarios y tiempo invertido en ellas, como en los ingresos obtenidos. El fenómeno de las redes sociales está cobrando aún más importancia gracias a la posibilidad de acceso a través de la banda ancha móvil, mediante aplicaciones para dispositivos móviles. Ambos fenómenos se retroalimentan y configuran un binomio de éxito dentro de la Sociedad de la Información.

Los usuarios de las redes sociales tienen ahora la capacidad de conectarse, opinar, seguir a sus amigos, informar, etc., en tiempo real. El acceso a las redes sociales en movilidad aporta un valor añadido al propio servicio, ya que el usuario está siempre conectado y puede interactuar en todo momento, independientemente del lugar en el que se encuentre.

*CFP* "EXHIBITING THE HOLOCAUST IN THE IMMEDIATE POSTWAR PERIOD: HISTORIES, PRACTICES AND POLITICS", SPECIAL ISSUE, THE JOURNAL OF HOLOCAUST RESEARCH

Exhibitions were a crucial medium of Holocaust memory in the immediate postwar period. Between 1944-1950, hundreds of exhibitions were mounted across war torn Europe and the United States that sought to tell the story of World War II, Nazi Crimes, and the Holocaust. Already on the day after liberation, the process of “museumification” was initiated. Political prisoners and Allied soldiers organized impromptu site-specific exhibits in the concentration and extermination camps. Small, low-tech, DIY exhibitions were mounted in the Displaced Persons camps and Historical Commissions by Jewish survivors. Impressive blockbusters sponsored by governmental ministries and international organizations, such as the United Nations War Crimes Commission, opened in museums across Europe. Varying in their budgets, resources, tone, media, and function, these exhibitions were intended to convince and convict but also to inform, educate, and commemorate. Whether meticulously planned and generously funded or makeshift and improvised, they offered their visitors a different “way of seeing” and interpreting the violence, atrocity, and human rights abuses of the recent past.

Exhibitions not only illustrate history, they also shape it. Despite their central role in shaping our understanding and representation of Nazi crimes and victim experiences, these early postwar exhibitions have received little scholarly attention to date. Yet their impact rivals the media of monuments, photography, and film, cutting across national and political lines and belying the “Myth of Silence” regarding the postwar period that David Cesarani so persuasively debunked. Reconstructing these exhibition histories can tell us a great deal about how different nations, communities, and individuals chose to remember, and what they privileged and understood about the war. It can help us construct a historiography of Holocaust representation, tracing the canonization of certain practices and images, as well as certain modes of presentation. This special issue hopes to offer a more nuanced understanding of exhibitions as a neglected but important medium of early Holocaust memory.

*CFP* "'THE EXORCIST: STUDIES ON POSSESSION, INFLUENCE, AND SOCIETY", SPECIAL EDITION, REVENTANT JOURNAL

The Exorcist, both as a book and film, has had a lasting influence beyond the world of horror. It is essentially a foundational, multivalent work: on the one hand, it helps understand and approach the theological concept and spiritual dimension of demonic possession as found in the Catholic faith, and on the other hand, it investigates domestic/public, spaces, dynamics, and spheres. Indeed, The Exorcist examines social discourse and narratives from a transformative and turbulent period of American history, sheds light on the difficulties that aging populations face in societies that do not offer adequate social safety nets, and exposes the miserable circumstances that people with mental health conditions and medically uninsured individuals and families often endure. Moreover, The Exorcist also speaks directly to the colonization and neo-colonization of archaeological sites and religions.

The Exorcist has much to offer as the foci for extensive and sustained research in the humanistic disciplines. This Special Edition of Revenant aims to start a new conversation on The Exorcist according to three dimensions: 1) to go back to the roots of the concept of possession, 2) to assess the cultural impact of the book and film, and 3) to present new scholarly developments about the book and film. Potential topics include but are not limited to:

*CFP* "SOCIOSEMIOTIC CRITIQUE. A LOTMANIAN PERSPECTIVE", ISSUE 5 (2022), SOCIAL SEMIOTIC JOURNAL

In 2022 – the centenary of the birth of Juri Lotman – we invite you to focus on the potentiality of his semiotic theory (including ideas of as personality, translation, creolization, autocommunication, self-description, semiosphere) to critique power structures and ideological processes in semiosic phenomena.

We invite contributors to prepare an analytical essay focusing on a specific case study of a semiotic artefact or type of artefact, demonstrating how Lotmanian theory can fuel a critique of the limitations on, and variations in, the ways in which the semiotic resources/practices in question may perpetuate biases, imbalance or legitimize and maintain kinds of power interests.

At this stage, we solicit not papers but a proposal of between 1000 and 1500 words length, with bibliographic references included. On this basis, we will select 8 proposals, to be developed in an essay of 7/8000 words (bibliography included).

Proposals should be sent to: (annamaria.lorusso@unibo.it) and (franciscu.sedda@gmail.com).

Deadline CfP: 30 October 2021

*CFP* "INVESTIGATING TRUE CRIME & THE MEDIA", JOURNALISM@NEWCASTLE CONFERENCE

"Investigating True Crime & the Media"

Journalism@Newcastle

Ethical Space, the International Journal of Communication Ethics

23 June 2022

Submissions are open to researchers, PhD students, and practitioners working in the field, and parity of esteem will be afforded to both theoretically-driven and practice-related papers.

We particularly welcome submissions from diverse voices and nations and regions beyond Western perspectives. The aims of the conference and  double issue are to explore current and emerging concepts, developments and potential future trajectories of true crime narratives and  production from a global perspective.

*CFP* CALL FOR PARTICIPATION, IASPM XXI 2022 INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE STUDY OF POPULAR MUSIC

IASPM XXI 2022

International Association for the Study of Popular Music

Daegu, South Korea, 5-9 July 2022 (hybrid format)

 

On behalf of the IASPM XXI 2022 Organizing Committee, we are pleased to invite you to the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) to be held at Daegu, South Korea on 5-9 July 2022. As you all know, IASPM 2021 originally to be held in July 2021 was postponed for 12 months. Due to this postponement, we are reopening Call for Presentations (CFP) for those who missed the chance to apply first time around and those who wish to revise or replace their original proposals.

Having been held every two years since 1981, IASPM is now one of world's most prestigious international conferences of popular music studies. It will be a fascinating opportunity for participants to share the latest information and knowledge in the diverse areas of popular music.

*CFP* "THEOLOGY AND VAMPIRES", THEOLOGY AND POP CULTURE SERIES COLLECTED VOLUME

From the ‘vampire craze’ of the eighteenth century, and up to contemporary takes on the genre, vampire narratives have been inextricably bound up with theological questions. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula and its many adaptations, the vampire is repelled by the crucifix and the consecrated Host. Two puncture wounds on the victim’s neck in Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla’ make the doctor send for a clergyman. In Anne Rice’s Memnoch the Devil, Lestat believes that he has witnessed the Crucifixion and tasted Christ’s blood. ‘God kills, and so shall we; indiscriminately He takes the richest and the poorest, and so shall we; for no creatures under God are as we are, none so like Him as ourselves’, he tells Louis in Interview with the Vampire, styling himself as a God, and mimicking divine omnipotence. But he has no answers to give Louis, no revelation, and no known salvation or solace, because he is just like him in their shared vampiric nature. What do these examples tell us about where the vampire sits in relation to the divine? And what kind of theological vision do vampire stories uncover?

Given the richness of theological substratum in vampire fiction, we invite submissions for a collected volume entitled Theology and Vampires, for the Theology and Pop Culture Series published by Lexington Books/Fortress Academic. The aim of this volume is to explore the theology of vampires, with a particular focus on the pop culture aspect of vampire narratives. We are seeking essays exploring the theological implications of the vampire across a wide range of media, from popular Victorian tales through to films, video games, and animated series.

*CFP* "CINEMATIC BOND AT 60: NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES", A HISTORY RESEARCH GROUP SYMPOSIUM

Cinematic Bond at 60: National and International Perspectives

A History Research Group Symposium

Bournemouth University (Online), 4 March 2022

 

In 1962 the first James Bond film, Dr No (Terence Young) was released. The film was a huge financial success for EON productions, catapulted Sean Connery to lifelong stardom and started a period of Bondmania that lasted for most of the 1960s. As a cultural icon and cultural phenomenon, James Bond and the Bond film have become a globally recognised brand. 

The films have been widely analysed for their spectacle, their often problematic engagement with masculinity, gender relations and cultural appropriation as well as the ideological implications of how they engage with their backdrop of social and geopolitical change across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. With 2022 marking 60 years of the cinematic Bond and the latest instalment, No Time to Die (Cary Fukunaga), due (allegedly) for release in October 2021, critical reflections on this ongoing franchise are relevant and timely.

*CFP* "BORDERS AND DETECTIVE FICTION", THEME ISSUE, CLUES: A JOURNAL OF DETECTION

For this theme issue of Clues, proposals are sought from a wide variety of critical, national, and cultural perspectives addressing how and why borders are represented in detective fiction, film, television, or other media (e.g., computer games, graphic novels, radio drama, podcasts). As David Newman and Anssi Paasi argue, “The construction of boundaries at all scales and dimensions takes place through narrativity.” Thus, it makes sense to turn to the detective story, a genre whose plots conceptualize issues of morality, legality, security, and transgression to understand the ways in which borders are conceptualized and mediated. Crossing borders can signify openness, mobility, cultural exchange, and cooperation. But the border can also be a site of surveillance, discipline, risk, exclusion, and violence, a place where geographic, cultural, economic, and bodily integrity are rendered vulnerable. It can, in short, be the scene of (the) crime. How do imaginative narratives across the diverse range of historical and contemporary crime fiction constitute investigations of defined, dynamic, and/or developing border spaces?

Suggested topics:

• Detective fiction and migrancy/refugees 

*CFP* "FAIRY TALE AND FANTASY FICTION", SPECIAL ISSUE, FANTASY ART AND STUDIES JOURNAL

In 1947, Tolkien published “On Fairy Stories”, an essay on fairy tales which grew out of his 1939 Andrew Lang Lecture and has since become the basis for the theorisation of the modern Fantasy genre. This essay popularised the terms secondary world, subcreation and subcreator in specialist criticism. Yet Tolkien’s text, often presented as being more a reflection on the author’s own literary conception and his Fantasy work, is indeed supposed to be about fairy tales and to offer a definition and presentation of their main characteristics, such as the notion of eucatastrophe, a concept coined by Tolkien to refer to the happy ending of fairy tales and which can be put into perspective with the naïve ethics of these tales, as examined by André Jolles in his book Simple Forms (1930).

While it might therefore seem remarkable that Tolkien’s essay has become the basis for the theorisation of Fantasy, this is hardly surprising to Fantasy scholars, as Fantasy regularly borrows from the marvellous staff and structure of the fairy tale. It should not be forgotten that Tolkien himself considered The Lord of the Rings to be a fairy tale for adults and that his work is not free of elements and motifs from fairy tales. Moreover, the rewriting of fairy tales is recurrent within Fantasy to the point of having become an obligatory part of the genre for authors, willingly encouraged by publishers. One can mention in this respect the series of anthologies edited by Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow, Snow White, Red Blood, the first volume of which is dedicated to Angela Carter, herself known for her rewrites of fairy tales. The Fairy Tale Series, also directed by Terri Windling, includes White as Snow by Tanith Lee (a rewriting of Snow White) and Briar Rose by Jane Yolen, based on Sleeping Beauty.