Autor: GKS

Special Issue of Transmotion: https://journals.kent.ac.uk/index.php/transmotion/index Issue editors: Ashley Caranto Morford, Tanja Grubnic, and Jeffrey Ansloos

Deadline: February 28, 2022

The digital turn in Indigenous studies, Indigenous literary studies, and across transdisciplinary engagements has ignited a range of conversations, debates, and possibilities for literary contributions regarding the relationship between Indigenous Peoples and all things digital.

Along these lines, Transmotion will publish new scholarship, creative/mixed-genre work, and reviews (art, film, book, etc.) that take up and analyse Indigenous literary engagements with the evolving, fast-paced, dynamic, often fraught, and complex environments of emerging communications technologies, social media, and digital ecologies. We seek to look at these themes within the literatures of Indigenous communities, activists, and movements, and through Indigenous theorizations of sovereignty, identity, justice, and change.

In this special issue, the editors define literatures in expansive, inclusive, and potentially radical terms: as any cultural expression. These cultural expressions might include — but are not limited to — tweets and Twitter threads, TikTok stories, YouTube videos, Instagram posts, books and printed text, beadwork and visual art, photographs, music, dance and performance, and more.

Deadline: February 15, 2022 (new!)

The 2022 Academic Conference on Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy will be held Friday and Saturday, June 3-4, 2022, in Toronto, Ontario, at the Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy, one of the most important collections of fantastic literature in the world.

We invite proposals for papers in any area of Canadian science fiction and fantasy, including:

-studies of individual works and authors;
-comparative studies;
-studies that place works in their literary and/or
cultural contexts.Papers may be about Canadian works in any medium: literature, film, graphic novels and comic books, and so on.  For studies of the audio-visual media, preference will be given to discussions of works produced in Canada or involving substantial Canadian creative contributions.

Papers should be no more than 20 minutes long, and geared toward a general as well as an academic audience.  Please submit proposals (max. 2 pages) to:

Dr. Allan Weiss
aweiss[at]yorku.ca

Centre for Canadian Studies, Jadavpur University

March 3-4, 2022, online

Deadline: February 14, 2022

“Just birth,” you smiled,
“creation, re-creation,
new paths cut
from old patterns”
— Lee Maracle, Ta’ah

Conversations about creation and re-creation seem difficult when the present realities
of the world appear to be antithetical to the premises of creation or re-creation. The pandemic, as it enters into its third year, has successfully ‘created’ a great amount of confusion among the people of the world — we are unable to concretely understand its nature, its potential, and the multiple variations that it morphs into, as it hits the world in successive waves. This confusion delays the prospect of containment or extermination of the virus and affects the virtues of hope and motivation that enable processes of ‘creation’ and ‘re-creation’. But the transformative and resilient potentialities of the virtue of ‘hope’ in individuals/communities have created/recreated multiple models of sustainability during the pandemic. Communities, from all over the world, have joined hands to ensure that we persevere and do not perish in the face of this difficult and confusing adversary — without causing a significant depletion in the share of the resources for the future generations. In the pandemic situation, it has become necessary for individuals and communities to take newer responsibilities. A part of these responsibilities is to ensure that sustainable access to food, healthcare, shelter, transportation, communication services, remunerated jobs, and natural resources are facilitated; but sustenance involves more than these tangible requirements. It also entails the creation of spaces and possibilities — the ‘headspace’ being a significant inclusion in this regard — that enable conversations, creativity, communication, and resistance as they are imperative to ‘sustain’ ourselves during a pandemic. In pertinence to this multi-nuanced understanding of sustainability and of spaces/possibilities that sustain — the Centre for Canadian Studies, Jadavpur University aims to open up a conversation, among scholars, academics, writers and activists, on the resilient and transformative potential of communities and individuals in Canada and India that enable sustainability during a pandemic.