SFRA 2022

Futures from the Margins

27 June – 1 July, 2022

Host: Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay
CoFUTURES, University of Oslo
In association with Theory from the Margins

Location:

Online and
Oslo, Norway

Mode:

Hybrid Conference

Deadline for Abstracts:

31 January 2022

Conference website:

Email for queries:

Theme

What do futures look like from the margins? The 2022 SFRA Conference is dedicated to visions of human futures that center and foreground the issues of those from the margins, including Indigenous groups, ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities, and any people whose stakes in the global order of envisioning futures are generally constrained due to the mechanics of our contemporary world. For many people around the world imagining radically different futures has a life or death quality, as their presents are beset by societal discrimination, poverty, inequality, and precarity, as well as the acute effects of climate change and the global environmental crisis. How can futures from the margins speak to power in presents?

We are especially interested in contemporary “futurisms” that foreground the margins, expose market processes in manufacturing majoritarian futures. Possible topics include but are not limited to:

  • Speculation and Demanding the impossible
  • Theories of contemporary futurisms
  • Indigenous Sciences and speculative worldbuilding
  • Neo-colonialism and speculative futures
  • Worldbuilding the Otherwise
  • Climate change and futures from the margins
  • Critical dystopias in climate change thinking
  • Pleasure Activism and Speculative Thinking
  • New philosophies of time in futurisms
  • Resistance and politics of hope
  • Cofuturisms

Format

We welcome two kinds of proposals:

  1. Individual papers on any of the above topics
  2. Pre-formed panels on the above topics (4 papers maximum)

Join fellow scholars, educators, librarians, editors, authors, publishers, archivists, and artists from across the globe in the SFRA.