Congratulations to the winner of the 2020-2021 Support a New Scholar Award!

by Carma | Jan 10, 2020 | Awards

Congratulations to the winner of the 2020-2021 Support a New Scholar Award,

Ida Yoshinaga!

Brief Bio

Earning her Ph.D. from the University of Hawaiʻi-Mānoa Department of English Creative Writing Program, Ida Yoshinaga combines creative writing pedagogy, genre theory, and formal analyses of story development and of screenplay drafting during the screen story production process. In her dissertation, she analyzed the connections between fantastic-genre audiovisual modes, the employment and promotion of minority screenwriters within Hollywood’s labor-management relations, and the cultural politics of screen representation as a result of the social stratification of teleplay writers and producers during this Peak TV era. A Disney scholar, she also researches the complex dynamics between labor and leisure within the political economy of transmedial (i.e., “franchise” or “IP”) fantastic storytelling, deploying cross-platform narratological analyses to evaluate gender, class, racial, and colonial memes across narrative and non-narrative fantasy media.

Research Statement

I contrast Disney’s mass-produced, Big-Data-guided articulations of the fantastic with female consumers’ practice of a fantasy imaginary within and outside of Disney’s storyworld platforms, including film, TV, fashion, food, and theme parks. Focusing on digital-age technologies of creative-labor extraction by Disney and their relationship to diverse female consumer subjectivities produced through its worldwide fantasy lifestyle empire, I analyze data from passive observation conducted at Disney Parks and Universal Studios Parks (and resorts) alongside those from fieldwork at alternative fantasy franchise and non-franchise leisure sites in the community, framing those findings against the scripted production of fantasy narrative by Disney writers.

Support a New Scholar Award Winner Announcement

by Carma | Jan 18, 2019 | Awards

Congratulations, Beata Gubacsi, on winning the Support a New Scholar Award!

Beata Gubacsi is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Liverpool. Her research interests are genre, trauma, climate and animal studies, technology in medicine, and health care with a focus on gaming and mental health. While working on her thesis, “Literature of Monstrosity: Posthumanism and the New Weird”, she has also been involved in Bluecoat Liverpool’s science fiction projects as part of her LiNK placement, and co-hosting and facilitating workshops at the Being Human Festival, Tate Exchange, and Nottingham New Art Exchange. She is the author of the column, “Medical Humanities 2.0”, for The Polyphony, the blog of the Institute for Medical Humanities at Durham University while also running the Current Research in Speculative Fiction Conference. Most recently, she has joined the team of the Fantastika Journal as assistant reviews editor.

Her research project, “Literature of Monstrosity: Posthumanism and the New Weird”, seeks to establish conceptual and aesthetic connections between Critical Posthumanism and the New Weird through their interactions with postmodernism. One of the most significant of these overlaps is the way both Critical Posthumanism and the New Weird respond to “global weirding”, the current ideological and environmental crisis, by redefining the notion of the Other via anti-humanist postmodernist criticism of normative ideologies. The thesis argues that said crisis is not only traumatic in itself but also a return of previous primordial trauma, the abjection of the ultimate Other, the animal. Regarding both Critical Posthumanism and the New Weird as trauma narrative, embodied in the figure of the posthuman/monster, yields the question of whether New Weird can be understood as posthumanist literature?

Support a New Scholar Award Winner Announcement

by Carma | Jan 29, 2018 | Awards

The SFRA is delighted to announce that Dr. Emily Cox is the winner of the Support a New Scholar Award.

Congratulations, Dr. Cox!

Having completed her doctorate at Brunel University in science fiction literature and continental philosophy, Dr. Emily Cox researches SF, gender theory, and the work of Giorgio Agamben and Gilles Deleuze. She is particularly interested in applying Agamben’s concepts of in-operativity and bare life to gender theory in SF media and popular culture. Dr. Cox also works as Public Relations editor for the journal Femspec, and her article ‘Denuding the Gynoid: The Woman Machine as Bare Life in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina’ is soon to be published in the journal Foundation.