2024 SFRA Executive Committee Elections

Vice President

Chris Pak (Swansea University)

I consider the SFRA to be my intellectual home. My first engagement with the organisation was through the SFRA Review, for which I began writing media and book reviews from 2009, one of which received the 2013 Mary Kay Bray Award. This was for an article about terraforming, my primary area of research as a scholar of climate change sf. Alongside research on geoengineering and terraforming in sf, I’m currently involved in interdisciplinary collaboration about biophilic design, in particular how sf and speculative visioning can be used as a tool to enable communities in South Wales to articulate future visions of the urban spaces in which they live, work and play. I’m also involved in a complementary research network, “Narrating Rural Change,” which addresses questions about the rural, agriculture and transition in the context of Wales and climate change.

The 2011 annual conference in Poland was my first chance to meet many of the people who gave me the encouragement and support to pursue research into sf at a time when sf studies was not particularly visible in the UK. In 2014 I took up the editorship of the SFRA Review, and it’s been an absolute delight to see how the publication has developed since I left its helm in 2018. I co-organised the joint SFRA / Current Research in Speculative Fictions (CRSF) conference at the University of Liverpool in 2016, the home of the Science Fiction Foundation collection, and in 2022 I joined the SFRA Book Award Committee, becoming its chair last year. The SFRA has, in short, been essential to how I’ve developed as an academic, and I’ve long been committed to giving back to the community in any way that I can.

And so I’m standing as a candidate for Vice-President. I believe it’s absolutely critical to continue to broaden the internationalism and the commitment to diversity, inclusion and accessibility that our previous VP, Ida Yoshinaga, and the VPs before her have worked hard toward. As a student and early-career researcher who relied on the SFRA as a source of support and to craft an intellectual identity, I believe it’s essential to support new generations of scholars, educators, activists, artists, writers, archivists, editors, publishers and other practitioners to navigate the complexities and, indeed, the hostilities of finding meaningful employment. The SFRA has changed since I’ve been involved with the organisation and will continue to change. I’m looking forward to seeing how it will look in another twenty years, and hope that with your help we can realise the SFRA’s ambitions to become a truly global organisation.

Treasurer

Joshua Pearson (California State University)

I am standing as a candidate for SFRA Treasurer. I am excited to serve our scholarly community in this important role. As academic labor and scholarship grows increasingly precarious, I am committed to maintaining SFRA as an accessible space of collaboration and solidarity. As an untenured instructor, I know that conference attendance can be a serious financial and logistical strain for many of our members. I will strive to reduce that strain by keeping SFRA’s finances healthy and making the registration and payment processes as transparent and predictable as possible. As a member of the Executive Committee, I will work to keep our organization flexible and responsive to the needs of our diverse scholarly community. I’m ready to give back to the community that has given me so much. Thanks for considering me.