From the Vice President

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From the Vice President

Ida Yoshinaga

Greetings Science Fiction Research Association comrades! Hope you’re soon to enjoy a sustainable, kind, and productive Year of the Wood Dragon.

As we head towards our first ever Estonian conference in early May, I’ve got 2 announcements:

2023 Support a New Scholar Awardee

The Track B, Non-Tenure Track Ph.D. recipient for the 2024-‘25 SNS award cycle, who will get 2 years of free SFRA membership starting this year, is ecohumanities scholar and writer Dr. Conrad Scott, the first Postdoctoral Fellow sponsored by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council at Athabasca University, where he researches and writes on plant and animal futures in literature.

Ecologically detailed texts Dr. Scott currently works with at this job include Douglas Coupland’s Generation A (2009); Michael Christie’s Greenwood (2020), and Jeff VanderMeer’s Hummingbird Salamander (2021), as well as Clara Hume’s work (2013’s Back to the Garden and 2022 Stolen Child).

Dr. Scott is omnipresent among early-career researchers in environmental-sf studies, co-editing the upcoming Utopian and Dystopian Explorations of Pandemics (2024) in Routledge’s Environmental Humanities series, and co-organizing the 2021 Cappadocia University conference, “Living in the End Times,” which generated that volume, as well as the 2024 migrations conference of the Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture for which he’s co-president. He is well-known broadly among sf scholars due to his service as well as academic work, garnering both Science Fiction Film and Television’s 2021 Award for Outstanding Journal Reviewers and SFRA’s 2019 SFRA Graduate Student Paper Award. Dr. Scott’s research on the Anthropocene has been in Paradoxa (2019-20, “Climate Fictions”) and The Anthropocene and the Undead: Cultural Anxieties in the Contemporary Popular Imagination (2022, Lexington Books), and he will soon publish on plant and animal SF also for Routledge Environmental Humanities.

While Dr. Scott’s literary analyses of Indigenous speculative fiction related to environmental issues can be found in Transmotion (2022’s “Global Indigenous Literature and Climate Change” issue), Extrapolation (2016), and The Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms (2023), he has additionally evolved as a creative writer (following up his 2019 poetry collection Waterline Immersion with a first novel soon!) and a globally impactful scholar, whose academic work is now found in Romanian and who contributes proofreading skills to the first English translation of a Turkish SF anthology from London Transnational Press. We are impressed with this justice-oriented thinker who has been active in the SFRA—attending our annual conferences almost every year recently, and sharing Canadian goings-on in the speculative arts and ecohumanities as our country representative from that region.

Thanks to the Track A (Ph.D. student) SNS awardees, Nora Castle, Yilun Fan, and Terra Gasque, for helping us make this decision, and to all candidates who applied!

DEI at SFRA 2024

For the Executive Committee-sponsored Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion session of SFRA’s Estonia meeting—which will be hybrid (at U Tartu and livestreamed)—this year’s focus is gender and sexuality in the speculative arts. Watch for this meaningful conference event in your program.

Mahalo,
Ida

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