From the SFRA Executive Committee
From the Vice President
Chris Pak
At the time of writing this column the SFRA 2026 conference is a mere seven weeks away. I’m incredibly excited to be attending via Zoom this year and only wish I could be there in person. The organising committee—Sonja Fritzsche, Eric Aronoff, Rocio Quispe-Agnoli, Blaire Morseau, Jessica Stokes, Michael Stokes and Vered Weiss—has done an incredible job of pulling together an exciting programme and working on all the many details that are required to put together an academic conference such as this. My appreciation and thanks go out to all of them.
This year, for the “Vision and Support” session, I have put together a roundtable on activism, public engagement and policy with Patrick Brock of the University of Oslo, Julian Chambliss of Michigan State University and Petranka Malcheva of the Office for the Future Generations Commissioner for Wales. This promises to be an engaging and wide-ranging discussion about the role of the sf academic and creative practitioner in the twenty-first century. The idea for this panel is informed by last year’s discussion during the Vision and Support session about the possibility for running sessions on activist training—which this panel is not quite about but which I do hope to organise something for a future session (and to that end, if anyone would like to discuss possibilities for such a panel please do send me an email). But another point that was raised during that session was a recommendation to engage in dialogue with communities beyond the immediate academic context. This panel explores how we might begin to fold those discussions into our academic and creative practice. Please do come along to the session and contribute to this discussion.
Until the conference, then, all the best!
SFRA Review 