Category: From the SFRA EC

From the Vice President

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 53 no. 2

From the SFRA Executive Committee

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From the Vice President

Ida Yoshinaga

The burgeoning excitement for our annual summer conference, evidenced by greater numbers of paper and panel proposals received for last year’s vibrant gathering in Oslo, and now for the upcoming Dresden 2023 meeting (including those submitted by in-person attendees of the latter), invigorates again the pressing question of how to expand science-fiction studies past our default Western and Global North circuits, to encompass speculative-fiction production and reception in other parts of the world.

From suggestions by members of our SFRA country representatives group, by our general membership, and by global CoFutures colleagues in Norway, we on the Executive Council have expanded these representatives to include SFRA members from China (Regina Kanyu Wang), Ireland (Thomas Connolly, pulling double duty as webmaster), Portugal (Tânia Cerqueira and Manuel José Sousa Oliveira), the Philippines (Gabriela Lee, also our At-Large Executive Committee member), in addition to adding reps of our Australia group (Yimin Xu).

Welcome representatives! If you’ve suggestions for more dedicated SFRA folk who can meet virtually 3-4 times a year; share what’s going on with sf production in their own regions, nations, or languages (such as conferences, publications, events, and trends); and advise the EC on ideas for the international future of the organization among other matters, please contact Hugh O’Connell, myself, or other members of the EC.

Here’s our current list of country reps: https://sfra.org/country-representatives/

At the International Conference of the Fantastic in the Arts a few months ago in March, the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts BIPOC Caucus held sessions on exploring global methodologies and theories for speculative genre and media. Inspired by the annual theme that underscored contributions from Africanfuturism and Afrofuturism to our evolving discourse on fantastic and speculative arts, as well as by cross discussions that have been arising in Indigenous Futurism and Latinx Futurism, the Caucus has been trying to reach beyond the standard Suvinian and Todorovian conceptualizations of our family of non-real and semi-real genres. Researchers Suparno Banerjee, Nicola Hunt, Taryne Taylor, Candice Thornton, and Guest Scholar Isiah Lavender III discussed topics such as postcolonial and Indigenous terminologies, translation challenges, diversity of regional production, and continuity of spirituality in transnational diaspora.

This August, we expect that both the Executive Committee’s sponsored sessions will follow these worldwide sf themes. They are: two professional-development panels for early-career scholars, including one made up of international postdocs and graduate students looking for work in the global job market; and one diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging session themed to decolonial and Indigenous Futurist speculative methodologies and related research protocols. Additionally, panel proposals accepted include one similar to the ICFA global theories/methods discussion, put together by German cultural studies scholar Sonja Fritzsche and her colleagues from Peter Lang Publishing’s World Science Fiction Series (on which board I happen to belong).

What is world science fiction? Hoping you can share your mindful, enriching responses this summer with us at TU Dresden, “disrupting” conventional imagination.

From the President

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 53 no. 2

From the SFRA Executive Committee

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From the President

Hugh O’Connell

As I look out my office window here in Boston and notice the trees starting to bud, my mind turns to two things: the end of the Spring semester and the annual SFRA conference. This year, as part of our efforts to increase the SFRA’s international representation, we’re partnering with der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Fantastikforschung (the German Association for Research in the Fantastic, or GfF) for the joint Disruptive Imaginations Conference.

After attending the virtual 2021 conference hosted by Graham J. Murphy and Seneca College and missing out entirely on the 2022 conference hosted by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay and the CoFutures collective due to contracting Covid-19, I’m very much looking forward to attending the Disruptive Futures conference in-person, while also taking part in the virtual programming. The organizers have received a stunning number of proposals from an international pool of applicants, and we’re quite optimistic that the conference will continue the ongoing work of globally expanding the SFRA by bringing this internationally diverse array of scholars into conversation with one another.

By now, everyone who sent a proposal should have heard back from the selection committee, but if for some reason you are still waiting, please contact the conference organizers, Julia Gatermann and Moritz Ingwersen at disruptive.imaginations@tu-dresden.de. And for those attending the conference in-person, as you begin to make your travel plans, make sure to check out the resources that the organizers are providing at the dedicated conference website: https://disruptiveimaginations.com. Here, you can find information in both English and German about accommodations, getting around Dresden, and some of the special events that are being planned for both in-person and virtual conference attendees, with more information to be added as we get closer to the start of the conference. And speaking of planning, we’ll be contacting the recipients of the SFRA’s travel grants in the first week of May.

Looking ahead, we’re scheduling another European conference in Estonia in 2024, before heading back to the United States for 2025 and 2026. The SFRA depends on volunteer conference organizers; so, if you would like to see the conference come to your area, please consider putting in a bid to host the conference (the SFRA is currently taking proposals for 2027 and beyond). You can contact me directly, and I’ll be happy to discuss what hosting the conference entails and how to go about putting a proposal together. Even if you are only curious at this stage, please feel free to reach out!

From the President

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 53, no. 4

From the President

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From the President

Hugh O’Connell

It’s hard to believe that I’m writing my first SFRA President’s column. I attended my first SFRA conference in 2015 at Stony Brook. It alternately seems like yesterday and a lifetime ago. It was a career-changing experience; the people I met there became mentors, collaborators, and friends, and I finally understood what others meant when they talked about their “academic communities.” Over the last couple of years, the SFRA’s executive board have been making changes both large and small to make sure that this sort of experience is the norm for all our members. I’m looking forward to serving as President and continuing this work with them.

Speaking of service, I want to extend my heartfelt thanks to our outgoing E-Board members: Sean Guynes, Keren Omry, and Gerry Canavan. Along with serving as Secretary from 2020-2022, Sean was editor of the SFRA Review from 2018-21 and helped institute many of its innovative transformations. Keren has served in a great number of roles, most recently as Immediate Past President, providing institutional memory, continuity, and advise to the Executive Board, and before that as President, and before that cycling through just about every award committee. Seriously, many, many thanks, Keren! Finally, I want to acknowledge our outgoing President, Gerry Canavan, who had the unenviable task of steering the SFRA through one of its most tumultuous periods: dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic, cancelled conferences, and the move to online and hybrid conferences, alongside all the other usual tasks. Before he escapes entirely, he’ll be serving as the Immediate Past President for the next three years (just when he thought he was out… we pull him back in!).

Keeping the ball rolling, I’d like to thank our continuing E-Board members, Ida Yoshinaga (VP), Tim Murphy (Treasurer), Thomas Connolly (Webmaster), and Aisha Matthews (Conference Committee), as well as welcome our incoming members, Sarah Lohmann (Secretary), and our first ever At-Large members, Helane Androne and Gabriela Alejandra Lee. And for those out there who would like to get more involved with the SFRA and add their names to this illustrious list of volunteers, watch out for a forthcoming call for the new Outreach officer position.

Looking ahead, we’re all very excited for the upcoming “Disrupted Imaginations” joint SFRA and German Association for Research in the Fantastic (GfF) conference in Dresden, Germany (August 15-19, 2023). The CFP is currently circulating and can be found on the SFRA website. This is a great opportunity for the SFRA to continue building upon its international outreach efforts and to forge greater ties with the GfF. As a reminder, SFRA members are eligible to apply for travel grants of up to $500.

Finally, we know that there have been a couple of issues with the new website. We are working on getting these resolved, and we thank you for your patience as we continue down the WordPress rabbit hole. In the meantime, if you encounter any problems, please continue to reach out to us.

From the Vice President

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 53, no. 4

From the Vice President

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From the Vice President

Ida Yoshinaga

The committee to select our Support a New Scholar Award for 2023-2024, including past winner Guangzhao Lyu, former SFRA President Keren Omry, and myself, was delighted by the quality of submissions received for the Track A (graduate student) category by the November 1, 2022, deadline.

Compared to earlier in the award’s history, we believe that recent efforts we’ve made to internationalize and diversify the Science Fiction Research Association are showing in the remarkable quality, range, and multifaceted nature of the applicants. Immaterial labor in our field is also transforming, as the academic job market grows more competitive and casualized…thus generating new breeds of scholars marked by versatility, heightened inter-disciplinarity, and multiple skill sets ranging from creative (print-literary) writing to translation to digital and interactive arts.

Thus we chose to award not one, but three, new scholars this time around—and the SFRA Executive Committee agreed. While the whole cohort of applicants were extremely exciting, we found the following selectees especially impressive.

First, we were floored by the application of University of Warwick Ph.D. student Nora Castle, whose leadership in the urgent, pandemic-era-salient field of food futures, whose strong publication record as author/co-author and editor/co-editor of several upcoming food-and-environmental-humanities collections, which are evolving this growing discourse forward, and whose recent service to the SFRA, as well as sustained participation in networks of interesting new SFF scholars, showcased Castle as what we’d consider a promising “traditional,” albeit clearly interdisciplinary and visionary, scholar.

Second, representing the increasingly popular, multiple-career pathway–especially among BIPOC, female, non-Western, and/or LGBTQIA+ researchers–we were amazed by the substantial global-SF contributions of University of California, Riverside, Ph.D. student Yilun Fan, who in addition to presenting at many scholarly meetings and producing numerous academic articles and essays on Chinese and comparative (i.e., Latinx and Chinese) speculative fiction, also has published several of her own award-winning creative works and her English-to-Chinese translations of leading SFF scholars’ articles so as to bring Western genre theory (such as Mark Bould’s analysis of Afrofuturism) to global reading audiences.

Finally, as a futuristic signal of where SF studies may be heading in terms of its application to digital-media platforms and Suvinian theory-in-practice, we were moved by the innovative hybrid scholarship-blended-with-creative work of Georgia Institute of Technology Ph.D. student Terra Mae Gasque, whose digital gaming research and design/coding practice explores the intersection of queerness, cognition, and player failure. Gasque has written for SFRA Review and attended our annual meeting, as well as published in SF scholarly collections; her dissertation develops, discusses, and

creates a virtual-reality game aimed at rethinking the very foundations of digital ludic design through embedding queer failure into its ethical inquiries.

The selectees represent the next generation of SF thinkers who embrace–to adapt a phrase from one applicant–SF as a mode. They’ve moved us away from mid-twentieth-century escapist notions of the genre as a U.S. pulp-literary hobby and towards global, multidimensional, active SF expression through practice and production.

Congratulations, Nora, Yilun, and Terra!

Ida Yoshinaga, VP

Candidate Statements for the 2023-2025 SFRA Executive Committee

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 52, no. 4

From the SFRA Executive Committee

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Candidate Statements for the 2023-2025 SFRA Executive Committee

Keren Omry

Below, please find the statements from the candidates for two Executive Committee positions that are open this year: President and Secretary. Each successful candidate is expected to serve for a three-year term. In addition, you can see the candidates for our one-year pilot At Large positions. Please read and consider all the candidates’ statements and, when we open our online voting page in early December, cast your vote.

I want to take this opportunity to express my warmest gratitude and greatest appreciation for everyone I’ve had a chance to serve with during my eight years on the SFRA Executive Committee. A volunteer association is only ever as good as its members make it and it’s been a true privilege to watch the Association grow and change, always striving to do more and better for the incredible community to which we belong. May the next stewards of this ship always roll with the waves and sail true. Finally, I want to send my sincere thanks to all the candidates who are putting their names in the hat and wish them good luck!

PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES

Hugh C. O’Connell

I’ve been a member for the SFRA since 2015, and during this time I’ve served on the Student Paper Award Committee (2016-2018) and as the organization’s treasurer (2018-2021). Over the last couple of years, the organization as a whole has worked hard to diversify the core membership and to increase member representation on the Executive Board. If elected as president, my main goal would be to continue working with the membership and E-Board on the new programs that have been put in place, while also seeking new avenues for members to help guide and shape the organization. In many ways, my experiences through joining the SFRA, attending the conferences, and working within the organization created that first sense of having an academic home, and it would be a privilege to continue to serve the organization and hopefully extend that feeling for both new and longtime members. 

Peter Sands

I’ve been a member of the SFRA for most of my professional career, stretching back to the 1990s, when I was the first webmaster for the group, and published Rich Erlich’s Coyote’s Song: the Teaching Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin as the first digital publication of the SFRA. Much of my professional energy has also been directed to the steering committee of a sister organization, the Society for Utopian Studies, where I am currently finishing my term as President; I have a good deal of experience in caretaking of scholarly societies. For many years I have also been the liaison between SFRA and SUS. Most of my publications are in utopian studies as well. My academic career has trended recently more toward administration; my experience as undergraduate chair for a large English department in a R1 university, and as Director of the Honors College since 2014 have been good preparation for managing the business, communications, and continuity of groups such as ours. My primary focus and success as an administrator has been improving the diversity of the student body and of the staff in the honors college; I believe that scholarly societies as well need as soon as possible to look less like me and more like the diverse rests of the world. I’m eager to give back to the SFRA, which has been a congenial home and intellectual engine for so many of us and for so long, and to continue the good work of those who kept us all going through the recent very weird years.

SECRETARY

Sarah Lohmann

It would be an honour for me to be considered for the position of SFRA Secretary. The SFRA has been an academic home for me since the 2016 conference in Liverpool – one of my first conferences – and I have been looking for opportunities to become more actively involved. I think the position of Secretary would be ideal given my background in academic organising, which I will briefly bore you with.

Firstly, during my undergraduate and MA years at the University of St Andrews, I served as Secretary and then President of three student societies, significantly increasing membership and hosting well-known speakers (like Iain M. Banks!). Following this, during my PhD at Durham University, I organised a well-received museum exhibition on time travel narratives, convened two successful lecture series, and served as PhD student representative. Finally, in my postdoctoral position at the University of Tübingen, I have become involved with the new College of Fellows and am designing a comprehensive orientation course for international MA students. All this has given me a great deal of committee experience, insight into academic procedures, and event management practice, which I would particularly like to make use of as SFRA Secretary during this time of change in the association: I would love to help mediate this transition, as I especially enjoy facilitating dynamic processes.

In addition, I would like to contribute the collaborative potential that comes with being a bilingual (English and German) and trinational (German, American and British) academic: for instance, I am well-positioned to help the EC unpack the international complexities of diversification and representation.

My work in this position would also, of course, be informed by my love of SF, which has been my central academic focus since I stumbled across a wonderful SF class in my undergraduate years. I am now preparing to publish my PhD thesis on feminist utopias as science-fictional thought experiments modelling complex systems, and other recent projects include a chapter on utopias as living organisms in a Festschrift for Lucy Sargisson, edited by Lyman Tower Sargent and Raffaella Baccolini, as well as several contributions to This is Not a Science Fiction Textbook, edited by Mark Bould and Steven Shaviro. My teaching also features SF or science-fictionality across speculative genres: I always find ways to explore the critical potential of cognitive estrangement and other science-fictional narrative mechanisms, which often incites great interest in the genre, and I am currently planning courses on SF and the Anthropocene.

I am unsure what the future holds, but having recently had the honour of being interviewed as an ‘up-and-coming SF scholar’ by current Secretary Sean Guynes for the SFRA Review, I have no intention of deserting this amazing field anytime soon: I have two SF-based academic books in the pipeline, plenty of SF-informed teaching material lined up, and many plans for SF-focused events up my sleeve. Serving as SFRA Secretary would be a wonderful addition to these endeavours, and I would do so with pleasure and to the best of my ability.

AT LARGE

Helane Androne

I am happy to stand for the At-large position on the Executive Committee of the SFRA. I am currently Professor of English at Miami University of Ohio Regional campuses, and an Affiliate of the Global and Intercultural Studies Department. I teach courses in African American literature, Latine literatures, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Women’s Studies, and SFF–all of which engage my primary focus on the sacred. I am committed to teaching and learning practices that engage non/traditional students through multidisciplinary and multi-modal learning, and I seek to reflect that concern both in my courses and in my scholarship. My current project uses Chela Sandoval’s Methodology of the Oppressed alongside Malidoma Patrice Somé’s rite of passage teachings to point out how myth and magic operate as an activism of radical survival in black womanist SFF. I have recently engaged SFF to present on Love Theory, on anti-racism, on activism and resistance, on intersectionality and the image of God, and on methodologies of emancipation. Along with scholarly interests, I have concrete experience and skills that enhance my candidacy: I have successfully written and co-written almost $200K in external and internal grants; presented for more than 70 conferences, workshops, and lectures; published 2 books and written more than 15 other publications. I have chaired a department; been an independent magazine editor and writer; chaired the 1921 Award for 2 cycles at the American Literature Society; and have served on several editorial boards and in multiple literary societies. As an At-large member of the SFRA, I believe I’ll bring a balance of academic experience, administrative conscientiousness, and scholarly aptitude, as well as energetic support for the diverse and expanding role of SFF.

Gabriela Lee

As an academic and author from the Global South, I am very excited to run as an at large member of the SFRA. I am looking forward to highlighting and raising up voices from my side of the world and bringing them into conversation with other scholars and writers from the Global North. I am also looking forward to more actively supporting regular activities that the SFRA currently has and encouraging new initiatives, and I intend to bring my energy and work ethic to these projects. Outside of the SFRA, I am also the co-editor of an upcoming sourcebook on Philippine speculative fiction, soon to be published by the University of the Philippines Press. I am also currently a graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh, as well as a faculty member (on leave) at the University of the Philippines, where I teach creative writing, children’s literature, and Philippine literature in English. Broadly speaking, my creative and critical work has usually focused on intersections of children’s literature, speculative fiction, and the post/de/anti-colonial, especially the ways in which it manifests in Philippine literature. I hope that through the at large member position in the SFRA, I can contribute to making visible many creators and scholars who may not have had opportunities to be seen and heard, as well as learning from a community of like-minded scholars and writers. I look forward to serving SFRA community in imagining and moving towards a kinder, more compassionate world.

From the President

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 52, no. 4

From the SFRA Executive Committee

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From the President

Gerry Canavan

It’s hard to believe this is my final President’s Note! As challenging and chaotic as the last three years have been in some ways, they also seem to have passed by in the blink of an eye. I look back on what we have accomplished, including two successful annual meetings with previously unprecedented virtual formats and the first major revision of the organization’s bylaws in many years, with gratitude and pride, and I want to thank everyone who has contributed to the (mostly) smooth running of this organization over my term as president of SFRA, especially the elected members of the two executive committees I’ve worked with (Keren, Sonja, Ida, Sean, Hugh, Jess, and Tim) and the organizers of the recent and upcoming annual conferences (De Witt, Rebekah, Graham, Bodhi, Moritz, Julia, and Jaak), as well as everyone who has taken on extra work to serve on a policy or awards committee. I really look forward to supporting the group in my new role as Immediate Past President, and trust that you’ll be hearing from me again when it comes time for populating election slates and committees next year.

Keren Omry recently sent out the candidate statements for the next election, which will take place in mid-December. You can find those at the SFRA website, or elsewhere in this issue. As a reminder, here is what the new bylaws say about elections:

The immediate past president, in consultation with the Executive Committee, shall submit a slate of candidates for each position to be filled at least 60 days prior to the election day. These candidates will be nominated by current members (self-nominations and nomination by current members of the Executive Committee will be allowed). The immediate past president shall notify the membership in the SFRA Review, and all other appropriate and available electronic and social outlets, of this slate of candidates. Within 30 days of the publication of this slate of candidates in the SFRA Review, additional candidates may be nominated by submission of a petition signed by at least five persons of the membership in good standing entitled to vote in the election to the secretary of the association. At the end of this 30-day period nominations shall be closed and the ballot shall be prepared.

We have crossed that 60-day threshold and are fast approaching the 30-day threshold, after which the ballot will be closed; if you would like to supplement this slate of candidates with a new name, please, do so soon!

As always, reach out to me if you have any questions or concerns, or if you would like me to promote anything on SFRA’s social media. Thanks so much for entrusting me with the responsibility of leading this group for a time, and I look forward to seeing you all in Dresden next year.

From the Vice President

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 52, no. 4

From the SFRA Executive Committee

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From the Vice President

Ida Yoshinaga


Aloha, SFRA members,

As we, the networks of Earth, flow towards mid-twenty-first century singularity from a wide spacetime perspective and we enter yet another holiday season from the smaller sense of human affective momentum, I find myself thinking about my own, small-f “futurisms.” Perhaps for the first time ever—very odd for a lifetime learner in science-fiction studies.

The collective that taught me how to think will turn into a “majority-minority” society in another 22 years, so I envision myself in Future Georgia, watching my students from this semester evolve into full persons, enchanting what’s been red and purple into a deep indigo-like blue in another 10.

The collective of my ancestors will spin its centuries of modernist love for artificiality, commerce, and form into a line of pleasingly mannered, sentient and multi-gendered, service workers. They’ll be facing that classical Nipponese dilemma—order and pleasure, or discomforting revolution—in another 80 (crossing into the twenty-second’s threshhold).

And I will labor at my present factory, the STEMmy mothership, tirelessly, relentlessly, until my favorite organ crepes into spotted curtains draped from my elbows and tailbone. I’ll drain my spirit turning human storytelling into one of those new monsters, a growling electrical beast who can generate fables and novels and screenplays autonomously. Like the scientist in the story, I will be shocked when the creature turns on me, on humanity. In another 30.

But mostly, a week before we take out the costumes and for the first time since the virus, join in on the parades…Before our souls homecome to family and community with three rounds of seasonal fantasy make-pretend (ghosts, unpredatory colonial settlers, Klaus)…I’m looking back. As part of my small-f futurism; otherwise, how can one grasp the meaning, the impact, of the flow towards all these someday-presents?

So: Thank you, Jessica Fitzpatrick, for your attention to detail, conscientious and necessary financial work, positive demeanor and imaginative orientation, and for doing what’s probably the second-hardest job (next to Gerry’s) in our Executive Committee.

Thank you, Sean Guynes, whose egoless service to SFRA of course eclipses the minute and diligent secretarial duties you’ve offered up these past years. I see you: your systematic and long-term questions, fixes, quiet administrative contributions.

Mahalo, Keren Omry, who along with Sean and Gerry, ushered me into this association. Global feminist leadership modeled; now the IAFA is fortunate to benefit from your hefty organizational smarts.

Crushingest of kaiju-sized hugs to Gerry Canavan, whose stewardship has honestly felt a little like that of the mythical space captain in that syndicated live-action series I’d watched as a child on Maui in the ‘70s. Intuitive, action-oriented when needs be, thinking always of crew and community. Funny on occasion (albeit not in a Shatneresque way). I know you hate the term praxis, so let’s simply ignore that you’re the embodiment of the best of this. Very glad you’re still on board. I’m here for another few.

From the President

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 52, no. 3

From the SFRA Executive Committee

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From the President

Gerry Canavan

We now are getting dangerously close to my last note as president of SFRA! It has been my genuine honor to serve this organization in this way and I look forward to staying on in the role of immediate past president for the next three years. I really want to encourage anyone who is interested in taking on an enlarged service role in the group to respond to Keren Omry’s recent calls for candidates for election this fall (including the next secretary and the president, as well as the two new “at-large” positions) as well as a US-based candidate for the outreach and publicity officer. And if you have experience with grants and/or with investment, we would love to talk to you about the development office position; please reach out! Also note Ida Yoshinaga’s recent call for the “Support a New Scholar” grant—and, if you’re eligible, consider applying! If you have any questions about any of these opportunities, please, reach out.

Last month’s conference in Oslo was a true highlight of my time as president; I want to thank Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay and the CoFutures collective for putting on a simply incredible event that I know people will be talking about for a long time. As discussed at the business meeting on the last day of the conference, the next two conferences for our group will be Dresden 2023 and Estonia 2024; I’m glad to say we have secured US sites for 2025 and 2026 and will publicly announce those as soon as we’ve worked out all the details. If you’re interested in hosting SFRA in 2027 or beyond, reach out! It’s truly never too early to start thinking about this.

As always, if you have an event you’d like SFRA to distribute through its media lists, or any other idea or concern about the work the organization is doing, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me at gerry.canavan@marquette.edu. I’d love to hear from you. These are hard times, and getting harder, but, as I said in my little speech at the awards banquet, the people in this organization lift me up, and bring me hope.

From the Vice President

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 52, no. 3

From the SFRA Executive Committee

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From the Vice President

Ida Yoshinaga


Dear colleagues,

Thanks to all participants in our “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging” (DEIB) hybrid session, held on June 29 during our Oslo summer conference. We on the Executive Committee appreciate Simran, Sabiha, Athira, Founder, Aishwarya, Manuel, Ingvill, SC, Larisa, Tânia, Flip, Jaak, Kara, Steve, Candice, Sara, Andrew, Sarah, Priteegandha, Chris, and others who attended, including those who shared these critiques and suggestions:

  • This conference expanded the areas of representation compared to previous ones.
  • The yet-unbalanced dynamic between whiteness/white scholars (often speaking for/about other cultures) and marginalized/regional groups (Indigenous peoples, etc.) remains the “elephant in the room.” Power still tends to flow in 1 direction.
  • Accept conference papers/panels based in part on their DEIB balance issues; rethink paper-acceptance policy or conference-site proposal selection, by being more conscious of such issues.
  • Fund projects with hands-on approaches to sf in regional communities (e.g., those working with child readers in India).
  • Greater visual accessibility for presentations, with prepared subtitles or transcripts; or use the hybrid format to display papers’ words onscreen.
  • The antiracism workshops should not only deal with U.S.-based racism but also European and other forms; we could also focus on methodology such as addressing ethics of researchers’ positionality/intersectionality; or such as ethics of Indigenous literary research in Europe (etc.).
  • Appoint a careers-research officer and an equality/diversity/ inclusion officer. [Note: the EC decided to approach DEIB from many angles among various responsible charges, rather than hold 1 person responsible.]
  • Support networks of emerging scholars from around the world, especially the Global South (being done in Germany and in Canadian studies); also, networks of early-career scholars in Europe and the Americas.
  • Conference format marginalizes online participants. Facilitators should engage all participants including virtual ones. Greater inclusion in webinars may help online attendees feel less lonely, more engaged. [Note: In Europe, there are privacy issues with some online formats; signed author forms, however, might aid in this, and help address the question of why not distribute emails of all presenters?]
  • Address larger question, “What is science fiction?,” from the perspective of different global populations.
  • The sheer power of one keynote (Laura Ponce) unapologetically giving her talk in Spanish was appreciated.
  • Consider providing child care (accessibility). [Note: Other conferences have found this issue tricky.]
  • Give attendees the choice of 10- or 20-min. papers.
  • Volunteer positions include conference committees and awards committees; however, compensation is an issue many.
  • More formal mentorship is desired esp. for BIPOC folk.
  • Better time zones needed for the bulk of the sessions.
  • A roundtable, not of regular SFRA committee members, but of others, to discuss careers research and/or DEIB issues, might be a good idea.
  • A Counter Space and a Keynote panel would be helpful, too.
  • Join in on a global-sf translation publication project which includes fandom-generated works, put together by Larisa Mikhaylova (larmih@gmail.com) towards facilitating diversity in the field.

Keep sharing your ideas,
Ida Yoshinaga, VP

From the President

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 52, no. 2

From the SFRA Executive Committee

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From the President

Gerry Canavan

I could not be more excited by the Oslo conference—Bodhi Chattopadhyay and the CoFUTURES group have planned a simply incredible event (including an ambitious hybrid structure, half a dozen keynotes, nearly 200 presenters from six continents, and no conference fee!) that I really think will put our organization on the map in a new way. The conference registration page is now live at https://sfra.org/sfra-2022-conference/sfra-2022-conference-registration/ for both presenters and non-presenting attendees so I would ask you to sign up and let me know if you have any issues or concerns. (Presenters must be members of SFRA, so be sure to renew your membership as well.)

Thank you to Bodhi and to CoFUTURES for everything you’ve done and are doing for SFRA.

We are moving forward with our plans to expand the executive committee. We have issued recent calls for the outreach director and the web director and will name those new officers soon; we are also reaching out to people we believe might make a good development officer and seeing if they have interest and capacity to take this on. Aisha Matthews has generously agreed to chair the new conference committee, and will be working with the organizers of recent conferences, as well as the 2023 and 2024 conferences, to set policy and guidelines for future SFRA conferences; she will also help us select a site for 2025 and beyond. (Thank you Aisha!) Perhaps most importantly, our elections this fall will include votes for president and secretary under the new guidelines, and will also include one-year pilot terms for the new “at-large” exec seats; this one-year pilot will help ensure that procedures and expectations are clear in time for the scheduled at-large election (for the full three-year term) in 2023.

This fall’s election will of course also mark the end of my time as SFRA President and my assumption of the “Immediate Past President” role. I look forward to assisting the new exec in that new position, but I’ll look back very fondly on my time as SFRA president (despite all the COVID-related chaos that dominated the last three years). Thank you all for the trust you’ve placed in me these last three years, and thank you for all the work you all do to keep SFRA humming. See you in Oslo!