Category: From the VP

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From the Vice President

Chris Pak

Welcome, all, to the new issue of the SFRA Review. This is a time of change for the SFRA, with positions open for two roles on the executive committee: one for President and one for Secretary. As an organisation we rely heavily on the goodwill of members and volunteers, and voting for our executive committee is one way in which you can have a direct influence on how the SFRA develops in relation to the changing landscapes of higher education internationally. Voting is now open and will close on the 14th November, so please do log in to the SFRA website and submit your vote before the deadline.

Our annual Support a New Scholar award is also open for applications. This year the award will support one non-tenure-track scholar, with a review panel consisting of Anastasia Klimchynskaya, Conrad Scott and Ida Yoshinaga, all of whom are previous recipients of the award. I’d highly encourage you to submit an application if you’re eligible, and to share the news of the award widely through your networks. The application form, eligibility criteria and a list of supporting documents to include with your application can be found on the SFRA website.

The deadline for applications is the 21st November. If you do have any questions please feel free to reach out to me by email at c.a.pak@swansea.ac.uk. The deadline for our 2026 conference at Michigan State University is also fast approaching. The theme of the conference is water and flow: ‘we seek work that examines how imagined worlds are carved by the motion of waters, the transition of power, and the stories we tell.’ The call for papers is available on the SFRA website, and there will be virtual and hybrid presentation options available.

Following this year’s conference at Rochester we held a Vision and Support session to discuss ways in which the SFRA could do more to support our membership. I have been meeting with our Country Representatives and with the EC to discuss the kinds of resources we might make available to our membership, either at the annual conference itself or through our website and other digital means. A lot of information about events, publications and activity happening internationally is shared during our Country Representatives meeting, and we’ve been discussing how we might make this information more accessible to our membership. Discussions are still underway but I am looking forward to sharing some of these developments in the future through this column. As always, if you do have any recommendations or would like to correspond to discuss the kinds of resources and activity that you would like to see or to contribute to the SFRA, please get in touch.

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From the Vice President

Chris Pak

Greetings All! By the time this will be published the SFRA 2025 conference at Rochester will be in full swing. I hope, for all of you who are attending virtually or in-person, that it is a rewarding, thrilling and intellectually challenging and stimulating experience. The annual SFRA conference is so important for bringing us together to share experiences and knowledge, to strengthen our connections and to create a research, pedagogical and creative culture that can sustain us academics, teachers and practitioners throughout our careers. But while the conference happens only once a year we do have other resources available to us: the SFRA Review itself is one of these, as is engagement with our country representatives, who meet quarterly with myself and other representatives to share news and events from around the world. If any of you would like to represent a country not already listed on the Country Representatives page of the SFRA website, please do send me an email. Please liaise, too, with your country representative to keep them abreast of any events or activity that you’d like the wider membership to know about.

During the EC Sponsored DEI panel at the Rochester conference we discussed ways that we could support our membership in light of the attacks on higher education and to vulnerable groups that are occurring in the US. These conversations are ongoing and we would welcome any recommendations or opportunities to explore the terrain that we began to open up during that panel. We would also like to explore using the resources available to us—the SFRA Review, the SFRA website, Listserv and the Social Media channels that are managed by our Outreach Officer Anastasia Klimchynskaya, along with any others—to continue this conversation and to co-ordinate ongoing support. Please do keep in touch with myself if you have any questions, ideas or recommendations for how we can keep developing and realising these discussions.

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From the Vice President

Chris Pak

It has been a bewildering year. Watching developments in the US from afar throws into relief just how far the norms and expectations that some regarded as stable can be overturned in an incredibly short time. Last month the UK Supreme Court ruling on the definition of biological sex in the UK’s 2010 Equality Act likewise disrupts patterns and norms that have been developing over decades, the repercussions of which are yet to unfold. Given these circumstances, it’s hard to think what the next four years will bring.

It’s in this context that the SFRA 2025 conference at Rochester, New York, draws ever closer. The chance to meet as an organisation to think through the challenges that we as a community of scholars, teachers and practitioners face is crucial, now and in the future. To that end, I will be organising a “Vision and Support” panel to bring us together to hear from you about the challenges that you’re facing now or which you might be anticipating, as well as to collectively think about how best we might respond as an organisation to the multiple crises brought about by the current US administration. I would also encourage you to attend, if possible, the SFRA Business meeting. This is a great way to understand how the organisation works and to contribute to shaping how it will develop in the future.

For those of you who are attending the conference in person, especially from abroad, good luck, and I have no doubt that the event itself will be rewarding as always. I unfortunately will not be able to attend this year’s conference but will be available at the Vision and Support session as well as via email, as always.

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From the Vice President

Chris Pak

Dear members, colleagues, and friends:

Hello all! It’s with great pleasure that I return to writing columns for the SFRA Review, this time not as editor but as vice-president of the organisation. I firstly wanted to thank Ida Yoshinaga for all that she’s managed to accomplish during her tenure as vice-president, and for her support while I’ve begun to settle into this new role—thanks that I’d like to extend to the rest of the executive committee. Opening spaces for the inclusion of more voices and continuing to realise the vision of an international SFRA community are critically important activities, and they become even more so during times of closure such as we’re seeing now. As scholars, artists, performers, creative writers, activists, and committed readers, viewers, listeners and players of science fiction, the SFRA has an important role in fostering the connections between us all, supporting the scholarship and activity of researchers in the field and encouraging new generations of scholars and creatives to think about, work and play with, and make use of sf. To that end, the upcoming SFRA 2025 conference in the US, in Rochester, New York, and its theme, ‘“Trans People are (in) the Future”: Queer and Trans Futurity in Science Fiction,’ represents an important reflection on and intervention into the politics of sf and its role in shaping inclusive futurities.

As vice-president I hope to work with you all to continue to realise the SFRA’s commitment to making the organisation diverse, supportive and inclusive. I will work closely with the existing country representatives to learn more about the diversity of our field and to understand more closely how we can best support international sf scholarship. I would also love to hear from any members who have ideas about how they would like to contribute to this work—please do get in touch via email and please do say hi at conferences and other events, should our paths cross. Of course, if you would like to volunteer as a country representative for a currently unrepresented country, please do get in touch.

The SFRA has been central to connecting me to a welcoming academic community and to broader conversations about sf. It has been an invigorating intellectual space that has challenged me to grow into the academic that I hoped to be. I’m looking forward to continuing these conversations and hope that new scholars and creatives will be inspired by the community that we’ve developed over the years.

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From the Vice President

Ida Yoshinaga

Dear members, colleagues, and friends:

Dear science-fiction studies colleagues,

As a lifelong feminist and supporter of gender equality, I’m excited about 2025’s annual meeting, which Dr. Stefanie Dunning of The Susan B. Anthony Institute (The Program for Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies), and her team at the University of Rochester, are co-sponsoring from July 30-Aug. 3.

With the bold theme, “‘Trans People are (in) the Future’: Queer and Trans Futurity in Science Fiction,” Dr. Dunning and The Susan B. Anthony Institute’s conference organizing committee are tackling frightening national and global trends towards fascism, as well as celebrating queer, especially trans, contributions to speculative arts and narrative.

We are thrilled by their courage and political vision which parallels those of organizers of the GATE Global Trans Conference, Columbia U’s Trans Disruptions, Moving Trans History Forward, The Watson Conference, QT Con (A Queer and Trans Conference), and other gatherings which reveal the organizing power of this diverse community while facing unimaginable legislative and institutional violence.

You can still submit a proposal in time for the November 15 deadline (to SFRARochester@gmail.com)

SFRA 2025 Conference

As you know, this is the first SFRA in several years to be held stateside, and the Executive Committee is in conversation to not only cohost another meeting in the continental US for our 2026 gathering, but also to expand our global meetings to new regional venues beyond Europe (while keeping with our hybrid format so as to remain accessible to scholars, researchers, artists, librarians, students, and teachers in a range of economic situations). We will notify you of these arrangements once confirmed.

In the meanwhile, does your institution have the resources to host an annual SFRA conference or even a one-off event? What might that conference/event look like—we would again like to encourage members to think outside of the box in how the organization might evolve going forward to recruit and retain members and creating academic events. For example: If you feel that one of the main purposes of an academic-professional group is networking, then might we consider putting on regular events, semi-formally structured, to offer that opportunity?  [I am thinking of the Society for Media and Cinema Studies’ annual December online meetings held by its various Special Interest Groups and Caucuses.] This need has been expressed by junior faculty and early-career researchers in recent years.

Also, what does it mean that, with several European meetings in the past years, we are now more international than ever? How to build on these regional membership gains in our growing, collective knowledge of speculative/fantastic fiction—the conscientious, artful deployment of which feels so critical at this point in world history?  Let us know, as we expand the core Executive Committee and newer roles and responsibilities for its members.

Please don’t hesitate to contact SFRA President Hugh O’Connell, me, or any member of the EC with your ideas. I will remain your Veep through the end of 2025, after 3 years of service, but hope to help the organization long after.

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Meeting Futures in the Face of An Age-Diverse Academic Labor Market

Ida Yoshinaga

This summer, while catching up with my sf-film viewing, the image of a crusty Dr. Henry Walton Jones, Jr., grumping at the young’uns during Indy’s own university retirement party—after decades of navigating both archaeology and tomb-raiding, adventures which somehow didn’t prepare him for the brave new world of a changeful 1960s!—struck me as prescient for our current era of inter-generational, academic knowledge and job succession.

As we Baby Boomers and older GenXers—perhaps the last PhDs who as a cohort could expect to land full-time, tenure-track jobs with traditional professorial benefits and economic security in the North American – (and part of) Western European academic markets—push back retirement past our 60s, into the 70s and even beyond, especially in the wake of financial anxieties brought about by post-COVID COLA rises (Anft 2023 5-6), new waves of scholars including Gens Y, Z, and Alpha face less certain, if decidedly more inventive, career pathways towards a sustainable academic life. The contingent-labor market is marked particularly by researchers and hybrid scholar-creatives who’re gender and race diverse (for instance, women and marginalized community members strongly characterize the adjuncting pool; see Anft 7; Colby 2023, 2 and 5-6).

Universities, colleges, and other institutions of higher education are adapting to labor-market shifts and their related inequalities—some creating relatively stable, non-tenure-track positions aka “contract-renewable” jobs (usually full-time non-tenure-track; see Colby 1 for data on this type of contingent labor); others offering long tenured faculty buy-outs to retire or choose phased retirement options (Anft 12-15) to as to make space for hiring new (often contingent) faculty; with a few schools even mandating that adjuncts participate in 401Ks (Anft 21).

What does an age- and life-stage-diverse community of science-fiction-studies scholars look like, with its powerful intersectional implications of class, gender/sexual, and race/nation inequality? How do we socialize, share disciplinary or subfield info, network, train, debate, and professionally advance ourselves alongside our colleagues—in short, community-build as we grow the field, in this era? How do we run conferences, assess the work of scholars and artists/writers for speculative-fiction awards, initiate exciting new projects?

We are interested in hearing from those of you with ideas on how we best facilitate members to meet, exchange ideas, and build lasting intellectual relationships with each other, going forward? What does a mid-21^st-century academic meeting look like, in other words? And what other types of activities and support can we offer?

You can reach me at ida@hawaii.edu, but—pending President Hugh O’Connell’s announcement of it—I may also show up in person to talk with you at SFRA 2025, which we hope will be held stateside again.

WORKS CITED

Colby, Glenn, “Data Snapshot: Tenure and Contingency in US Higher Education,” AAUP Reports and Publications, March 2023, pp. 1-8, https://www.aaup.org/article/data-snapshot-tenure-and-contingency-us-higher-education.

Anft, Michael, for the AAUP (co-sponsored by the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America), “Preparing for a Graceful Exit: The Faculty-Retirement Landscape,” Chronicle.com, 2023, pp. 1-24, https://connect.chronicle.com/rs/931-EKA-218/images/Retirement_TIAA_InsightsReport.pdf.

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From the Vice President

Ida Yoshinaga

Dear members, colleagues, and friends:

This May, the Science Fiction Research Association will host its first-ever Estonia meeting at the University of Tartu. We on the SFRA Executive Committee welcome registrants to two events especially.

Put together by our At-Large Representatives Helane Androne and Gabriela Lee, this year’s professional-development workshop during the conference is for early-career scholars including graduate students, adjuncts, postdocs, and assistant professors:

“Application Anecdotes and Alternative Career Paths in SF/F”
Tuesday, May 7, 11 a.m.-12:30 p.m. CET; Jakobi 2-226 and via Zoom

Session description: What is the trajectory of a career in science fiction/fantasy? How have scholars navigated the journey from graduate school to the academy and beyond? What are the current appointment and/or collaborative options within the academy? How might we bridge the journey into other adjacent careers? How might we imagine and carve out opportunities for SF/F research within traditional programs and departments? Join us as we unpack this journey with several scholars who have recently secured positions in–and adjacent to–the academy. 

This year’s EC-sponsored DEI roundtable, on social-justice issues in our field, was organized by closing keynote Bogi Takács:

“DEI Roundtable: Transitions and Transformations”
Friday, May 10, 1:30-3:00 p.m. CET,  Jakobi 2-226 and via Zoom

This is SFRA 2024’s panel discussion on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI): everyone is welcome to attend. Together with our panelists, we intend to engage with topics that go beyond the usual introductory-level DEI discussion. As this year’s theme is Transitions, we plan to explore changes in DEI over time. The following topics are just some of the points we aim to touch on: if equity increases or decreases, how can and should structural DEI supports change to adjust better to new situations? How does this apply to organizations like SFRA, conferences, the field in general? How can we cope with changes for the better—or for the worse? As definitions of DEI have been shifting—including attempts to extend the acronym—who might not still be included in them, and who are only nominally included? How can we strategize to work across differences both in our immediate environment and more broadly over the internet, and how can the global nature of our field aid or hinder us in this? Many marginalized people feel a skepticism toward DEI, and this has extended to conference panels and convention events focusing on the topic. We plan to discuss what specific actions can such panels facilitate, and how they can enrich the lives of audiences and participants rather than focusing on providing basic education to outsiders, or an item on the agenda to complete.

Links to these hybrid events will be provided to registrants prior to the conference’s start, and speaker names will be posted shortly on the website and via email.

Thank you Bogi, Gabriela, Helane, Jaak, and Lisanna for enriching our conference experience!

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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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From the Vice President

Ida Yoshinaga

As we head into the holidays, planning our first Estonia-set international meeting for May 2024, let’s take stock. From two successful European conferences—Oslo, 2022, and Dresden, 2023, both well-attended—and now helping to organize Tartu, 2024, we on the Executive Committee are evolving the 21^st-century conference format to reflect “post”-COVID era changes in the world and in academia.

How can our in-person/hybrid meetings improve towards becoming more international as well as inclusive? For 2022 in Norway, we began offering a DEI workshop in addition to the other EC-sponsored activities (such as our annual Early-Career Researchers’ professional-development session, focused on tenure-track position searches or on scholarly publishing). During that Q&A session, Ph.D. students, postdocs, and adjuncts told us they had simply desired a gathering of various non-tenure track researchers who were on the job market, to talk amongst themselves. As a result, we scheduled such a session in the 2023 German conference this past August.

We also heard 2022 Oslo attendees respond that there was much theorizing about colonialism and Indigeneity at that meeting but much fewer actual Indigenous voices. So for the 2023 Dresden meeting, our DEI session featured a Native Aymara scholar from Bolivia, Ruben Darío Chambi, who’s doing doctoral work at LMU Munich. Chambi shared his research on Aymara in his home city, including both Aymara speculative-architectural expression, and settler literary utopias of Bolivia. Graciously, Leo Cornum’s superlative keynote on moon landings referenced this Ph.D. student’s presentation, so it was a (relatively) rare exchange, at an SFRA conference, between ideas of Native intellectuals from different parts of the globe—something we hope for more and more in the future.

For 2024 Estonia, we hope that among other goals/topics, to bring to the spotlight queer/trans speculative arts (the topic of our ECR DEI workshop). We are thrilled to feature among our three keynotes noted poet-writer-translator Bogi Takács, a hybrid scholar-artist whose multiple talents and knowledge sets we expect will enrich conference conversations.

The question of how to best support our LGBTQIA2S+ community members in this dystopian time of draconian governmental laws that threaten these members’ safety and very lives, has arisen many times in EC discussions about where to hold both upcoming conferences (Estonia being one of the first former Soviet countries to pass relatively progressive LGBTQIA2S+ legislation) and future meetings (we’ve had many talks about whether SFRA should be held at all in US states with strongly anti-Critical-Race-Theory and misogynist, in addition to anti-trans, laws).

We hope you can present in Estonia, too, and while attending—if you choose to participate in person—also enjoy the Tartu Literary Festival Prima Vista (https://tartu2024.ee/kirjandusfestival) held at about the same time, themed “Better or Worse Futures.” Many thanks to Jaak Tomberg and his team for putting together our Tartu meeting and coordinating it with the festival for an optimal sf-arts and sf-scholarship experience! They’re working in the spirit of utopia: may we all look forward to better futures indeed.

Don’t forget to submit your own conference abstract or proposal by November 24 (https://sfra.org/sfra-2023-conference)! And provide feedback to the hybrid Dresden meeting in our soon-to-be-emailed survey or directly to me (ida@hawaii.edu) or to Hugh (hugh.oconnell@umb.edu).

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From the Vice President

Ida Yoshinaga

Dear fellow Science Fiction Research Association members:

With your hearty responses to our call for papers and our registration deadline—adding up to 300+ participants!—“Disruptive Imaginations” looks to be one of the largest academic meetings of our organization ever [thanks also to our co-sponsor, German fantasy-studies research group GFF (https://fantastikforschung.de/en) , which agreed to share our two conferences’ venues and content].

In addition to the current themes covered by conference paper sessions as well as by the splendid German cultural studies events put together by dedicated TU Dresden organizers Julia Gatermann and Moritz Ingwersen (and team), several Executive Committee-sponsored events on speculative-fiction studies, can be attended by registrants virtually or in person (the following is all in Central European Time):

Wed. 8/16, 9:30-11 a.m. (Panel 7, ABS/E11 Auditorium & online): “Early Career Scholar Event: Diffrakt on Nourishing Imaginative SF/F Thought-Making, Artistry, Community” featuring members of thr German speculative-arts collective “diffrakt: centre for theoretical periphery” (http://diffrakt.space/en) Moritz Gansen and Hannah Wallenfels share how Diffrakt combines inventive pedagogy with sf theory and other intellectual discourses, to create a community-engaged arts practice. Thanks to SFU’s Ali Sperling for helping make the contact with this group and for suggesting their session in the first place!

Wed. 8/16, 16:30-18:00 (p.m.) (ABS/E11 Auditorium & online): “SFRA Business Meeting.”

Thur. 8/17, 15:30-17:00 (p.m.) (Panel 44, ABS/E08 & online): “SFRA: Equity/Diversity/ Inclusion Event: Indigenous Futurism in Latin America—The Case Study of the Aymara in El Alto, Bolivia” featuring Aymara Ph.D. student Ruben Darío Chambi Mayta of LMU Munich’s Indigeneities in the 21^st Century Project, who’ll share his research on how a Native Bolivian group has responded to settler colonialism including the state’s “Buen Vivir” (“Living Well”) campaign which extracts culture from Aymara protest history and struggles (https://www.indigen.eu/projects/core-projects/indigeneity-beyond-buen-vivir-the-aymara-case-in-bolivia). Thanks to UFL’s Libby Ginway for serving as discussant!

Fri. 8/18, 09:30-11:00 a.m. (Panel 46, ABS/E11 Auditorium & online): “[SFRA Early Career Scholars Roundtable] SF on the Market: Advice from Early Career Researchers in Pursuing an SF Studies Career” will feature global Ph.D. students and postdocs participating in a vibrant conversation & audience Q&A about concerns, strategies, and issues about being on the academic job market, including Patrick Brock Nora Castle, Reem Mansour, Yilun Fan, Candice Thornton, Andrew Erickson, Rose Moreno, and Uchechi Anomachi. Their expertise collectively spans the breadth of today’s sf/fantasy studies, from Afrofuturism, to film and visual studies, to translation and literary studies, to ethnic and cultural speculative works (and so on!). Thanks to SFRA Secretary Sarah Lohmann for chairing and organizing!

These events evolved from feedback received from participants during last year’s Oslo (2022) EC-sponsored Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion session. We’ll similarly survey those who attend this year’s EC sessions; please provide feedback then to that instrument, or directly to Hugh (hugh.oconnell@umb.edu) or me (ida@hawaii.edu), on what you’d like to see in the future as well as how the sessions went.

Questions about the TU Dresden conference?: Please contact Moritz and Julia at disruptiveimaginations@tu-dresden.de.

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