Category: From the VP

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From the Vice President

Chris Pak

Greetings all! It has been an incredibly busy and hot summer, but I hope it has been treating you well. We’ve had our amazing SFRA conference at Michigan State University last month and I’d like to thank the organising committee and those who provided support, technical and otherwise, for putting together and running such an engaging and thought-provoking event. My appreciation also goes out to everyone who participated in person and online. I’d also like to take the opportunity to congratulate our 2026 award winners and the recipient of our Support a New Scholar (non-tenure track B) award, Orin Posner. Well done to all of you!

Our next round of the Support a New Scholar award will be open to graduate students. I shall be circulating information about this award in due course but please do consider applying if you are eligible or encourage your graduate students to apply. The award is an opportunity for the SFRA to support outstanding scholars so that they are able to engage more fully with the organisation. To that end I’d love to hear from as many graduate students as possible.

This year’s Vision and Support session involved a discussion about futures thinking and public engagement. One of our panellists, Petranka Malcheva, a policy lead at the Office of the Future Generations Commissioner for Wales, provided a number of resources about futures thinking and public engagement that I’d like to share with the wider membership. These include links to the work on Culture and the Welsh language by the Future Generations Office, the projects Communities and Climate Change in Future Wales, the Bannau Brycheiniog harnessing futures storytelling, the Engagement Institute’s IAP2 Spectrum of Public Participation, and the National Infrastructure Commission Wales’ Toolkit: Engaging Diverse Communities in Climate Adaptation Conversations. Sonja Fritzsche also mentioned that Megan Halpern at Michigan State University runs a community engagement speculative design workshop as part of her Center for Interdisciplinary Research, Collaboration, Learning, and Engagement (CIRCLE). If you find these resources useful or are working on sf, public engagement and policy I would love to hear about it and to correspond to keep the conversations going.

As I mentioned above, it has been a busy summer. I attended the fantastic inaugural symposium of the Zurich SF Network, which was organised by Sarah Lohmann and Simon Spiegel. Our country representatives have also reported on a number of events that have taken place this summer, particularly in Germany, including Enmonsterisations in the Fantastic, the International Symposium of the German Inklings Society, and Metropolcon 2026 (Eurocon 2026). In September the annual Elstercon conference will take place in Leipzeig, while Situating Energy, the forthcoming PetroCultures conference, and “Data↔Worlds” are being held at TU Dresden in September.

With that update, I wish you all the best for the remainder of the summer.

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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!

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From the Vice President

Chris Pak

One of the joys of working with the SFRA is the sheer number of projects, events, creative works and public engagements that I hear about as vice-president through our quarterly country representatives meetings. From projects such as the Spanish-language Future Laboratories LabandJessica Imbach’s European Research Council funded project, Sinofantasy, the exciting activity being conducted by the new Zurich Science Fiction Network, chaired by our former SFRA secretary Sarah Lohmann, to the variety of talks and conferences, such as Petrocultures 2026, which is being held at TU Dresden, sf scholarship’s vigour and dynamism is always a delight to hear about. Events such as the Kyoto International Manga Museum’s ongoing exhibition of art from Nyaight of the Living Cat, the 2025 International Science Fiction Festival’s Les Utopialesin Nantes, the 46^th Japan SF Awards, voted for by the SFF Writers of Japan, and the exciting scholarly and creative works published from around the world reaffirm the vitality of the field. It’s a pleasure to share these engagements and creative works through this column but I have also been exploring channels to communicate this information to our wider membership. I will thus be looking to develop ways to use the SFRA website to do so. Of course, if you have any suggestions, please do feel free to reach out to me to let me know of them. If you would like to get more closely involved with the SFRA then I would encourage you to consider becoming a country representative. Take a look at the Country Representatives page to see whether the country you would like to represent already has a liaison and, if so, do reach out to them to join the country network. Otherwise, do consider volunteering—just send me an expression of interest by email.

Plans for our annual conference at Michigan State University are well underway, and more details and conference acceptances will be issued shortly, if you’ve not already received them. Do consider applying for the travel grant. Further details about this grant will be shared along with the acceptance notifications. During this year’s conference we shall be using the ECR panel to explore a new mentorship scheme whereby the organisation shall pair mentees and mentors, who will collaborate to develop a mentorship programme that works for both. If you think you would benefit from being paired with a mentor or if you would like to volunteer to mentor someone during the 2026–2027 period, please do attend the ECR panel and let us know of your interest.

I shall be looking forward to seeing you at this year’s conference, which I shall be attending virtually. Until my next column, I wish you all the best for 2026.

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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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