Category: From the VP

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

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 54 no. 3

From the SFRA Executive Committee

download

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-21st-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.

From the Vice President

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 54 no. 2

From the SFRA Executive Committee

download

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!

From the Vice President

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 54 no. 1

From the SFRA Executive Committee

download

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

From the Vice President

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 53 no. 4

From the SFRA Executive Committee

download

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 21st-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).

From the Vice President

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 53 no. 3

From the SFRA Executive Committee

download

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 21st 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.

From the Vice President

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 53, no. 4

From the Vice President

download

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

From the Vice President

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 52, no. 4

From the SFRA Executive Committee

download

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 Vice President

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 52, no. 3

From the SFRA Executive Committee

download

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 Vice President

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 52, no. 2

From the SFRA Executive Committee

download

From the Vice President

Ida Yoshinaga


As we head to our first truly hybrid conference, in Oslo and online this summer, it is my pleasure to facilitate a follow-up discussion on diversity and inclusion for the global SF studies community that is the Science Fiction Research Association. Last year’s organizers—in response to critical, helpful feedback on the conference program by our membership—started this conversation on how our association can perform social justice in its institutional practice in addition to appreciating it in textual analyses. We hope to become the sort of organization that puts the “Co” in “CoFuturisms,” in other words.

Such conversations have been transpiring in traditional academic disciplines as well as our modest field of speculative/fantastic studies. Diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) issues are not exclusive of other, related discussions we have been holding among the SFRA Executive Committee—for instance, how to widen our scope of country representatives so as to include more participants who are not from the Global North. How to conduct better outreach to members of non-traditional class-, gender-, sexuality-, age-, ability-, and other thriving communities of intellectuals, educators, and artists who love our family of genres. How to support our rich breadth of scholars through more extensive networking and mentorship activities as well as improved travel and research funds. And so on.

At SFRA 2022 this summer, there will be a DEIB panel that invites you to share suggestions and proposals for widening the reach of our organization, for making it more safe and encouraging to join for diverse thinkers and creatives in SF studies, and for reflecting conscientiously on the outcomes of such efforts as we move together into the future. I take my lead from observing other academic associations—for instance, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, which in the mid-2010s advanced a free trial 2-year membership for Indigenous scholars as a way to signal a welcoming space for Native, Aboriginal, First Nations, and similar researchers. For many, an SFRA membership might come secondarily after signing up to belong to a key association in one’s discipline (e.g., the MLA or ASA)—or inter-discipline (e.g., in the field of Native studies, NAISA; or of film/media studies, SCMS), as the case may be. For “alt-ac” researchers and adjuncts; for BIPOC and first-generation college-graduate scholars; for LGBTQIA faculty and storytellers working under varied social conditions, how do we facilitate membership in a vibrant, nourishing organization, so as to be competitive with other associations?

Come with your concrete suggestions for practice, policy, evaluation, finance, organizing. Come with your experiences with, and knowledge of, other associations’ (or programs’/ institutions’) imaginative, effective DEIB changes. If you can, reduce it to ONE page—outline, paragraph summary, bulleted list—to share online onscreen and in our Oslo meeting room with fellow attendees. And come with your curiosity for the future.

From the Vice President

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 52, no. 1

From the SFRA Executive Committee

download

From the Vice President

Ida Yoshinaga

Greetings, SFRA–Hoping that your health and personal journeys thrive in the Year of the Tiger.
As vice president, I am looking forward to expanding my knowledge about the speculative and fantastical genres, as I meet with you in 2022. I hope to hear about your scholarship and artistry–so do not hesitate to be in touch, especially should I run into you (virtually or in person) at March’s ICFA or our annual summer meeting in Oslo! 

We just held SFRA’s first-of-2022 gathering of country representatives over Zoom, and I was pleasantly surprised to find out how intellectually persistent and curious SFRA members have been (thus far!) during this third year of the global pandemic. Reps from Estonia (which will host a national SFRA conference in the next few years) and South Korea testified as to how the field is growing in their regions, while others from Europe, the U.S., and Latin America spoke of intriguing hybrid and online conferences on posthumanism, AI, materialism, weird narratives, spoiler studies (!), critical futures research, and affect theory. Many have been publishing on a slew of old-reliable SF subgenres (cyberpunk, utopian studies, cinematic/televisual spec fic, area/language studies) in all kinds of fresh, necessary, fascinating collections.

Everyone has been astonishingly generative amidst the spread of corona’s variants! And calls for a hopeful speculative arts, for comforting genre stories that inspire optimism and celebrate utopian communalism, have bloomed…though these have never quite been my jam. But what public-health historians are calling a mass-disabling event are giving at least some people pause to rethink anti-science ideologies. In the U.S. south (where I now reside), we are finally seeing people queue in long car lines for free COVID-19 testing. The hardcore dystopian inside me who has waited a whole life to experience the apocalypse—that films and pop culture of a 1970s childhood had once promised—is now giving way to a fresh variant. She does not bake sourdough, but she does dig into her family recipe file to re-make ancestral meals anew. If the world is ending soon, this is not what the post-apocalyptic playbook had laid out as the first step towards humanity’s inevitable return to its own decisive mistakes.

We will try to freshen SFRA with mindful, engaged conversations about how to diversify our membership ranks, to (further) globalize our conversations and research, and to live lives  vibrant and rich with community-centered imaginative arts. Why not share your ideas with us in this growling wildcat of a year!