Thursday October 17
| Time | Event |
| 10–noon | Registration |
| Noon | Bus departs for Academy Museum (details below) |
| 2–4:30pm | Museum tour |
| 6 pm (latest) | Arrive back at hotel |
| 7-8pm | Plenary Session: Anne Toole (Location: Jupiter) |
| 8–9 pm | Opening reception; outdoors |
Friday October 18
| Time | Jupiter | Saturn | Mars | Mercury/Venus |
| 8–8:30 am | Continental Breakfast (Outdoor patio space) | |||
| 8:30-10:00 am | Feminist Aesthetics
Mihaela Mihailova, “Reclaiming the I in AI: Deepfakes as Speculative Feminist Filmmaking”
Paula Burleigh, “Picturing Other Worlds: Feminist Speculative Fiction: in Contemporary Visual Art”
Jacqueline A. Heinzelmann, “Dark Rooms: The Feminine Gaze in Life Is Strange”
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Narrative Technique
Wendy Van Camp, “Every Word Matters: Using Poetry Concepts To Enrich Your Prose”
Duke Trott, “Speculative Poetry as Black Feminist Resistance ”
Rachel Haywood, “Elena Aldunate: Creating Utopia in Golden Age Chilean SF”
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Images of Women
Samantha Tapia, “Scientists, Slayers, and Witches: A New Age for Women in Television”
Audrey Taylor, “Domestic Space in Anne McCaffrey”
Anna Wohlgemuth, “From the Darkness: A Practice-Based Research on Feminist Aesthetics for Future Storytelling in Popular Media”
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| Coffee break | ||||
| 10:30 am-noon | Doubles, Dolls, Avatars and Their Operators
Jasmine Moore, “‘bLaCk siMmERs DOnT ExiSt’: Shaping Worlds via Black Doll Culture and The Sims 4”
Allison de Fren, “Maria’s Daughters: The Pop Diva, the Female Robot, and Metropolis”
James Tobias, “‘Stunt Women’: Moving Image Doubles as Personhood and as Prosthesis”
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Ecology
Patrick B. Sharp, “Green Cities and Nascent Ecofeminism in Early Science Fiction Magazines”
Karoline Huber, “Enclosure and Escape: The Female Bildungsroman in Speculative Climate Fiction”
Sheyda Safaeyan, “‘The grit that made the pearl’ or a Plantesque “Passenger?: Peeking Through the Paradoxical Patterns of Obfuscation in Jeff VanderMeer’s The Southern Reach Series”
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Biology and Women: Avatar, Dune, and Black Panther
A conversation about speculative representations of women in biology focusing on three blockbuster films. Host: Kate JohnsTon |
Cultural Politics of Genre
Lauren Crawford, “Reluctant Ambassadors, Righteous Activism: Nalo Hopkinson, Racefail ’09, and the Impact of Fandom”
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| Lunch: Hotel box lunch | ||||
| 1:00–2:30 pm | Artificial Intelligence
Leslie J. Fernandez, “Asian Feminist Techno-Poetics”
Haerin Shin, “Ambiguous AI: Lossy Compression, Model Collapse, and Intercultural Sensitivity in Person of Interest”
Stina Attebery, “Fetal Technology: Metaphors for AI in Whispers of a Machine”
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Queer
Hester Baer, “Unsequencing: Queer-Feminist Futurity in Ula Stöckl & Edgar Reitz’s Tales of the Dumpster Kid (1969–71)”
Maria Barreto, “An Apocalypse of Choice: Rejection of ‘Chosen’ identity becomes vital for solidifying queer futurity in Rita Indiana’s La Mucama de Ominculé (trans. title: Tentacle)”
Amrita Chakraborty, ““A Forest of Hands”: Transcorporeal Bodies and Speculative Ecologies in Amruta Patil’s Kari and Vandana Singh’s Short Fiction”
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It’s Alive!: How Frankenstein Reimaginings Are Telling Marginalized Stories
Host: Lisa Kroger |
Modes of Storytelling
Suchandana Bhattacharyya, “The Myriad Shades of Time: On the Art of Magical Realism in Alice Walker’s The Temple of My Familiar”
Ayana Jamieson, “Kindred Re-Membered: Revelations on Octavia E. Butler’s First Screen Adaptation”
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| Break | ||||
| 3:00–4:30 pm | Climate Crisis
Paweł Frelik, “Making and Unmaking the Anthropocene in Horizon Zero Dawn (2017)”
Christina Shiea, Bony Tongue, “Meet Silver Spoon: Environmental Considerations of the Arowana and its Aquarium in Devotion”
David Shipko, “The (Gendered) Subject of Geoengineering”
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Women’s SF
Brian Attebery, “The Women Nobody Saw: Concealed Identities and Covert Messages in Women’s Science Fiction of the 1970s”
Steven Shaviro, “On (not) Saving the World: Joanna Russ’ Extra(Ordinary) People”
David Agranoff, “ Can I Tell You a Story: The Impact of Dorothy Fontana on 20th-Century Science Fiction”
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Transgender Speculative Fictions
Host: Izzy Wasserstein |
Myth
Shengya, Huo, “From Hulijing (Fox Spirit) to Cyberfox: the Metamorphosis of a Literary Image from Chinese to American Speculative Fictions”
Genevieve Munsey, “Sleeping Beauty as Disability Sci-Fi”
Marjut Puhakka, “Zombie girls save the world!”
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| Break | ||||
| 5–6:30 pm | Plenary Session: Constance Penley (Location: Jupiter) | |||
Saturday October 19
| Time | Jupiter | Saturn | Mars | Mercury/Venus |
| 8–8:30 am | Continental Breakfast (Outdoor patio space) | |||
| 8:30-10:00 am | Rewriting Stories
Claudia Sackl, “Alternative Histories for the Future. Afropean Afrofuturisms in Bernardine Evaristo’s Soul Tourists” (2005) and SchwarzRund’s Biskaya (2016)”
John Rieder, “Posthuman Protagonists and Space Opera Conventions in the Novels of Ann Leckie and Arkady Martine”
Andrew Hageman, “How Issa López’s True Detective: Night Country Reframes Gender and Race in Near-Polar SF”
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Identity
Timothy James Schreiber, “The One-Eyed Space Captain From The Sewers: ‘Passing’ and Identity in Futurama”
Daniel Lambert, “‘The Razor-Potato Man’: An Analysis of Harlan Ellison’s Short Story ‘He Who Grew Up Reading Sherlock Holmes’”
Jennifer Baker, “There is an ‘I’ in Human: Individuality, Datafication, and Other Human Conditions in Ghost in the Shell”
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Ecofeminism and A Door Into Ocean
Host: Jeanne Griggs |
Anti-Capitalism
Hugh C. O’Connell, “The Financial Imaginaries and Indebted Lives of Claire North’s 84K”
Agnibha Banerjee, “‘The Ones That Twisted Away’: Queering (Post)Human Futures in Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods”
Joshua Pearson, “Poor Things: Sutured from, and bringing new life to, the SF Megatext”
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| Coffee break | ||||
| 10:30 am-noon | Plenary Interview: Ann Leckie (Location: Jupiter) | |||
| Lunch: On your own | ||||
| 1:30–3 pm | Visual Arts
Willem Conrad, “Sculpting SF”
Lisa Swanstrom, “FABRICULES . Polyester, Pleather, and Sexual Politics in Speculative Textiles across Media”
Paul Harris, “Rewritten in Stone: Geo-Poetic Translations in/of N.K. Jemisin, Louise Erdrich, and A.S. Byatt”
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Cultural Ways of Knowing
Helane Androne, “Nnedi Okorafor’s Sacred Interlocution in Shuri and Binti”
Jennifer Eastman Attebery, “Epistemological Inquiry in Molly Gloss’s Science Fiction”
Colin Milburn, “Getting Carried Away: Probes and Other Speculative Instruments in Alien Abduction Narratives”
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Costume Design Session | Embodiment
Julia Gatermann, “Memories of the Womb: Painful Transformations, Queer Kinships, and Embodied Knowledge in Rivers Solomon’s The Deep”
Jovana Isevski, “Dangerous Frequences: Reclaiming the Body in N. K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth Trilogy”
Rachel S. Anderson, “Tentacles/Hair: Medusa, Shambleau, and Binti”
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| Break | ||||
| 3:30–5 pm | Plenary Session: Christine Lötscher
“Her own wild animal”. Transgressive Desire in Feminist Body Horror made in France (Location: Jupiter) |
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| Break | ||||
| 7:30–9 pm | Closing Banquet | |||
All events take place on the second floor of the hotel.
Registration: Early registration for the SFAM conference is $300 per attendee, or $225 per student /underemployed attendee. Early registration ends on September 2, 2024. After that date, registration becomes $350 per attendee or $250 per student / underemployed attendee. The registration fee covers the cost of the hotel conference rooms, tech setups, food, and refreshments. Full details about the food and refreshments will be on the schedule when it is finalized. To register, use the PayPal link.
Cyberpunk Exhibition: Conference attendees can attend the Cyberpunk: Envisioning Possible Futures Through Cinema exhibition at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures (6067 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles) on Thursday, October 17th from 1-4pm. This will include a conversation with the curators of the exhibition and access to other exhibitions at the museum. You can find more information about the exhibition here.
In addition, there will also be the possibility to visit the and Color in Motion exhibition. Film scholar Barbara Flueckiger, who worked on Color in Motion, will be on site to give tours of that exhibition to attendees who are interested.
Tickets for the two exhibitions cost $23 for adults and $14 for students over 18 (with ID). Children under 17 get in free. These prices include a $1 charge for service fees. You must reserve your ticket in advance here.