Schedule

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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”
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”
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”
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”
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
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
Joan Slonczewski
Wendy Van Camp
Haerin (Helen) Shin

Cultural Politics of Genre

Lauren Crawford, “Reluctant Ambassadors, Righteous Activism: Nalo Hopkinson, Racefail ’09, and the Impact of Fandom”
Helane Androne, “Nnedi Okorafor’s Sacred Interlocution in Shuri and Binti
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”
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”
It’s Alive!: How Frankenstein Reimaginings Are Telling Marginalized Stories

Host: Lisa Kroger
Andy Davidson
Justin C. Key
Rebekah McKendry

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”
Sarah Lohmann, “The Social Dreaming of Le Guin: Changing Planes as Embodied Feminist Epistemology”
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”
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”
Transgender Speculative Fictions

Host: Izzy Wasserstein
Ann Leckie
Jennifer Baker
Duke Trott
David M. Higgins

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!”
Break
5–6:30 pm Plenary Session: Constance Penley (Location: Jupiter)

Saturday October 19

Time Jupiter Saturn Mercury/Venus Mars
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”
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
Ecofeminism and A Door Into Ocean

Host: Jeanne Griggs
Joan Slonczewski
David Agranoff
Brian Attebery
Sarah Lohmann

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”
Coffee break
10:30 am-noon  Plenary Interview: Ann Leckie (Location: Jupiter)
Lunch: On your own
1:00–3 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”
Cultural Ways of Knowing

Anindita Banerjee, “Aelita’s Ways of Seeing and Being”
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”
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”
Break
3:30–5 pm Plenary Session: Christine Lötscher

“Her own wild animal”. Transgressive Desire in Feminist Body Horror made in France

(Location: Jupiter)

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.

Tickets for the exhibition 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.