Registration for our SF + Activism & Resistance conference is now live! You can find the event page here. Please note that you do not need to ‘prove’ eligibility for whichever ticket type your purchase.

We are also very pleased to reveal the conference schedule! Please note that this is a provisional schedule, and that titles, chairs and even panel composition may change. All times provided are British Summer Time (GMT +1).

Thursday 9th September

12.45-13.00: Introduction/Welcome

13.00-14.00: Panel Block 1

14.00-15.00: Panel Block 2

15.00-15.30: BREAK

15.30-16.30: Panel Block 3

16.30-17.00: BREAK

17.00-18.00: Panel Block 4

Friday 10th September

9.45-10.00: Introduction/Welcome

10.00-11.00: Panel Block 5

11.00-12.00: Panel Block 6

12.00-13.00: LUNCH

13.00-14.00: Panel Block 7

14.00-15.00: Creators Roundtable (Jeannette Ng, Rivers Solomon, Neon Yang, Chair: Avery Delany)

15.00-15.30: BREAK

15.30-16.30: Panel Block 8

16.30-17.00: BREAK

17.00-18.00: Keynote: Radha D’Souza (Chair: Heather McKnight)

Saturday 11th September

10.45-11.00: Introduction/Welcome

11.00-12.00: Panel Block 9 [Session 9A has a duration of 90 minutes]

12.00-13.00: LUNCH

13.00-14.00: Panel Block 10

14.00-15.00: Keynote: Grace Dillon (Chair: Katie Stone), “Moozhig-aendum-itchigaewin: Indigenous Futurisms and Climate Justice”

15.00-15.30: BREAK

15.30-16.30: Panel Block 11

16.30-17.00: BREAK

17.00-18.00: Indigenous Games Roundtable (Johnnie Jae, Santo Aveiro-Ojeda, Weyodi OldBear, Chair: Johnnie Jae)

18.00-18.15: Thanks, acknowledgement & closing remarks/farewell

Panel Block 1

Panel 1A: Digital Somatics: Feminism, Bodies, Dominion (chair: Avery Delany)

• Adam McLain (he/him), My Body, My Data: Orwell, Social Media, and #MeToo (Content Warning: sexual violence)
• MK Pinder (she/her), “She infected us with her gift” An Ecofeminist Look at Resident Evil Antagonists as SciFi Horror Matriarchs

Panel 1B: Recuperating Agency: Challenging Dystopia to Salvage Utopia (chair: Cristina Diamant)

• Alba Gallego (she/her), Revisiting the Future: Social Criticism and Resistance in Walter Mosley’s Futureland (Content Warning: brief discussion of slavery and mutilation)
• Megen de Bruin-Molé (she/her), Salvaging Utopia: Lessons for (and from) the Left in Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts (2017), The Deep (2019), and Sorrowland (2021)
• AM Marini (she/her), Dystopias in the Trump Era: Anti/Immigration and Resistance in Calexit

Panel Block 2

Panel 2A: Publishing Feminist SF: A Model for Activism (self-moderated roundtable)

• Una McCormack (she/her), Paul March-Russell (he/him), Sarah Kember (she/her) &  Aishwarya Subramanian (she/her)

Panel 2B: Can Chinese Science Fiction Transcend Binary Thinking? (self-moderated roundtable)

• Mia Chen Ma (she/her), Yen Ooi (she/her), Regina Kanyu Wang, Frederike Schneider-Vielsäcker & Angela Chan (she/her)

Panel 2C: Realising the Fictional: Mapping, Narrative, Speculative Activism (chair: Tom Dillon)

• Gwilym Eades (he/him), Dhalgren as handbook for mapping an activist hyperobject
• Heather McKnight (she/her), “I don’t see how singing and dancing could be dangerous” Becoming Utopian in Utopia Falls: Interrogating a Nano-Utopian Moment in Teen TV
• Kate Meakin (they/she), Feminist speculative activism: narrativising the use of the speculative in UK movement building

Panel Block 3

Panel 3A: Star Wars and Star Trek: Sagas of Hope for a More Just Future (self-moderated roundtable)

• Randall Milstein (he/him), Jose-Antonio Orosco (he/him) & Mohammed Shakibnia (he/him)

Panel 3B: Imagining Crip Futures (chair: Marietta Kosma)

• Sarah King (she/her), Real Soviet Men: Disability and (Token) Representation in Viktor Pelevin’s Omon Ra
• Laura Nash (she/her), Crips Claim Space: Disabled Writers Resisting Eugenicist Ideology Through Science Fiction
• Chiara Montalti (she/her), (Crip) feminist futures. The case of Woman on the Edge of Time (Piercy, 1976) (Content Warning: eugenics)

Panel 3C: Decolonising the Future: Spiritual Technologies and Alternative Futurisms (chair: Edward King)

• Arwen Spicer (she/her), “I Come from the East of the Mountain: Greg Sarris’s How a Mountain Was Made: Stories as a Transformative Indigenous Futurism” (Content Warning: discussion of trauma, addiction and other impacts of colonialism)
• Julia Wintner (she/her), Cosmism and Afro-Futurism: Life Against Death
• Adwait Singh (they/them) & Rachel Hill (she/her), An Ode to Devour: Spiritual Eating and Kinship in N. K. Jemisin

Panel Block 4

Panel 4A: Justice for the Margins: Building Intersectional Futures (chair: Kate Meakin)

• ksenia fir (they/she),  Border Hacking and Queer Utopias of Sense8 and Transfinite
• Marietta Kosma (she/her), Politics of the margins in Octavia Butler’s Kindred – queerness, disability, race
• Ezeiyoke Chukwunonso (Peter, he/him) & Laura Atherton (she/her), Speculative Fiction as a tool for Sexual Justice

Panel 4B: Cultivating Indigenous Futures (chair: Jarrel de Matas)

• Nicole Ku’uleinapuananiolikoawapuhimelemeleolani Furtado (she/her), Wandering the World’s Most Isolated Metropolis: Structured Dispossession & Post-Apocalyptic Stress Syndrome in the Film Waikiki
• Abdenour Bouich (he/him), Beyond the End: Indigenous Futurisms’ Intervention in the Anthropocene

Panel 4C: Exploding the Borders of the Human (chair: Megen de Bruin-Molé )

• Zita Hüsing (she/her), Racism and the Control of (Post)human Bodies in Minister Faust’s Mir: Volume I: Ascension
• Helane Androne (she/her), Theorizing Emancipation: Butler’s Parable through Sandoval’s Methodology of the Oppressed
• María Ferrández San Miguel (she/her), Posthuman Ethics and Human-Animal Ontologies in Ted Chiang’s “The Great Silence”

Panel Block 5

Panel 5A: Are you game? Videogame activism in Hong Kong (chair: Avery Delany)

• ACAB (she/her)

Panel 5B: When the Past Remains: Activism, Care, Writing (chair: Sophia Bazile)

• Gillian Polack (she/her), When the personal affects the story: activism and novel writing
• Kathryn Heffner, Participatory Cultures of Care: Femizine and Proto-Feminist Fan Productions in the Mid-Century

Panel 5C: Disposable Lives Amid Disaster (chair: Alba Gallego)

• Sonakshi Srivastava (she/her), Sub/versions: Speculating Justice in Animal’s People
• Danny Steur (he/him), Living beyond stonelore: Suturing towards a multi-epistemic literacy in the dehumanist ethico-politics of non-imperial communities in N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth

Panel Block 6

Panel 6A: Poetics of Pain and Enchantment (chair: Ezeiyoke Chukwunonso)

• Yen Ooi (she/her), 6 4 Lines
• Chiara Cigarini (she/her), Challenging the system by subverting the canon: re-enchanting Chinese science fiction through poetry

Panel 6B: The Tumultuous Alternatives of Historical Futurisms (chair: Francis Gene-Rowe)

• Ruiying Zhang (she/her), Phantom Narrative in Three Science Fictions set in Ming Dynasty China
• Christopher Loughlin, When was Celtofuturism? Proto-Science-Fiction and Voyages Extraordinaires

Panel 6C: Cosmic Resistance (chair: Nat Muller)

• Flis Holland (they/them), Subserotic Bulge [Screening]
• Emma Puranen (she/her), Exoplanets as Sites of Rebellion

Panel Block 7

Panel 7A: A World Beyond This World’: A Panel on Queer and Trans Resistance in The Deep (self-moderated roundtable)

• Beyond Gender Collective

Panel 7B: Revolutionary Emotion Against Injustice (chair: Yen Ooi)

• Eliza Rose (she/her), The Communist Hypothesis in SF, or: The Sad Metaphor of the Marxist Archeologist
• David M. Higgins (all pronouns acceptable), “Save It For When It Will Make a Difference” – Cynical Reason and Revolutionary Activism in Ancillary Justice
• Danxue Zhou (she/her), Urbanization and Social Inequalities in Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction

Panel 7C: Inciting Disobedient Subjects: Desire, Empathy, Grief (chair: Cristina Diamant)

• Emily Hall (she/her), The Meaning of Life: Grievability, Human Rights, and Readerly Empathy in Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods and Jesse Ball’s The Divers’ Game (Content Warning: discussion of representations of suicide)
• Agnibha Banerjee (he/him), “There is still chaos”: Eros as Error in the Construction of the Posthuman Subject in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We

Panel Block 8

Panel 8A: Labouring Towards the Unknown (chair: Emily Hall)

• Jo Lindsay Walton (he/him), ABOLISH MONEY
• Ellie Campbell (she/her) & Antonia Eliason (she/they), Teaching Law and Science Fiction at the University of Mississippi
• José Gomez Moreno, Film Sleep Dealer (2008)

Panel 8B: Ruinous Recuperation (chair: Zita Hüsing)

• Dave Hubble (he/him), Bricoleurs in SF: making do beyond the walls of Utopia
• Zoe Goldstein (she/her), If It’s Vacant Take It: Spatial and Environmental Justice in the Reconfiguration of Urban Refuse
• Nat Muller (she/her), Utopian Impulses through Ruin in Larissa Sansour’s In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain (2015)

Panel 8C: Counterfiguring Hegemonic Injustice (chair: AM Marini)

• Simran Gindwani (she/her), Subversion of patriarchal norms through the metaphor of Mythology in Indian Science Fiction
• Jarrel De Matas (he/him), Configuring the Caribbean through sf
• Edward King, Afrofuturismo and the Aesthetics of Resistance to Algorithmic Racism in Brazil

Panel Block 9

Panel 9A: Gaming the Futures of Activism and Resistance (chair: Avery Delany) [90 minute workshop]

• Sophia Bazile (she/her)

Panel 9B: The Softer Path: Quiet Activisms and Failed Resistance (chair: Rachel Hill)

• Roy Tristan B. Agustin (he/him), Tacit Resistance Against Authoritarianism and Imperialism in Gregorio Brilliantes’ “The Apollo Centennial”
• Iuliia Ibragimova (she/her), Outlaws and Bounty Hunters: Failed Resistance in Farscape (1999-2003) and Killjoys (2014-2019)
• Gabriely Pinto (she/her), So we can walk forward with knowledge of who we were before”: Landscape, History and Resistance in Sarah Maria Griffin’s Spare and Found Parts

Panel 9C: Glimpsing a Resilient Hope: The Fight for Climate Justice (chair: Angela Chan)

• Yue Zhou, Representation of Ecological Injustice in Post-1990s Chinese Science Fiction
• Erika De Vivo (she/her), Gállogieddi 100 years from now: Markomeannu#2118 Sámi art-activism between past and futures at the intersection of climate-fiction and reality

Panel Block 10

Panel 10A: Glitching Exchanges, Subverting Coloniality (chair: Kathryn Heffner)

• Päivi Väätänen (she/her), Resisting and reshaping the alien encounter narrative
• Elsa Bouet (she/her), Is the price right?: Decolonising Global Trade in Octavia Butler’s Dawn
• Chandrica Barua (she/her), A terrible femininity: Ornaments, cyborgs, and monstra

Panel 10B: Sertaopunk (chair: Ariela Parisi)

• Alan de Sa, Gabriele Diniz, Ariela Parisi (she/her)

Panel Block 11

Panel 11A: Counter-Protagonistic Resistance (chair: David M. Higgins)

• Jonathan Thornton (he/him), Dissolving the Individual: Collective Consciousness as a Rebellion Against Neoliberalism in Tade Thompson’s Rosewater and Chana Porter’s The Seep
• Ana Romão (she/her), Resisting Military Futurism: Black Mirror’s ‘Men Against Fire’ and the Dystopian Representation of the Military Cyborg
• Thais FL (she/her), The Hero Doesn’t Need a Face and We Don’t Need a Hero: 3%, Social Justice and the Shared Protagonism of Brazilian Science Fiction

Panel 11B: From Dystopian Impasse to Vistas of Hope (chair: Elsa Bouet)

• Ariela Parisi (she/her), Of Black Bodies and Celestial Bodies: Queer Afrofuturism and New Spatialities in Diego Paulino’s Negrum3
• Meltem Dağcı, An Ecofeminist Look at Apocalyptic Solarpunk
• Lucía Leandro Hernández (she/her), Dystopian scenarios in “the Switzerland of Central America”: science fiction stories by female Costa Rican writers