Registration for our “Beyond Borders: Empires, Bodies, Science Fictions” online conference is now live. If you wish to attend the event, please visit our ticket tailor event page for the conference.

The conference schedule is just below, followed by current panel compositions.

Thursday 10th September

13.00-14.00 (GMT+1) – SF & Translation (Sawad Hussain, Emily Jin, Guangzhao Lyu, Dr. Sinéad Murphy, Dr. Tasnim Qutait)

14.00-15.00 (GMT+1) – LUNCH

15.00-16.30 (GMT+1) – Workshop 1 (Rhona Eve Clews, “Plump out your bodies, we’ve sacrificed so much for flatness”)

16.30-17.00 (GMT+1) – BREAK

17.00-18.00 (GMT+1) – Workshop 2 (Bretton A. Varga & Erin Adams, “In the Image of (Posthu)Man: Exploring the Relationship Between Droids, Humans, and In/Justice” )

Friday 11th September

09:00-09:15 (GMT+1) – Opening Remarks

09:15-10:15 (GMT+1) – Keynote: Dr. Nadine El-Enany (chair: Tom Dillon)

10:15-10:30 (GMT+1) – BREAK

10:30-12:00 (GMT+1) – Panel Block 1

12:00-12:15 (GMT+1) – BREAK

12:15-13:45 (GMT+1) – Panel Block 2

13:45-15:00 (GMT+1) – LUNCH

15:00-15:15 (GMT+1) – Opening remarks (for the US)

15:15-16:45 (GMT+1) – Panel Block 3

16:45 -17:00 (GMT+1) – BREAK

17:00-18:00 (GMT+1) – Provocations Beyond Fiction (Michael Darko, Jordan Wise, chair: Ibtisam Ahmed)

Saturday 12th September

10:00-11:30 (GMT+1) – Panel Block 4

11:30-11:45 (GMT+1) – BREAK

11:45-12:45 (GMT+1) – Creator Roundtable (Chen Qiufan, Larissa Sansour, Linda Stupart, chair: Angela Chan)

12:45-15:00 (GMT+1) – LUNCH

15:00-16:30 (GMT+1) – Panel Block 5 (N.B. 5C to begin at 14:45)

16:30-16:45 (GMT+1) – BREAK

16:45 – 18:15 (GMT+1) – Panel Block 6

18:15 – 18:30 (GMT+1) – BREAK

18:30 – 19:30 (GMT+1) – Keynote: Florence Okoye (chair: Katie Stone)

Panel Block 1

Panel 1A: Collective Struggle, Collective Joy (chair: Katie Stone)

• Carolyn Lau – Generative Powers of the Limited Present
• Joel White – Imagining Abolition

Panel 1B: Dissected, Augmented, Perfected: The Dystopian Body (chair: Rachel Hill)

• Rimi Nandy – Re-wiring the self and memory in the Post Human being
• Ewa Drab – Limitations of the bodies in a dystopian society: The example of The Belles by Dhonielle Clayton
• Agnibha Banerjee – “We’re modelled from trash”: Corporeal and Corporate Borders in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go

Panel 1C – Chinese SF 1:  Pass the Point of No Return (chair: Guangzhao Lyu)

• Yen Ooi  – Language and the borders of identity in ‘The Language Sheath’ by Regina Kanyu Wang
• Angela Chan – Climate Change and Contemporary Chinese Science and Speculative Fiction: Invisible, Extractive and Uneven Boundaries
• Jan Marvin A. Goh – The Gothic-Speculative Condition of Chinese-Filipino Diaspora: Rethinking the Authorial Negotiations and Representations of Charlson Ong in his Of that Other Country We Now Speak and other Stories

Panel Block 2

Panel 2A: Dystopia, Apocalypse and the Border (chair: Amy Butt)

• Seyedhamed Moosavi – Different Types of Borders in the films Grain and Blade Runner 2049
• Glyn Morgan – “The Sight of the Beautiful Wall”: Pandemic, Gentrification and Traumatic Apocalypses in Colson Whitehead’s Zone One
• Hasnul Insani Djohar – Beyond Borders: Empires, Bodies, and Cyber in G Willow Wilson’s Alif The Unseen

Panel 2B: Paranoia, Scepticism and the Limits of the SF Novel (chair: Francis Gene-Rowe)

• Marek Maj – Stanisław Lem and the Literature of Failure
• Krushna Dande – Secured, Contained, Protected: Consensus Reality in the SCP Foundation

Panel 2C: SF Beyond 1: Performing Science Fictionality; Transgressing Borders (chair: Sinéad Murphy)

• Nat Muller – Bordering the Frame: Superheroes, Art, and the Rethinking of Borders in Oreet Ashery and Larissa Sansour’s The Novel of Nonel and Vovel
• Faisal Adel Hamadah – Theatre Against the Border; Virtual Presence and Political Absence

Panel Block 3

Panel 3A: SF and Desire: Wanting Better Worlds (chair: Sasha Myerson)

• Smin Smith – Beyond the Binary: Queer Feminist Science Fiction Art
• Jonathan Thurston – Queerness and HIV in Science Fiction
• Chiara Pellegrini – Trans-inhabiting Aliens: Gender-variant Embodiment and Science Fiction’s Reshaping of Borders

Panel 3B: Against Extrapolation: Reimagining SF (chair: Sakshi Tyagi)

• Filip Boratyn – Race and Enchantment in N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy: Magic, Modernity, Geology
• Andrew Ferguson – Decolonizing the Novum
• Alessandra Marino – SF as critical thinking: Donna Haraway and Ursula Le Guin’s fabulations on living with the trouble

Panel 3C: Chinese SF 2: Upon the Wasteland (chair: Guangzhao Lyu)

• Fan Ni – Solastalgia on the Silicon Isle (Guiyu): Visiting the “Heart of Darkness” of the Technology Empire in Chen Qiufan’s Waste Tide (2013)
• Xiaoli Yang – Living with/within Waste: Toxic Space and Abject Bodies in Chen Qiufan’s Waste Tide
• Ling Liu – Disposable life in “The Wandering Earth”

Panel Block 4

Panel 4A: Nonhuman Bodies and Taxonomic Fantasies (chair: Rimi Nandy)

• Lee Christien – Bodies and Borders in the Colonial Archives
• Prema Arasu and Drew Thornton – “Sleeping with the Fishmen: Oceanic-Chthonic Hybrid Couplings in Fantasy and Myth”

Panel 4B: Pliable Futures (chair: Tom Dillon)

• Giulia Iannuzzi- A new and unexampled way of writing the history of future empires: Samuel Madden’s Eighteenth-century Twentieth century
• Sakshi Tyagi – Beyond Otjize and Medusae: Identity and Borders in Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti
• Mary Regine Dadole – Familiar Aliens: An Analysis of the Postcolonial Condition and the Politics of Science Fiction in Isaac Asimov’s “The Martian Way”

Panel 4C: SF Beyond 2: Fortress Cities and Flight: Walls, Barriers, Migration (chair: Tasnim Qutait)

• Gabriela Lee – Dreaming Domesticity: The Migrant Workforce in Philippine SF
• Farah Al Yaqout – Borders, Edges, and Walls: The Urban is Dystopian in Ahmed Khaled Towfiq’s Utopia
• Aishwarya Subramanian – The Walls of Delhi: Borders, Boundaries and Barricades

Panel Block 5

Panel 5A: Make the Border Strange (chair: Avery Delany)

• Georgia Perkins – Speculative F(r)ictions and Slimy Indeterminacy
• Amy Butt – “Equally like a beginning and an end”: Edge-lands and threshold conditions
• Nivi Manchanda and Sharri Plonski – Stranger than (Science)Fiction: A Conversation between the Border and the Corridor

Panel 5B: Walls, Maps, Deserts: Unreal Geographies (chair: Eliza Rose)

• Gwilym Eades – Representation without Reproduction: Beyond the Borders of the Science Fiction Map
• Emily Hall – Surveillance, Borders, and (Re)Imagining the Nation in Chang-Rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea
• Adam Stock – Deserting futures and states of uncertainty: re-thinking desert dystopian settings

Panel 5C: SF Beyond 3: Border-Crossing Bodies; Embodied Borders (chair: Sinéad Murphy. Please note the earlier start time for this panel)

• Sümeyra Buran – Beyond Borders of the Gender Binary: Towards Genderqueer Mirror Universe
• Ibtisam Ahmed – Crossing Thresholds: Exploring Bangladeshi Social Borders in Djinn City
• Serena Ceniccola – Reimagining the Hybrid: Transnational Rewritings of the Kitsune in Ishida Sui’s Tokyo Ghoul and Julie Kagawa’s Shadow of the Fox
• Shoumik Bhattacharya – Life and the Possibilities of Humanity in Animal’s People

Panel Block 6

Panel 6A: Science Fiction: Capitalist Tool, Revolutionary Weapon (chair: Francis Gene-Rowe)

• Brittany R. Roberts – Advertising for the Void: Consumer Capitalism and the Collapse of the Real in Viktor Pelevin’s Homo Zapiens
• Pablo Gómez-Muñoz – Reshaping Geographies, Transforming Bodies: The Operation of Cheaponomics in Contemporary SF Cinema

Panel 6B: Sensing New Worlds (chair: Ibtisam Ahmed)

• Virginia Conn – Blinded by the Light: Atomic Visuality and the Boundaries of Perception
• Joe P. L. Davidson – The space between the beats: dub and the ruins of the Caribbean
• Eliza Rose – Perdide Retrieved: Two Tales of Acousmatic Time Travel

Panel 6C: The Politics of Expansion (chair: Rachel Hill)

• Ricardo Jasso Huezo – Empire’s Barrier of Silence: H G Wells’ Silent Martian Invasion and the Unknown Reasons for Imperialism
• Iuliia Ibragimova – Resisting the Empire: AI’s Ethical Rebellion in Ann Leckie’s The Imperial Radch Series
• Thomas Cheney – Green Mars: Ecological Imperialism in Science Fiction and Implications for Space Governance