The “Beyond Borders: Empires, Bodies, Science Fictions” conference brought together over two hundred delegates (including over sixty speakers) from a wide swathe of continents and timezones. While we were not able to record all of the conference, this post will serve as a repository for documents and files connected to the conference: keynote lectures, prerecorded presentations, roundtable chat logs/bibliographies, and much more. It will take us some time to gather all the conference materials available to us, so do check in on this post every week or two.
All material hosted here is hosted with the consent of its authors, and all rights belong to the authors in questions. If you wish to have your information/content removed from the site, please get in touch.
SFRA Review Symposium
The SFRA Review published a Beyond Borders symposium (featuring write-ups of twelve papers from the Beyond Borders conference) in their Winter 2021 issue.
Keynotes
Dr Nadine El-Enany (@NadineElEnany) Keynote Lecture
Florence Okoye (@FINOkoye) Keynote Lecture
Provocations Beyond Fiction
Michael Darko (@MakDarko) Opening Speech
Jordan Wise (@xBeautifulRoses) Opening Speech
Conference Reports & Responses
Beyond Borders: Virtual Realities and the Future of Conferencing, blog post by Dr. Megen de Bruin-Molé.
Conference Report (Fafnir) by Filip Boratyn
Conference Report (Fantastika Journal) by Beatriz Herrera Corado
Workshop: Erin A. Adams & Bretton Varga
In The Image Of (Posthu)Man: Exploring The Relationship Between Droids, Humans, And In/Justice. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1eK6dnAqzhtP3QsHy1mTF64_28ccmbFtWILN5WJs6g5Y/edit#slide=id.g940531af4c_2_59
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. phone number: +918017651276; email: agnibhaag@gmail.com.
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. https://soundcloud.com/angelaytc/chinese-climate-sf-angelaytchan; angelaytchan.com and @angelaytchan for latest projects and activities.
- 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. https://youtu.be/_bikMKiRTcM; Email: hammed.mousavi@gmail.com .
- 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. Email: krushna.kd@gmail.com; art, music, poetry, etc. may be found at https://www.instagram.com/littledeathsink; forthcoming chapter titled Gou Tanabe’s Lovecraft and the Time of the Inhuman, in Japanese Horror: New Critical Approaches to History, Narrative, and Aesthetics; forthcoming chapter titled Terror and Wartime Cosmology in Liu Cixin, in Horror Fiction in the Global South.
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. https://www.dropbox.com/s/n4nv4uotm0gyjco/borderingheroics_natmuller.pptx?dl=0; email: nat@xs4all.nl
- 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. https://youtu.be/Mrutr6VNvMM; sminsmithstyling@gmail.com / www.sminsmith.co.uk / @sminsmith
- Jonathan Thurston – Queerness and HIV in Science Fiction. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHMx6ByBkbc; thurst39@msu.edu / jonathan.thurstonhowlpub@gmail.com; Twitter @JThurstonMSU; my upcoming book Animals & Race will be published by MSU Press in 2021.
- 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. https://youtu.be/YMwYc3AplqY
- 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. https://youtu.be/0BKLZEGa0H0; email: gdlee@up.edu.ph; institutional affiliation: Department of English and Comparative Literature, College of Arts and Letters, University of the Philippines – Diliman; I’m currently putting together a writing sourcebook on Philippine speculative fiction tentatively titled Mapping New Stars: A Sourcebook on Philippine Speculative Fiction, with co-editor Anna Felicia Sanchez; we are planning on completing the manuscript by mid-2021. I’m also guest-editing a special issue of the Southeast Asian Review of English (SARE) titled Worldbuilding and the Asian Imagination and we’re currently accepting abstracts until 15 November 2020. The call for papers can be found here: https://sare.um.edu.my/announcement/view/169. Finally, my second book of sf stories, titled A Playlist for the End of the World: Stories will be coming out at the end of 2020/early 2021, to be published by the University of the Philippines Press.
- 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. Twitter: @_GeorgiaPerkins; georgiaperkins.co.uk. Current and upcoming projects: ‘Dizzying Swamp Protocols and Con-fusing Indeterminacy’Paper for Indeterminate Futures/The Future of Indeterminacy at University of Dundee(November 2020); ‘The Body in Algorithms’ Book Project with Zero Corners (Ongoing).
- Amy Butt – “Equally like a beginning and an end”: Edge-lands and threshold conditions.
- https://static1.squarespace.com/static/58c1c48129687f4f8456c96e/t/5f5cfad8381d4c58cea6f4af/1599929049075/Butt,+A.+(2020)+Equally+like+a+beginning+and+an+end+-+Edge-lands+and+threshold+conditions+.pdf; amyvictoriabutt@gmail.com; https://www.amyvictoriabutt.com.
- 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. https://youtu.be/dMhlGZHHZhk
- 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)
- 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. https://youtu.be/NSB6O3r7pb0
- 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. https://vimeo.com/456704399; Virginia.L.Conn@gmail.com; Twitter: @VirginiaLConn.
- 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. https://www.elizarose.info/perdide-retrieved; Twitter: @leaky_rose; Personal website: elizarose.info; Academic website: https://gsll.unc.edu/current-faculty/eliza-rose/
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. Email: rjasso.huezo@gmail.com , (+52 1) 55 2899 9856
- Iuliia Ibragimova – Resisting the Empire: AI’s Ethical Rebellion in Ann Leckie’s The Imperial Radch Series. Presentation: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rhvUk1muInEQZReqbKnppgnsyN3QKMEy/view?usp=sharing; Text: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1s2KfOcEZwVsWo7raWwSxAhA3GwTPIncX/view?usp=sharing
- Thomas Cheney – Green Mars: Ecological Imperialism in Science Fiction and Implications for Space Governance. https://youtu.be/SHZ8c6x9nTg; Email: thomas.cheney@open.ac.uk; Twitter: @thomcheney
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