Academic

  • Contact: academic@wiscon.net
  • Deadline for proposals: March 1, 2025 
  • WisCon 46 will take place May 23-25, 2025

WisCon’s Land Acknowledgement.

2025 Call for Papers

Given our current political moment, we invite papers and panels that engage with Palestine and the genocide in Gaza, including but not limited to works listed in Sonia Sulaiman’s #ReadPalestinianSpecFic reading list and the edited volume Thyme Travellers (2024). What is feminist speculative fiction’s contribution to thinking about humanitarian conflicts, here and now, especially in relation to indigeneity, climate calamities, and Western complicity in global crises? We are interested in papers that deal specifically with social and cultural questions about the radical politics of futures as they relate to feminist speculative fiction and for work on the histories and dream-making of freedom-oriented fan communities. We encourage proposals to consider science fiction as a site of resistance, connection, survival, and solidarity. 

For example, how can feminist speculative fiction help us fight for a more just world? What lessons can be learned from Indigenous, Black, POC, disabled, and diasporic speculative fiction, to advance decolonial and anti-racist change? How can we use speculative fiction genres to respond to the threats of white supremacy, settler colonialism, dispossession, militarization, and extractive capitalism? 

An incomplete list of possible subjects:

  • Gender, gender identity, sexuality, race, class, and disability in individual works of science fiction and fantasy, especially in the works of 2025’s Guests of Honor (TBA). 
  • Explorations of different iterations of love, erotics, care, mutual aid, and solidarity.
  • Rethinking Humanity and Humanism to intentionally decenter whiteness, through robot intelligence, A.I., ability/disability/superability, & BIPOC embodiments.
  • Speculative aspects of feminist and social justice movements, especially reproductive rights (or the lack of).
  • Critiques and reimaginations of class in speculative fiction, especially in the context of intersectionality. 
  • Race, colonialism, and speculative fiction; Indigenous Futurism, Afrofuturism, Latinx Futurism, Africanfuturism, techno-Orientalism, Arab Futurism, Muslim Futurism, and related cultural movements.
  • Feminist pedagogy and speculative fiction in the classroom and beyond.
  • Feminist, queer, critical race, and critical disability analysis of speculative fiction in media
  • Reading and critiquing banned books.
  • How and in what ways can we embrace The Future is Disabled (Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2022)? And what if disability justice and disabled wisdom are crucial to creating a future in which it’s possible to survive fascism, climate change, genocide, and pandemics and to bring about liberation?

An incomplete list of possible formats: 15-minute paper presentations, with or without visual accompaniment, Groups of presentations submitted together as panels, Presentation of scholarly creative works, including digital scholarship, Discussion-based panels and roundtables on scholarly research, teaching, or service, Screenings and discussions of short films or videos.

The deadline for submitting an abstract for WisCon 2025 is midnight Central Time on March 1, 2025. This year, the Con will be online and the sessions will be synchronous and live.

Please submit your proposal on the Workshops survey (https://forms.gle/Q9j2A5cADQbmja6BA). Scroll down and submit to the academic section. You will be asked for a title, a 100-word abstract, which will be printed in the convention’s program. If your paper goes beyond the space in this survey or you have questions, please feel free to email: academic@wiscon.net.