[Commlist] CfP: GIFCon 2024 Conjuring Creatures and Worlds

Please find below the Call for Papers for the seventh *Glasgow 
International Fantasy Conversations* (GIFCon), taking place**online from 
*15-17 May 2024 *through the University of Glasgow. Submission and 
registration for the event is *free* and the theme of this year’s 
conference is ‘_Conjuring Creatures and Worlds_.' Please feel free to 
share this email or details of our event (found here 
<https://fantasy.glasgow.ac.uk/index.php/2023/11/02/gifcon-2024-conjuring-creatures-and-worlds-call-for-papers/>) 
with any colleagues or students within the areas of literature, creative 
writing, film, television, theatre, comics, and games who you think may 
be interested.

We have also included Advice for First Time Submissions 
<https://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/critical/research/researchcentresandnetworks/fantasyatglasgow/gifcon/#submissionguidelines> in 
our Submission Guidelines that may be particularly useful for first-time 
conference applicants.

++++

*GIFCon - Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations*

*The **Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic 
<https://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/critical/research/researchcentresandnetworks/fantasyatglasgow/>** is 
pleased to announce a call for papers for Glasgow International Fantasy 
Conversations (GIFCon) 2024, to be held online on 15-17 May, with the 
theme of ‘Conjuring Creatures and Worlds’. *

Fantasy is inherently an act of conjuration. When we create, dismantle, 
or engage with fantasy, we are conjuring magic: the impossible, the 
mysterious, the unknown, and the indefinable. Conjuring fantasy is an 
act of creation not necessarily defined by our existing modes of being 
or reality, yet it is always in conversation with our own world. Thus, 
when we enter fantastika, we necessarily enter a conjured world that 
invites us to reimagine fundamental aspects of our existence. One way it 
effects this is by encountering seemingly nonhuman creatures, through 
which we meet the magical, the uncanny, the monstrous, the Other, and 
perhaps most uncomfortably, ourselves. Brian Froud writes in /Good 
Fairies/ /Bad Faeries/ (1998) that “like any supernatural encounter, 
meeting a fairy—even one who is gentle and benign—is never a comfortable 
experience”. Samantha Langsdale and Elizabeth Coody argue in /Monstrous 
Women in Comics /that “the monster is difference made flesh”. The same 
is often true of the worlds these creatures exist in. Conjurations, 
then, are not wholly foreign; their components are knowable. Through 
fantasy we can conjure, and therefore communicate, with the necessarily 
mysterious, the otherwise ineffable.

The act of conjuration is an ambivalent one, being both beyond and 
outside our own world yet inherently connected to it and therefore 
susceptible to the same limitations and preconceptions. In /Race and 
Popular Fantasy Literature/, Helen Young argues that “the logics of race 
and racial difference are so deeply ingrained in Western society that it 
is extremely difficult, often even for members of marginalised racial 
groups, to imagine worlds that do not have those structures.” Indeed, 
Fantastika has often been concerned with narratives where creatures 
“function as recognizable stand-ins for majorities and minorities and 
the inevitable conflicts that emerge between identity groups”. We are 
interested in explorations of marginalised identities, including 
creatures, systems of magic, and worlds concerned with (but not limited 
to) race, ethnicity, gender, queerness, class, and (dis)abilities. These 
conjured creatures and worlds offer an alternative viewpoint into other 
modes of identity and being. Additionally, the /ways/ in which these 
fantasies are conjured is important. The medium through which the reader 
(in the broadest sense of the word) encounters and interacts with the 
fantasy affects its meaning.

How do academics, creative practitioners, and fans conjure (and 
understand the conjuration of) fantasy, creatures and worlds? Fantasy 
and the fantastic have the capability to conjure the ephemeral and the 
horrific, the indefinable and the real, the Other and ourselves, but how 
do we understand these creations? And how do these encounters with 
creatures, magic, and worlds conform or challenge our understanding of 
the fantastic?

Suggested Topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

  * Fantasy texts and media by creative practitioners from marginalised
    backgrounds, and from beyond the anglophone and Anglocentric fantastic
  * Creatures as corporeal and/or spiritual beings
  * Worlds and magic as material or conceptual spaces, realms, or
    structures
  * Multi-media representations of creatures, worlds, and creators
  * Creating and recreating race, class, queerness, (dis)ability and
    other marginalised identities in fantasy
  * Explorations and representations of the Other in fantastika
  * Attraction to, repulsion or rejection of creatures and the nonhuman
  * Depicting alienation, body dysphoria, body swapping and
    transformation in fantasy
  * The anthropomorphising of objects and creatures
  * Human and nonhuman binaries, hierarchies, and dynamics
  * Conforming to and challenging conventional depictions of creatures
    e.g., mythic and supernatural traditions, folklore, fantastic tropes
    and iconic and archetypal characters
  * Representations of fantastical creatures for example cryptids, fae,
    magical creatures, supernatural beings, the undead, humanoids,
    animals, hybrids, AI, extraterrestrials, demons, monsters, horrors,
    boogeymen
  * Environments, alternate worlds, ecocriticism, posthumanism, the
    Anthropocene
  * Conjuring futures and pasts
  * Organic vs. artificial worlds, spaces and creatures
  * Conjuring as a destructive or creative act
  * Conjuring magic and magic systems
  * How fandoms and scholars recreate, reinterpret, or conjure
    creatures, worlds and magic systems
GIFCon 2024 is a three-day virtual conference welcoming proposals for 
papers relating to this theme from researchers and practitioners working 
in the field of fantasy and the fantastic across all media, whether from 
within the academy or beyond it. We are particularly interested in 
submissions from postgraduate and early career researchers, and 
researchers whose work focuses on fantasy from the margins.

We ask for abstracts for 20-minute *papers*. See our Suggested Topics 
list above for further inspiration. Please submit a *300-word 
abstract* and a *100-word bionote* via this form 
<https://forms.office.com/pages/responsepage.aspx?id=KVxybjp2UE-B8i4lTwEzyPiplqGoEQ1JirqHAG6lJGlUQk8yTjMyU1pDVTM4RENGODE5MkU0TlFRUi4u> by 
*January 5th, 2024*, at *midnight GMT.*

We also ask for *workshop* descriptions for 75-minute creative 
workshops, for those interested in exploring the creative processes of 
conjuring these creatures and worlds into being from a practice-based 
perspective. Please submit a *100-word description* and a *100-word 
bionote* via this form <https://forms.office.com/e/5MzfLeX5Wn> by 
*January 5**^th **, 2024 at midnight GMT*.

If you have any questions regarding our event or our CfP, please contact 
us at (GIFCon /at/ glasgow.ac.uk) <mailto:(GIFCon /at/ glasgow.ac.uk)>. Please also 
read through our Code of Conduct 
<https://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/critical/research/researchcentresandnetworks/fantasyatglasgow/gifcon/>. 
We look forward to your submissions!

---------------
The COMMLIST
---------------
This mailing list is a free service offered by Nico Carpentier. Please use it responsibly and wisely.
--
To subscribe or unsubscribe, please visit http://commlist.org/
--
Before sending a posting request, please always read the guidelines at http://commlist.org/
--
To contact the mailing list manager:
Email: (nico.carpentier /at/ commlist.org)
URL: http://nicocarpentier.net
---------------