[Commlist] CFP Speculative Narratives Beyond Consensus Reality: Navigating the Senses from Wonder to Horror

Call for Papers


*Speculative Narratives Beyond Consensus Reality: Navigating the Senses 
from Wonder to Horror *


International Interdisciplinary Conference

29 th – 30th June and 1st July, 2026


Venue: Department of Languages and Cultures, University of Aveiro, Portugal

Conference Organisers: Popular Culture Group


We invite scholars, researchers, and artists to submit abstracts for the 
upcoming academic conference, Speculative Narratives Beyond Consensus 
Reality: Navigating the Senses from Wonder to Horror. This event will 
explore the transformative potential of speculative narratives – across 
literature, film, visual arts, and other media – in breaking free from 
the boundaries of “consensus reality.”


“No Martians”, explains Margaret Atwood in In Other Worlds: SF and the 
Human Imagination on what separates her writing from science fiction 
(2011: 6). Instead, locating herself in the sphere of speculative 
fiction, she describes it as the narrative of “things that really could 
happen but just hadn’t completely happened” (2011: 6). Promoted by Marek 
Oziewicz as a “meta-generic fuzzy set supercategory”, speculative 
fiction sets itself against “consensus reality” as a cultural and 
literary tool of investigative exploration which rejects mimetic 
approaches (2017: 1).


Despite their conceptual slipperiness, the term and field of speculative 
fiction are now mature. The term “speculative fiction” itself made its 
first appearance in Robert A. Heinlein’s “On the Writing of Speculative 
Fiction” in 1947 and today the umbrella of speculative fiction covers a 
wide variety of literary traditions from which various hybrids have 
emerged and continue to do so. Feminist speculative fiction, like other 
types of spec-fi, thrives in the undecidability of its identity, taking 
advantage of the porous boundaries between fields such as science 
fiction, fantasy, and horror. In the Introduction to Sisters of the 
Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology (2015) by Ann 
Vandermeer (editor of the horror magazine Weird Tales) and Jeff 
Vandermeer, with whom she has co-edited recognised collections such as 
the Steampunk series (2008, 2010 and 2012) and The New Weird (2007), 
promote what they describe as “an ongoing conversation” which is fraught 
with contradictions (2015: 1). Speculative fiction’s political value has 
proven to be immense, and it has been making contributions not only to 
feminist literature but also to indigenous literature, refugee and 
migration fiction, cli-fi, and anti-globalisation writing. Dwelling in a 
cultural cross-genre third space, speculative work uses gothic elements, 
re-animating vampires, ghosts and zombies; it creates dystopian 
post-apocalyptic futures, fractures fairy tales, revises the past 
through alternate/alternative histories (e.g. Winepunk on Port wine 
powering a monarchy in the North of Portugal), and materialises trans 
and posthuman aspirations. Speculative fiction embodies a worldwide 
political response of human creativity, attempting to imagine potential 
futures during a significant shift towards a globalised human 
experience. In imagining/making these futures the responses navigate 
between anxiety and hope (Braidotti 2011, 2019), but the urge to create 
these speculative imagined communities cannot be repressed.


We encourage scholars and researchers from various disciplines to submit 
proposals related but not limited to:


The Limits of Reality: Horror, Weird Fiction, Slipstream, and Magical 
Realism


Feminist Pasts, Feminists Futures in Speculative Fiction: Gender, Power, 
and Liberation


Brighter and Darker Futures in Punk Nations: Steampunk, Biopunk, 
Dieselpunk, Solarpunk, Winepunk, and others


Cybercultures and Futurisms: Digital Futurism, Retrofuturism, Afrofuturism


Superheroes in the Age of Crisis: A Cultural and Critical Approach


Alternate Histories and Reclaiming the Past: Identity, Memory, and Power


Critical Animal Studies and Speculative Narratives


Care and Social Justice in Cli-fi and Crip Theory: Ecoability and the 
Intersection of Disability, Critical Animal Studies and Environmental 
Futures


Globalisation and Mobility in Speculative Fiction: Transnational 
Identities and the Politics of Movement


Economic, Social and Eco-Sustainability in Speculative Fiction: 
Post-Capitalist Speculative Economies


Intersectionality in Speculative Fiction: Navigating Race, Gender, and Power


(Post)-Apocalyptic Narratives: Survival, Ethics, and the End of the World


Dystopia and the Politics of Control: Visions of Totalitarian Futures


Speculative Fiction as a Reflection of Technological Anxiety: From 
Cybernetics to Artificial Intelligence


Radical Futures and Dys/Us/Utopian Thought in Speculative Narratives


Speculative Fiction and the Ethics of Posthuman Life


Posthumanities and the New Frontiers of Medical, Environmental, and 
Digital Futures



Keynote speakers

Ana da Silveira Moura/AMP Rodriguez, author, founding member of Invicta 
Imaginaria, co-coordinator of the Creative Europe project Hypothesis You 
Preserve (Portugal, Spain and France), University of Vigo


Camilla Grudova, author of The Doll’s Alphabet (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 
2017), Children of Paradise (Atlantic Books, 2022), The Coiled Serpent 
(Atlantic Books, 2023)


Michael Lundblad, Professor of American Literature and Culture, 
University of Oslo


Nelson Zagalo, Professor of Multimedia, University of Aveiro


Website: under construction


Deadline for submission of abstracts: 15th April 2026

Notification of acceptance: 30th April 2026

Accepted Formats: Papers may be submitted in a variety of formats, 
including individual papers, panel proposals, posters, and creative 
presentations


We welcome proposals in English of around 300 words which should be sent 
to *(cllc-speculativeconference.aveiro /at/ ua.pt)* along with a short bionote 
(150 words).


Presentations should be approximately 20 minutes in length, with time 
for discussion to follow. For further details contact Maria Sofia 
Pimentel Biscaia, University of Aveiro ((msbiscaia /at/ ua.pt)) and António 
Oliveira, The Porto Accounting and Business School ((ajmo /at/ iscap.ipp.pt)).


Bibliography


Booker, M. Keith ed. 2013. Critical Insights: Contemporary Speculative 
Fiction. Salem: Salem Press

Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press

_____ 2019. Posthuman Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity Press

_____ 2022. Posthuman Feminism. Cambridge: Polity Press

Gill, R. B. “The Uses of Genre and the Classification of Speculative 
Fiction”. Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal. 46: 2 (2013): 71-85

Goody, Alex. 2011. Technology, Literature and Culture. Cambridge: Polity 
Press

Lafontaine, Tania. 2016. Science Fiction Theory and Ecocriticism: 
Environments and Nature in Ecodystopian and Post-apocalyptic Novels. 
Cambridge, Massachusetts: LAP Lambert Academic Publishing

Lavigne, Carlen. 2013. Cyberpunk Women, Feminism and Science Fiction. A 
Critical Study. Jefferson, North Carolina, and London: McFarland & Company

Matas, Jarrel de ed.. 2025. Caribbean Futurism and Beyond: Conversations 
with Writers of Folklore, Fantasy, Science, and Speculative Fiction. New 
York and London: Routledge Murray, Stuart. “Disability Embodiment, 
Speculative Fiction, and the Testbed of Futurity”. Journal of Literary & 
Cultural Disability Studies 16: 1 (2022): 23-39

Roden, David. 2020. “Posthumanism: Critical, Speculative, Biomorphic”. 
The Bloomsbury Handbook of Posthumanism. Ed. Mads Rosendahl Thomsen and 
Jacob Wamberg. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic. 81-93

_____. 2014. Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human. New 
York and London: Routledge

Roh, David S., Huang, Betsy, and Niu, Greta A. ed. 2015. 
Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and 
Media. New Brunswick, New Jersey and London: Rutgers University Press

Suvin, Darko. 1979. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and 
History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale University Press

Thomas, Sheree R, ed. 2001. Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative 
Fiction from the African Diaspora. New York: Warner Books

Vandermeer, Ann and Vandermeer Jeff, ed. 2015. Sisters of the 
Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology. Okland: PM Press

Walliss John, Newport Kenneth G. C. 2014. The End All Around Us: 
Apocalyptic Texts and Popular Culture. London and New York: Routledge




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