[Commlist] CSAA 2025 cfp: So hot right now

We're pleased to share the call for abstracts for the CSAA 2025 
conference. The cfp is available on the CSAA website 
<https://csaa.asn.au/csaa-conference-2025/>. We hope to see you there!

*/So hot right now: Cultures in rising temperatures 
<https://csaa.asn.au/csaa-conference-2025/>/*

Cultural Studies Association of Australasia conference // 26-28 November 
2025
University of Melbourne campus as part of the Congress of HASS
(Conveners: Rebecca Olive, Gilbert Caluya, Holly Randell-Moon, Andrew 
Hutcheon)

Temperatures are rising.

Political debate is polarised, reactive, and relentless. Urban heat 
highlights inequity in housing and greenspace access. Body politics 
remain charged with tensions in representations, inclusion, and rights. 
Social media and cultural influencers create a treadmill of “eras” so 
knowing (or caring about) what’s hot and what’s not requires constant 
surveillance. Debates about AI content are shifting from ‘should’ to 
‘how’? The housing crisis continues to intensify and biodiversity loss 
is increasing. Even the beach is losing its capacity to offer summer 
refuge. And, amplifying it all, the impacts of climate change are 
escalating – the oceans are warming, computer servers are becoming 
ever-bigger emissions contributors, and extreme weather events of fire, 
flood, and storms are increasing, making life untenable and unaffordable 
in some communities.

And yet, people continue to navigate these intensities through their 
everyday relationships and practices with food, film, literature, craft, 
art, sport, news, dwellings, protest, play, travel, rest, spirituality, 
and all the other things that give life meaning.

CSAA 2025 aims to look at intersections, divergences, conflicts, and 
convergences of ‘heat’ in cultures, practices, media, environments, and 
forms of governance. Together, we will explore how our relations to each 
other are heating up across political, environmental and cultural 
challenges and to explore what rising temperatures might help us imagine 
or foreclose into the future.

To help spark some ideas, submissions for panels or presentations could 
include topics such as:

  *
    *Cultures of Heat*: representing heat/fire in everyday cultures; the
    rhetoric of fire/heat/temperatures and its effects on culture,
    politics, society, identity, practice or praxis; theorising ‘slow
    burn’ in literature and film.
  *
    *Hot as Hell*: heat/fire in religious and spiritual cultures; the
    cultural politics of hell.
  *
    *Heated media*: revisiting McLuhan’s hot and cool media theory;
    fiery social media communities and cultures; the media of outrage
    and panic; reporting on/in hot conflict zones; mediated hate speech
    against women and minorities; toxic fandom in entertainment media.
  *
    *Hot bodies*: the body politics of heat; screen representations of
    sex; the gendered and racialised politics of attractiveness; cooling
    off dating; hot flashes/hot flushes; heatstroke.
  *
    *Taking the temperature of technological developments*:
    technological contributions to carbon emissions; AI and climate
    change; technology’s connections to social and political conflicts.
  *
    *Fiery emotions*: affects of ‘passion’; passionate debates; the uses
    and abuses of anger; lust and desire; the politics of passionate
    ‘races’; the gendered politics of passion.
  *
    *Geographies of heat*: the geopolitics of climate change; the urban
    politics of overheating; access to heating/coolness as a right; heat
    in rural and regional studies; ‘race’, empire and heat vulnerability
  *
    *Managing fire*: governance and governmentality of heat/climate
    change/fires; Indigenous approaches to using fire as an
    environmental management tool; cladding and the cultural politics of
    building codes; managing fires in the culture of construction 
industries
  *
    *Cultural politics of climate change*: the effects of global warming
    on leisure and recreation industries and cultures; non-humans and
    more-than-human worlds in climate change; movement, physical
    activities and sport under global warming; rethinking health and
    wellness in the context of climate change.
  *
    *Critical reflections on ‘the Anthropocene’*: the theory of ‘climate
    change’ or ‘the Anthropocene’; new methodologies for the
    Anthropocene; the connections between humans, non- humans, and
    more-than-human worlds in the Anthropocene.
  *
    *Creative Arts in heat*: creative artist responses to climate
    change; the role of the arts and craft in climate change politics;
    sustainability in arts and craft practices.
  *
    *Theories, ethics and practices of care in global warming*: what are
    our responsibilities under climate change? What kind of care does
    the planet need? And how do we enact such care under global warming?
  *
    *Colonialities of heat*: the geopolitics of race and coloniality in
    rising temperatures; environmental racism; Indigenous sovereignties
    and sciences

These are just some provocations to ignite your own ideas with this 
year’s theme. As always, the CSAA annual conference is open to any hot 
topics in cultural studies. We’re excited to hear your ideas so fire away!

Email submissions to _csaaconference2025@gmail.com_ *by 25 July 2025*.

Submissions must include:

  *
    Title
  *
    Panel abstract of 250 words max OR individual abstract submissions
    of 150 words max
  *
    Presenter names, institutional affiliations, and email addresses
  *
    Speaker bios of 50-100 words


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