[Sfts-faculty] SFAM conference; CFP deadline May 15

[Sherryl]

Third Annual SFAM Conference

Contacts and Crossings: Borders in Speculative Fiction

October 21-24, 2026

Courtyard by Marriott Culver City

6333 Bristol Parkway, Culver City, CA



Speculative Fiction Across Media (SFAM) invites proposals for our third
annual conference, Contacts and Crossings: Borders in Speculative Fiction.



Gloria Anzaldúa posits that “borderlands are physically present wherever
two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races
occupy the same territory, where the lower, middle and upper classes
touch." According to Thomas Nail's *Theory of the Border*, "societies and
states are the products of (b)ordering, not the other way around.”



We invite papers that explore how these and similar ideas about borders and
contact zones inform speculative fiction—as motifs within individual texts,
as frameworks for subgenres such as space opera or first-contact
narratives, as spaces of intensified surveillance and tracking via new IT
tools, and as theorizations of form as we debate the borders between and
exchanges among multiple speculative genres. We invite papers and panel
discussions that investigate the affordances of speculative genres for
interrogating, illuminating, or proposing alternatives to the myriad ways
that borders and contact zones shape our identities and communities.



Our 2026 conference will feature keynote speaker Kalindi Vora, Professor of
Ethnicity, Race, and Migration, and Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies at
Yale University. Her first book, *Life Support: Biocapital and the New
History of Outsourced Labor*, takes up questions of technology,
colonialism, and raced and gendered labor under globalization. Her
second, *Surrogate
Humanity: Race Robotics and the Politics of Technological Futures*, co-authored
with Neda Atanasoski, explores the racial and gendered politics of robotics
and artificial intelligence. With *the Precarity Lab,* she is co-author of
*Technoprecarious* (2020), which tracks the role of digital technologies in
multiplying precarity.



Please send proposals for paper sessions, individual papers, or panel
discussions to Sherryl Vint (sherryl.vint at gmail.com) by May 15, 2026;
decisions will be communicated in early June. Proposals should be sent as
PDF attachments and include

·      Name and contact details for all presenters

·      250-word abstracts for the paper (or one each for papers submitted
as a panel) or a 250-word description of the topic for a discussion panel
section

Please note that all presenters must be registered attendees of SFAM to
participate.



We will also feature programming in dialogue with the Lucas Museum (
https://www.lucasmuseum.org), including an excursion to visit that space on
Wednesday. Keep watching our website (https://sfamla.org) for more updates
on creative guests and further details on programming and related events.



Possible topics might include, but are not limited to:

·      The politics of empire in space opera by writers such as Arkady
Martine, Anne Leckie, Iain M. Banks, Ken MacLeod, Emily Tesh, Bethany
Jacobs, games such as *Mass Effect*, television series such as *Star Trek*

·      Technologies of border surveillance and control as they are depicted
in speculative narratives such as T.R. Napper’s *Ghost of the Neon God*,
Ray Naylor’s *The Mountain in the Sea*, and near-future sf by authors such
as Cory Doctorow and Tim Maughn

·      Worldbuilding as a border-making process in speculative fiction in
any medium

·      Game design and gaming architectures as they explore borders, such as
 *Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice*, *Cyberpunk 2077*, *Legend of Zelda: A Link
Between Worlds*, tabletop games such as *Risk* or *Civilization*

·      Fantasy realms and multidimensional narratives as investigations of
ontological borders such as *Everything Everywhere All At Once*, Piers
Anthony’s *Apprentice Adept* series, the game *Split Fiction*

·      Narratives that make borders their central motif such as China
Mieville’s *The City and the City*, R.F. Kuang’s *Katabasis*, *Sleep Dealer*
, *Elysium, *N.K. Jemisin’s *The City We Became*, the *Borderlands *game
series, the tv series *Dark Winds*

·      Narratives that explore species borders among aliens or between
humans and nonhuman species, between humans and mechanical beings, such as
work by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Ursula K. LeGuin, Stephen Graham Jones, the *Mass
Effect *game series, *Alien: Earth, Nausicaä and the Valley of the
Wind*, *Ghost
in the Shell *

·      Differentiations by class as a border technology within sf
narratives by Claire North, K.J. Fajardo, Robert Jackson Bennett, the
television series *The Expanse* and *Severance*

·      Time travel as a sociopolitical technique of making and unmaking
borders in works such as Annelee Newitz’s *The Future of Another Timeline*,
Katherine Hurley’s *The Light Brigade*, the television series *Continuum*
and *Beforeigners*

·      Narratives focused on counterspace or other enclaves of difference,
such as the Strugatsky brothers’ *Roadside Picnic* and its film adaptation
as S*talker*, J.G. Ballard’s *Super-Cannes*, M.R. Carey’s *The Book of Koli*,
Kim Stanley Robinson’s *Mars* trilogy

-- 
Sherryl Vint (she/her)
Distinguished Professor, UC Riverside
Managing Editor, *Science Fiction Studies <https://online.ucpress.edu/sfs>*
Editor, Palgrave *Science and Popular Culture
<https://link.springer.com/series/15760> *series
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