[Sfts-students] CFP for SFAM 2025

[Sherryl Vint]

Dear students,

Below please see the CFP for SFAM 2025. My apologies for circulating this
late. I thought it had already been sent out to you. I'll offer UCR grad
students an extension on the deadline to May 24, 2025 due to this late
circulation.

thanks,
Sherryl

Speculative Fiction Across Media 2025

Artificial Intelligence: Fantasies, Realities, Futures

September 25-27, 2025

Courtyard Marriott Monterey Park, Los Angeles

The second annual Speculative Fiction Across Media Conference will explore
AI narratives in speculative media, from the foreboding, through the
mundane, to the celebratory. We will explore how speculative media shapes
our anticipations of a world in which we live with and use AI and consider
the degree to which certain sf tropes—such as Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of
Robotics—have found their way into research and design conversations.

The conference will feature special guests

Brit Marling: writer, director, actor and producer, who wrote and starred
in multiple sf media works, including the critically acclaimed series *The
OA *and the limited series *A Murder at the End of the World*, which
addresses issues of AI and political culture.

Ted Chiang: author of multiple award-winning works, including *The
Lifecycle of Software Objects* (2011), and sought-after commentator in
venues such as *The New *Yorker regarding AI discourse and the implications
of AI tools.

Engaging both historical and present-day examples, our conference will
convene to consider sf examples of AI throughout the genre’s history as
well as the ways in which real-world AI research draws from sf tropes. We
are interested in papers that consider images of disembodied AI, those
addressing robots and similar artificial beings, and papers that
interrogate how the emergence of generative AI, large-language learning
models, and algorithmic tools change the fabric of our social lives, our
employment, and our modes of artistic production. We invite papers on a
wide range of media and topics and encourage submissions that consider the
intersections of AI and speculative imaginaries from multiple disciplinary
and methodological perspectives.

Proposals of 250-300 words should be sent as PDF attachments to Sherryl
Vint (sherryl.vint at gmail.com) by *May 16, 2025.* Proposals for individual
papers, pre-constituted paper panels, and roundtable discussion panels are
all welcome. Please ensure the names and contact details for each proposed
participant are included in the proposal.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

●         The legacy of significant AI figures on popular culture, such as
Isaac Asimov’s robots, Philip K. Dick’s androids, cyberpunk’s AI networks,
or military AI systems such as Skynet

●         AI and robots as figurations of gender, race and class
hierarchies, whether as sympathetic depictions of exploitation or as
emblems of threat to humanity

●         Alternative perspectives on AI technologies and the ethics of
design in work by Indigenous, Latinx, feminist, nonbinary, Black and other
creators

●         The politics of Silicon Valley and other corporate AI imaginaries
globally and their influence on contemporary culture

●         Works of sf that critique practices of AI in contemporary
culture, from algorithmic data processing, to gig-economy labour and
pricing, to AI-produced creative works, and more

●         Historical analyses addressing how and why our imaginary of AI
has changed over time both within and beyond genre sf

●         Theoretical interrogations of how representations of AI intersect
with posthumanism, disability studies, studies of media ecologies, and more

●         Analyses of works of art produced in whole or part by AI systems

For more details on the venue and the guests, please see our website at
https://sfamla.org/speculative-fiction-across-media-2025/.











Sherryl Vint (she/her)
Professor, Departments of English and of Media & Cultural Studies

*We at UCR would like to respectfully acknowledge and recognize our
**responsibility
to the original and current caretakers of this land, water, **and air: the
Cahuilla, Tongva, Luiseño, and Serrano peoples and all of **their ancestors
and descendants, past, present, and future. Today this **meeting place is
home to many Indigenous peoples from all over the world, **including UCR
faculty, students, and staff, and we are grateful to have the **opportunity
to live and work on these homelands.*
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