
Current Research in Speculative Fiction 2025 15th Annual Conference
About the Conference
- When: July 3rd & 4th 2025
- Venue: University of Liverpool (Hybrid)
- Call for Papers
All bodies are, in some sense; engines driven by the health or disease of their owners, jackets of flesh that are the physical sum of their wearers. But to become your disease? To become the consumption itself? (Kathe Koja, The Cipher)
That’s how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality. (Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation)
Authors of speculative fiction operate in spaces beyond the ordinary limits of art, exploring not just our reality but the otherwise inaccessible hypothetical realm of possibility, truth, and materiality. Not even conventions of genre are safe from the ever-blurring motley of speculative fiction’s desire to always mutate, change, and transgress. With SF, constant boundaries are crossed: the interplay between fictional and nonfictional realities, the relationship between the hypothetical and the inevitable, and the spaces that separate our present and the infinite number of possibilities that define what could be, what could have been, and what might still be. Binary oppositions melt to form new, unimagined realities that boundaries previously prevented. For CRSF’s landmark 15th annual conference, we are therefore inviting discussion on boundaries in speculative fiction, in the widest and most abstract sense of the word.
We welcome papers on the theme of Boundaries from the fields of literary studies, creative writing, media studies, philosophy, art, anthropology, sociology, and political theory that speak to, but are not limited to:
- The exploration of liminal spaces in SF
- Boundaries between reality and hypothetical futures
- Frontiers of discovery and intellectual exploration
- Physical, technological, and extraterrestrial borders
- Temporal distinctions between present, past, and future, and the cultivation of history and periods
- Manifestations of barriers in speculative bodies and sexualities (posthuman, gendered, queer, cyborg)
- Borders between fictional and nonfictional conceptualised spaces
- The interplay between SF film, literature, media, and the realities of 21st-century life
- Speculative fiction as a critique/deconstruction of border
Submission Guidelines
Papers should be 15-20 minutes long. Abstracts (max. 300 words) and a short biographical note (max. 100 words) should be submitted to crsf.team@gmail.com by March 24th 2025.
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