Visions of Humanity in Cyberculture, Cyberspace and Science Fiction has put out a call for presentations for its 9th Global Conference. The conference will be held at Mansfield College, Oxford, UK from Sunday July 13th through Tuesday July 15th, 2014.
Call for Presentations:
This inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary project aims to explore what it is to be human and the nature of human community in cyberculture, cyberspace and science fiction. In particular, the project will explore the possibilities offered by these contexts for creative thinking about persons and the challenges posed to the nature and future of national, international, and global communities.
Proposals, presentations, papers, and workshops are invited on issues related to any of the following themes:
- the relationship between cyberculture, cyberspace, science fiction
- cyberculture and the near future: utopias vs. dystopias
- technologies of the future today: access and divide
- humans and cyborgs; the synergy of humans and technology; technological singularity; changing views of the body
- human and post-human concepts in digital arts and cinema
- digital artistic practices and aesthetics
- mobile media, future of online social networks, place and the telematic body
- bodies in cyberculture; body modifications; from apes to androids – electronic evolution; biotechnical advances and the impact of life, death, and social existence
- artificial intelligence, robotics and biomedia
- gender and cyberspace: new gender, new femininities, new masculinities
- cyberculture of virtual worlds and computer games
- augmented reality
- nature, enhancing nature, and artificial intelligence; artificial life, life and information systems
- networked living in future city, new urban lifestyles
- human and post-human politics; cyborg citizenship and rights; influence of political technologies
- challenging boundaries, frontiers and taboos in cyberculture
The Steering Group particularly welcomes the submission of pre-formed panel proposals.
In order to support and encourage interdisciplinarity engagement, it is our intention to create the possibility of starting dialogues between the parallel events running during this conference. Delegates are welcome to attend up to two sessions in each of the concurrent conferences. We also propose to produce cross-over sessions between these groups – and we welcome proposals which deal with the relationship between Visions of Humanity and Environmental Justice and the Animal and Human Bond.
What to Send:
Proposals will also be considered on any related theme. 300 word proposals should be submitted by Friday 14th February 2014. If a proposal is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper of no more than 3000 words should be submitted by Friday 16th May 2014. Proposals should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:
a) author(s), b) affiliation as you would like it to appear in programme, c) email address, d) title of proposal, e) body of proposal, f) up to 10 keywords.
E-mails should be entitled: VISIONS9 Proposal Submission.
Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.
Joint Organising Chairs:
Daniel Riha: rihad@inter-disciplinary.net
Rob Fisher: visions9@inter-disciplinary.net
The conference is part of the ‘Critical Issues’ series of research projects run by Inter-Disciplinary.Net. It aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and challenging. All proposals accepted for and presented at the conference must be in English and will be eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected proposals may be developed for publication in a themed hard copy volume(s). All publications from the conference will require editors, to be chosen from interested delegates from the conference.
Thanks to colleague Marilena Dracea for this news.
