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Tentative Program |
Saturday, May 30
9:00 Introductory Remarks
9:10 Author Keynote: Premee Mohamed
10 00 Session I: Canadian Science Fiction
Jaime Babb (York University), “Order from Chaos: Making Meaning in the Postmodern Multiverse of Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s This Is How You Lose the Time War”
Monica Millar (Trent University), “When AI Creates AI: Posthuman Destablizations/Meditations in Mason Coile’s William”
Roman Colangelo (University of Alabama), “Environment and the Posthuman in Peter Watts’s Starfish and Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation”
11:15 Break
11:30 Session II: Canadian Political and Feminist Fantastic Literature
Lisa Macklem (King’s University College), “Do the Ends Justify the Means? Aunt Lydia, Gilead, and the State of the Union”
Lorin Schwarz, Isabelle Lati, Erin Pangilinan, and Hau Pham (York University), Panel on Young Adult Literature
Vikki Visvis (University of Toronto), “The Family as Microcosm for the Speculative Nation in Omar El Akkad’s American War”
12:45 Lunch
2:00 Session III: Canadian Fantastic Comics and Graphic Novels
Rashika Desai (York University), “Haptics and the Material Touch in Ariel Gordon and GMB Chomichuk’s Blood Letters”
Dominick Grace, “Cerebus Today”
George Kaldis (York University), “Myth under Surveillance: Indigenous Cosmology, State Power, and the Canadian Fantastic in John Byrne’s Alpha Flight (#1–29)”
3:15 Coffee Break
3:45 Session IV: Canadian Fantastic Media
Cat Ashton, “Terrors Pleasing to the Ear: Canadian Horror Podcasts”
Hugh Spencer, “Signals Unknown: The Largely Forgotten History of Speculative Fiction on Canadian Radio”
4:45 Break
5:00 Session V: Canadian Fantastic Film
Elena Velilla Gonzalvo (University of Zaragoza), “Representing Toronto: The Renamed City in Code 8”
Alexander Sallas, “Long Live the New God: Videodrome and the Canadian Logic of the Deus ex Machina”
Chair : George Kaldis
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Sunday, May 31
9: 30 Scholar Keynote: Robert Knowlton
10: 30 Coffee Break
10:45 Session VI: Canadian Fantasy
Peter Melville (University of Winnipeg), “Representing the Nonhuman in The Butcher of the Forest and Uprooted”
Michael Johnstone (University of Toronto), “Fantasy is the Real Thing: Magic and the Concretization of Oppression in C.L. Polk’s Witchmark”
Nikolai Rodrigues (Queen’s University), “Hatred and Revising Atrocity in Charles R. Saunders’ Imaro and The Quest for Cush”
12:00 Lunch
1:30 Session VII: Cherie Dimaline
Katarzyna A. Baran (Universitat Rovira i Virgili), “Dreaming the Not-Yet: Affect, Dystopia, and Indigenous Resistance in Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves and Hunting by Stars”
Denisa Krásná (Palacký University), “Extractive Technologies and Indigenous Futures in Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves”
Silvia Pérez Castelo (Universidad de Oviedo), “Magic, Care, and Counter-Narratives: Solidarities Beyond Multiculturalism in Cherie Dimaline’s VenCo”
2:45 Break
3:00 Session VIII: Canadian Postcolonial Fantastic Fiction and Film
Ruth Okon (Kansas State University), “Extractable Bodies, Fractured Solidarities: Capitalist Precarity in Contemporary Canadian Speculative Fiction”
Ana María Fraile-Marcos (Universidad de Salamanca), “Imagining Decolonial Freedoms in Contemporary Speculative Fiction from Canada / Turtle Island”
Meghan Riley (University of Waterloo), “The Salt Roads and Salt Fish Girl: Goddesses, Embodiment, Speculative Tropes, and Reader Identification”
4:15 Coffee Break
4:30 Session IX: Indigenous Futurisms in Canada
Md Abu Shahid Abdullah (East West University), “Criticising Economic and Environmental Colonisation: The Interplay of Globalisation and Science Fiction in Zainab Amadahy’s The Moons of Palmares”
Nathaniel Harrington, “Language / Barriers: Technology and language in Chelsea Vowel’s “âniskôhôcikan” and Fionnlagh MacLeòid’s “Tiop””
Mervi Salo (University of Saskatchewan/University of Tromsø-Arctic University of Norway), “Who Owns Memory? Indigenous Futurisms, Counter-Archives, and the Politics of Survival in Canadian Speculative Storytelling”
5:45 Final Remarks