Aliens are among us. They’re welcomed, subjugated, theorized, fetishized, and abhorred; they’re of this world and out of this world, in time and out of time, human and inhuman, with and without reference. And they’re also deeply embedded within the critical and speculative discourses of 21st century art, design, science, and theoretical humanities: from systems of political, economic, and legal alienation to alien forms of computational rationality, and the onslaught of xeno- architectures, feminisms, and materialisms, aliens are clearly among us. For these reasons, the alien landscape of the Sonoran Desert will play host to 2023 annual conference for the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts. We invite papers, panels, workshops, roundtables, and creative work that engages with the theme of Alien, broadly defined. We also welcome proposals addressing topics on other SLSArelated themes.
Possible Topics:
Immigration, citizenship, bordering/critical border studies, border-crossing,
hybridity, (re)(de)territoriality, territory/neighborhood/urban/Cultural borderlands
Environmentalism, native/alien species/invasive/indigenous and overcoming the dichotomy, microbes, biodiversity
Astrobiology, weird life
Alien landscapes, geographies
Alien encounters
Alienation, immigration, race and nationality; race, culture, identity
Alienation and economy
Alienation and education
Alienation and belonging
Alien intelligence, animal intelligence (plant intelligence)
Alien reasoning, AI, computational rationality
Xeno-feminism, architecture, art, design, materialism
Disciplines that are ‘alien’ to one another
Monstrous other, feminism, racism, queer, abject,
Science fiction, alien encounters, mythmaking
Violence exclusion and the making of alien bodies
Theoretical outsides
Artistic outsides exo-planet
Reshape the relation between the in/human, extra/terrestrial, familiar/alien
Strangers to/in/of/… this world
All submissions are due by May 12, 2023.
- Stand-alone papers: please submit title, 250-word abstracts, and bio
- Panels and streams: please provide a 250-word panel/stream description
along with titles, individual abstracts, and bios
- Roundtables and workshops: please provide a 250-word abstract along
with names and bios of participants