DECODINGS
Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts Newsletter
Fall 2024, Vol. 34, No.4
*SLSA 2024: Climate Diasporas (Dallas)
*2024 Awards and Prizes
*Executive Meeting Notes 11/2024
*SLSA 2025: Risk (Corvallis)
*Social Media & Website Redesign
*Policies:Respectful Behavior and Freedom of Speech & Volunteer Ombudspersons
*Call for Papers: Medical and Health Humanities Global Perspectives 2025
*Call for Papers: SLSAeu 2025 “The Lifespan: Perspectives on Ageing”
*New Book Series: Proximities: Experiments in Nearness
*AnthropoScene Book Series
*Configurations Book Reviews
*European and British Science Societies
SLSA 2024: CLIMATE DIASPORAS: The 2024 SLSA conference was held at the Sheraton Dallas, North Olive Street, Dallas, Texas, from November 7 through November 10, 2024. Rajani Sudan was the organizer, and her institution Southern Methodist University sponsored the meeting with additional support from the Bass School for Arts, Humanities, and Technology at the University of Texas-Dallas. Plenary speakers were Suzanne Anker, School of Visual Arts, bioartist and art historian, and Jussi Parikka, Aarhus University, whose work focuses on environmental media. Rajani’s graduate student team—Marimac McRae, UcheChukwu Agbo, Emily Snyder—helped organize the program along with managing the registration desk and chairing panels. More than 200 attendees presented papers on climate and on other SLSA-related topics. The eight panels in the popular Game Studies stream were organized by Ed Chang and Ashlee Bird; they included a range of well-known scholars and designers. Additionally, Nat Mengist organized the Black and Indigenous Studies of Science stream, which offered presentations by an impressive set of internationally recognized scholars and a concluding roundtable. The streams also included the always entertaining Fluxakucha sessions (organized by arts liaison Dennis Summers and other Fluxus enthusiasts). Thanks are due to Rajani and her team and to the many staff members at the Sheraton for their excellent work hosting this lively meeting. Attendees celebrated 20 years of Art in SLSA with an installation–curated by Jesse Colin Jackson, assisted by Philip Otto–that showcased multimedia excerpts of works by more than 50 artists participating in society conferences. The Saturday night celebration began with remarks from Dennis who thanked Bruce Clarke and Linda Dalrymple Henderson for proposing adding the A to SLS at the 2003 Austin meeting and who noted the significant contribution of Marcel O’Gorman for incorporating art exhibits at the annual conference.
SLSA 2024 AWARDS AND PRIZES presented at the 11/9/24 Business Meeting:
David Cecchetto was celebrated as our first two-term President, co-founder of an SLSA book series, and champion of equity who guided us steadily in unprecedented times.
Sean A. Yeager’s “Kakokairos: A Not-Altogether-Unserious Theory of Time, Language, and Autism” received Honorable Mention for 2024 Bruns Prize for the Best Graduate Student Essay. Adopting the playful term “kakokairos,” (roughly translated as “wrong moment for action or speaking”), Sean A. Yeager explores the different temporalities of autistic persons, postulating that autistics experience diverse temporalities different from the ordered sequential time of neurotypical people.
Ethan Plaue’s “The Patent Form: Norbert Rillieux, Solomon Northup, and the Production of Means in the Atlantic World” was the winner of the 2024 Bruns Prize for the Best Graduate Student Essay. His essay proposes a new term, media vita, defining it as the capacity of subjects to form relationships, thus building on the sense of mediation as “putting into relation.” He examines the form of patent applications to show how they contested the nineteenth century perception that African Americans lacked the capacity for intellectual thought and foresight. African Americans inventors such as the creole Norbert Rillieux used the patent form as testimony that they were not only intellectually capable but also citizens who contributed to the collective good. Rillieux’s patent application for a three-phase sugar refining process improved upon an existing two-phase process, re-routing the steam from one phase for use in the next one, thus conserving energy and increasing efficiency. Contrasting with the patent route to prove citizenship and intellectual capacity was the fish trap designed by Solomon Northup, a free African American who was kidnapped and sold into slavery before managing to escape. In his narrative Twelve Years a Slave, Northup describes a fish trap he invented, thus making the design freely available to laborers like him who had no time left over to hunt game or fish in streams but needed to provision themselves. Since patent applications require that an original idea not be previously published, Northup also ensured that no one else could patent the fish trap design, either. Historically astute and rich in literary insights, this essay shows how racialized conceptions permeated patent law and points to the necessity to incorporate a critique of racialized interpretations into existing media theory.
The winner of the 2024 Schachterle Prize for the best essay by a nontenured scholar was Cera Smith for her essay “Shocking Therapy: Narrating Racism’s Psychobiological Injuries in Ralph Ellison’s Factory Hospital,” published in American Literature in June 2024. Her essay reframes Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man as a patient narrative, providing a “biologically attentive reading” of the Liberty Paints factory hospital chapter as an interrogation of structural racism in the North. Illuminated by archival research, Smith’s reading considers the narrator’s encounter with medicine in the context of Ellison’s “particular concern with African American medical care, scientific experimentation, and racialized embodiment.” In both its methodology and its fresh analytical approach, this essay advances the critical conversation on Ellison and opens new avenues of inquiry for the health humanities into both African American literature and Ellison in particular.
Suzanne Anker received the 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award for her pioneering bio-art and scholarship revealing dilemmas in the convergence of art, nature, science, and technology. During her plenary address, she shared how her practice investigates the ways in which nature is being altered in the 21st century. Concerned with genetics, climate change, species extinction and toxic degradation, she calls attention to the beauty of life and the “necessity for enlightened thinking about nature’s ‘tangled bank’.” Chairing SVA’s Fine Arts Department in NYC since 2005, Ms. Anker continues to interweave traditional and experimental media in her department’s new digital initiative and the SVA Bio Art Laboratory in New York.
SLSA EXECUTIVE MEETING NOTES, 11/8/24
Attendees: David Cecchetto, Rajani Sudan, Adam Nocek, Ed Chang, Raymond Malewitz, Wayne Miller, Elizabeth Donaldson, Ranjodh Dhaliwal, Nat Mengist, Shane Denson, and Carol Colatrella
President’s Report: David Cecchetto explained that the book series Proximities has published one book and that others are in the pipeline. He commended Rajani Sudan and her team for the excellent conference, and he introduced the new officers–Rajani as president, Adam Nocek 1st Vice President, and Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal 2nd Vice President—and noted new member at large Nat Mengist.
2024 Conference: Rajani acknowledged her team’s efficient arrangements for more than 200 attendees participating during the four-day meeting and praised the generous financial and in-kind support of the English Department at Southern Methodist University for the meeting.
Configurations: Serving with Melissa Littlefield as coeditor, Rajani reported the journal has received 48 new submissions and has a 14% acceptance rate. In 2025 the journal will scale back to three issues per year instead of four issues. Praising Jay Labinger’s efforts as book review editor, the editors will continue efforts to increase submissions, reviewers, and the visibility of the journal.
2025 Conference: Ray Malewitz will organize the 2025 meeting at Oregon State University. The earlier than usual dates of the meeting mean that low-cost accommodations for underfunded individuals and students will be available on campus to supplement rooms at nearby hotels. Details are below and at https://litsciarts.org/2024/11/09/slsa-2025-cfp-risk/
SLSA 2025, “Risk,” August 21-24, 2025
Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR
Stream Proposal Deadline: January 10, 2025
Proposal and Panel Deadline: February 17, 2025
To think in terms of risk is to imagine the future as a set of foreseeable possibilities and to ameliorate the potentially hazardous ones through action in the present. Distinct from danger, which is seen as inchoate and incalculable, risk carries with it the notion of statistical, probabilistic, or otherwise enumerated legibility, and the costs and benefits of prospective courses of action are given the narrative authority of mathematical language. But even as risk posits itself as a rational approach to considerations of the future, it ignores the mythology of its own construction: risk is, as its critics note, always a process of storytelling. Put slightly differently, risk management is not just a mathematical but also an affective exercise involving anxieties, fears, rational or irrational speculations, (dis)honorable activities, and ethical claims. Furthermore, the ways risk is managed – through techniques like data mapping and visualization, actuarial accounting, and insurance bands – help to create social – and not merely mathematical – perceptions about who, what, and where might be “risky.” Risk, therefore, is a discourse that constitutes subjects and is capable of perpetuating cycles of injustice and immiseration.
This call for papers asks readers to consider risk as both a formal/generic term and as a term that shapes and is shaped by the contents of literature, the arts, and cognate disciplines. How do risk and other related concepts (danger, hazard, speculation, debt, credit, assurance, insurance) work to colonize the future, construct forms, and produce narratives? How does a history of risk and the language used to describe it (adventure, projecting, imagination, curiosity, novelty) help us to understand the past’s future and its hazards? How has risk been enlisted in representations of social Others for progressive or regressive ends? How does risk throw into relief or complicate ethical relationships between nations, between cultures, between communities, and between humans and the natural world?
We welcome papers that address these concepts as well as proposals (presentations, panels, streams, workshops, and roundtables) on other subjects that fall within SLSA’s mission to explore the cultural and social dimensions of science, technology, and medicine. We are taking steps now to ensure that the conference will be accessible and welcoming to all SLSA members by pursuing low-cost housing for graduate students and contingent faculty and by reaching out to Oregon State University’s KidSpirit to facilitate childcare for academics traveling with small children.
Possible topics related to the theme include but are not limited to:
Climate The Commons
Futures Past Geopolitics and Biopolitics
Disaster Relief Capitalism
Prostheses Sustainability
Human and Animal Health Surveillance
Disease Regulation
Artificial Intelligence Conflict
Tipping Points Exposure
Infrastructure Data Visualization / Narratization
Privacy
Program Committee (Corvallis): Raymond Malewitz, Tekla Bude, Surabhi Balachander, Evan Gottlieb
Look for the SLSA 2025 Conference website to debut in a few weeks!
Conference email and submission site TBA
For information about travel awards for students and underfunded individuals to participate in the conference, see https://litsciarts.org/awards/
SOCIAL MEDIA & WEBSITE REDESIGN: Wayne Miller, Electronic Resources Coordinator (wayne.miller@gmail.com), asks for new images for the SLSA website homepage (litsciarts.org). Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal and Ed Chang are developing SLSA social media. SLSA members interested in contributing to social media on behalf of the society are encouraged to email Ed (change@ohio.edu) and Ranjodh (rdhaliwa@nd.edu). Along with Adam Nocek, Wayne, Ranjodh, and Ed will work with graphic professionals to redesign the SLSA website.
POLICIES ADOPTED:Respectful Behavior and Freedom of Speech & Call for Ombudspersons
The updated policies are posted here:
CALL FOR PAPERS: MEDICAL AND HEALTH HUMANITIES: GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES 2025
Doha, State of Qatar, February 7-8, 2025.
The 3rd international conference on Medical and Health Humanities: Global Perspectives 2025 in Doha, Qatar on February 7-8, 2025, invites abstracts for oral presentations and posters on the topics of: narrative medicine, medical sociology, philosophy of medicine, medical ethics and narrative ethics, literature and medicine, arts therapies and arts-in-health, healthcare communication, the history of medicine and other humanistic initiatives in health and medicine.
Keynote Speakers: Paul Crawford, University of Nottingham; and Mohammed Ghaly, Center for Islamic Legislation and Ethics, Hamad Bin Khalifa University
All submissions are peer-reviewed and selected papers will be invited to a published volume.
Abstract Submission Deadline: 15 December 2024
Notification of Acceptance: 1 January 2025
Registration Deadline: 15 January 2025
Conference in Doha: 7-8 February 2025
Abstract Deadline Springer Volume: 15 April, 2025
Acceptance Decision Springer Volume: 15 May 2025
Final Manuscript for Publication: 1 October 2025
Publication: 15 January, 2026
For abstract submission and further information, visit:
https://qatar-weill.cornell.edu/event/medical-humanities-2025/overview
https://qatar-weill.cornell.edu/event/medical-humanities-2025/submit
CALL FOR PAPERS: SLSAeu 2025 CONFERENCE: London (King’s College), 4-6 June 2025
“The Lifespan: Perspectives on Ageing and the Life Course from the Medical Humanities, the Health Sciences and Age Studies”
https://www.slsa-eu.org/uploads/3/1/9/7/31971835/slsaeu_2025_save_the_date_25072024.pdf
POLICIES: CONDUCT AND FREEDOM OF SPEECH
https://litsciarts.org/2019/05/29/policies-for-respectful-behavior-and-freedom-of-speech-commitment/
OMBUDSPERSONS: Any member interested in volunteering to serve as ombudsperson, should apply by emailing Carol Colatrella (carol.colatrella@lmc.gatech.edu); include a short statement of why you are interested in serving in this role and what experience you can bring the position. Current officers will review applications to make appointments.
Each Ombudsperson is an impartial entity who strives to see that SLSA members and SLSA conference attendees are treated fairly and equitably. Any member/attendee can seek the advice of an Ombudsperson. The Ombudsperson is impartial, neutral, and confidential. The rights and interests of all parties to disputes are considered, with the goal of achieving fair outcomes.
The primary responsibilities of the Ombudsperson are:
Ombudspersons: Marcel O’Gorman marcel@uwaterloo.ca and Kari Nixon mkarinixon@gmail.com
SLSA BOOK SERIES Proximities: Experiments in Nearness, from University of Minnesota Press
We are thrilled that the first volume of the Proximities Series—Microbial Resolution, by Gloria Chan-Sook Kim—is now published and available!
Adjacencies abound. We are past the moment of merely thinking in terms of how opposites attract and nodes network. Today, disciplines and fields move consciously proximate to one another, in conversation and growing together. Further, the future is no longer sometime in the distance, but appears near to us, often grasped as an impending horizon of political, social, economic, and environmental catastrophe. Now more than ever, so much is so close. See the Call for Proposals (https://litsciarts.org/proximitiesflyer.pdf) for more information.
Books in the Proximities series think proximately, that is, in disciplinary tandem, about the relationships within and between the arts, literature, and science, as well as how scholarship can best be in active dialogue with communities and the world around us today, and in the future. Published in association with the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, this series not only thinks across disciplines, but thinks about the continuities and crossings themselves, interrogating how and why their disciplinary proximities matter. Proximities publishes work that is crafted with nearness in mind: human nearness to one another and the world around us; nearness to one another’s thoughts; to our written and unwritten pasts; to critical trends and crises; to our futures ahead. This kind of scholarship powerfully catalyzes awareness of what it means to work interdisciplinarily by challenging assumptions about disciplinary thinking from the outside in, and the inside out. If interested in submitting a proposal, please contact the editors with a short description of your book project. Series Editors: David Cecchetto—York University (Toronto, Canada) dcecchet@yorku.ca and Arielle Saiber—Johns Hopkins University asaiber@jhu.edu
ANTHROPOSCENE:This book series from Penn State University Press was published in collaboration with SLSA. While not all scientists have accepted the term “anthropocene” as part of the geological timescale, the idea that humans are changing the planet and its environments in radical and irreversible ways has provoked new kinds of cross-disciplinary thinking about relationships among the arts, human technologies, and nature. This is the broad, cross-disciplinary basis for books published in the series, which includes specialized studies for scholars in a variety of disciplines as well as widely accessible works of interest to broad audiences. Send questions to the SLSA liaison for the series, Pamela Gossin at psgossin@utdallas.edu or psgossin@gmail.com. The series includes these titles:
Electromagnetism and the Metonymic Imagination by Kieran Murphy
Love in a Time of Slaughters: Human-Animal Stories Against Genocide and Extinction by Susan
McHugh
Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times. Eds. Tobias Menely,Jesse Oak Taylor
Editing the Soul: Science and Fiction in the Genome Age by Everett Hamner
The Art of Identification Eds. Rex Ferguson, Melissa M. Littlefield, and James Purdon
Fear and Nature: Ecohorror Stories from the Anthropcene. Eds. Christy Tidwell and Carter Soles
Fragments from the History of Loss by Louise Green
Oil Fictions. Eds. Stacey Balkan and Swaralipi Nandi.
Under the Literary Microscope. Eds. Sina Farzin, Susan M. Gaines, and Roslynn D. Haynes
SLSA Member Discount from Penn State University Press: Use promo code NR21 for 30% off AnthropoScene titles purchased directly, plus free domestic shipping and discounts on foreign shipping! See https://www.psupress.org/emailassets/NR_SLSA_1021.html
Configurations Book Reviews: Jay Labinger, the Configurations book review editor, will publish around 10 reviews per year, of books–on any topic–that are likely to interest a wide cross-section of SLSA members and Configurations readers. If you wish to propose a book for review, please email Jay (jal@its.caltech.edu) the author/title/publisher, a very brief description and statement of why it merits being reviewed in Configurations, and whether you would like to do the review yourself or, if not, any suggestions you may have for appropriate reviewers. Authors are welcome to propose their own recent book for review, with the same info. Jay will post a list of books on litsci-l and ask anyone interested in reviewing one of them to respond to him. Look at an issue of Configurations to get an idea of the preferred length and style for reviews. After a reviewer has been matched with a book, Jay will ask for submission of the review within four months, and he will share the estimated date of publication.
The EUROPEAN Society for Literature, Science, and the Art is the sister organization of the international, USA-based Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts. SLSAeu welcomes colleagues in the humanities, the social sciences, the arts, and all fields of science, medicine, engineering, and computer sciences as well as independent scholars, artists, and scientists. https://www.slsa-eu.org/. The last meeting of SLSAeu, hosted by the Center for Literature and Natural Science in Birmingham, was held April 10-12, 2024, in conjunction with the annual meeting of the British Society for Literature and Science (BSLS) and the biennial conference of the Commission on Science and Literature (CoSciLit). The 2025 conference “The Lifespan: Perspectives on Ageing and the Life Course from the Medical Humanities, the Health Sciences and Age Studies” will be held at King’s College London June 4-6, 2025:
https://www.slsa-eu.org/uploads/3/1/9/7/31971835/slsaeu_2025_save_the_date_25072024.pdf
SLSA EXECUTIVE BOARD (2024-25)
President: Rajani Sudan, Southern Methodist University (rsudan@mail.smu.edu)
Executive Director: Carol Colatrella, Georgia Institute of Technology (carol.colatrella@lmc.gatech.edu)
First Vice-President: Adam Nocek, Arizona State University (Adam.Nocek@asu.edu)
Second Vice-President: Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal, University of Basel ranjodhsingh.dhaliwal@unibas.ch
Members-at-Large: Paula Leverage (2023-25), Shane Denson (2023-25), Nat Mengist (2024-26)
Graduate Student Liaisons: Ben Platt (plattbe@oregonstate.edu), Elena Maloul (emaloul@umich.edu)
ConfigurationsEditors:Melissa Littlefield, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Rajani Sudan,
Southern Methodist University. Configurations Email address: configurations@smu.edu
ConfigurationsBook Review Editor: Jay Labinger, California Institute of Technology (jal@its.caltech.edu)
Publications Committee: Pamela Gossin; Raymond Malewitz; Bruce Clarke
Electronic Resources Coordinator: Wayne Miller (wayne.miller@gmail.com)
Arts Liaisons: Dennis Summers (dennis@quantumdanceworks.com); Maria Whiteman (mtw1@iu.edu)
Social Media Liaisons: Ed Chang (change@ohio.edu); Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal (rdhaliwa@nd.edu)
Ombudspersons: Marcel O’Gorman (marcel@uwaterloo.ca); Kari Nixon (knixon@whitworth.edu)
Past Presidents: David Cecchetto, York University, Toronto; Marcel O’Gorman, University of Waterloo; Ron Broglio, Arizona State University; Robert Markley, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Laura Otis, Emory University; Richard Nash, Indiana University; Alan Rauch, University of North Carolina-Charlotte; Bruce Clarke, Texas Tech University; Eve Keller, Fordham University; Jay Labinger, California Institute of Technology; T. Hugh Crawford, Georgia Tech; Susan Squier, Penn State; Sidney Perkowitz, Emory University; Stuart Peterfreund, Northeastern University; James J. Bono, SUNY-Buffalo; N. Katherine Hayles, Duke University; Mark Greenberg, Drexel University; Lance Schachterle, Worcester Polytechnic Institute; Stephen J. Weininger, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
The Executive Director can be reached at (404) 894-1241 or carol.colatrella@lmc.gatech.edu.
Postal address: Carol Colatrella, Executive Director, SLSA, School of Literature, Media, and
Communication, Georgia Institute of Technology, 686 Cherry Street, Atlanta, GA 30332-0165
SLSA websites: http://www.litsciarts.org and http://slsa.press.jhu.edu
