CFP Fairy Tales, Folk Lore and Legends Conference (10/2/2015; Budapest 3/14-16/2016)

Fairy Tales, Folk Lore and Legends
Announcement published by Robert Fisher on Thursday, August 27, 2015
https://networks.h-net.org/node/73374/announcements/80114/fairy-tales-folk-lore-and-legends

Type: Conference
Date: March 14, 2016 to March 16, 2016
Location: Hungary
Subject Fields: Anthropology, Cultural History / Studies, Literature, Oral History


Fairy Tales, Folk Lore and Legends
Call for Submissions 2016

Monday 14th March – Wednesday 16th March 2016
Budapest, Hungary


Wicked witches, evil stepmothers, Rumplestiltskin, jinn, gnomes, trolls, wolves and thieves versus fairy godmothers, Peri, departed beloved mothers, firebirds, dwarves, princesses, Simurgh, woodcutters and princes charming. Fairy tales, folk lore and legends are the canvas on which the vast mural of good versus evil plays out and our darkest dreams or nightmares struggle against our better selves and highest hopes. At the same time, the relationship between these tales and modern society is a complex one that invites closer consideration of the changing nature of the stories and how modern sensibilities have both challenged and been challenged by the values and viewpoints that underpin the narratives.

Fairy tales can be interpreted in a variety of ways and from a variety of viewpoints: they can be psychological exposes, blueprints for dealing with the traumas of childhood and early adulthood, guides to navigating life, windows onto social realities long forgotten, remnants of ancient mythology or hints at how to access the Transcendent.

The Fairy Tales interdisciplinary research and publishing stream investigates how fairy tales/folk tales/legends represent both good and evil, how these are personified or interact, what these reveal about the lives of those who have told them over the years, what they mean for us who read or listen to them today. Possible subjects for presentations include but are not limited to:



Exploring the Tales Themselves

• Functions of tales over time and across cultures
• Socio-political context of tales and their capacity to serve as allegories for real life issues
• Justice and morality in the tales
• Fairy tale utopias and dystopias and the blurred lines between fiction, fact, reality, science fiction and mythology
• How fairy tales shape ideas about happiness
• Considerations of why tales are an enduring aspect of culture
• Factors that make some tales more popular than others (and why popularity can shift over time)
• (Re)interpretations and re-imaginings of the same tales differ over time or across cultures
• Relationship between fairy tale characters and real life humans: do human ‘good guys’ or ‘bad guys’ behave so differently from fictional goodies and baddies, where there times when characters that seem fantastic to modern folks were actually considered to be more realistic by historical readers/listeners, what factors shape the changes that cause people to perceive characters as more or less real
• Relationship between fantastic and magical elements of tales and lived reality
• Tales and monsters: monstrous animals, monstrous humans, children’s interaction with monsters
• Intended lessons and values of stories and counter-interpretations, particularly in relation to gender, sex, materialistic values, notions of virtue and authority
• Processes around the domestication of fairy tales
• Tales as a source of/mechanism for oppression of individuals or groups
• New/modern tales
• Critical approaches to tales
• Tales and their authors
• Fairy tale artwork and imagery
• Fairy tale geographies: spaces and places of both the worlds within fairy tales as well as the spaces and places where the narratives are told or written

Encountering Fairy Tales/Legends/Folk Tales

• Studies of readers/audiences across time and cultures
• Listening versus reading: impact of oral traditions on the narratives, impact of illustrations in reception of the tales, etc.
• Relationship between traditional and modern forms of interactive storytelling involving fairy tales
• How adaptation to other mediums, such as film, television, visual art, music, theatre, graphic novels, dance and video games, affect the content of the tales themselves, appreciation of the narrative or our interpretations of narrative meaning

Uses of Fairy Tales/Legends/Folk Tales

• In advertising (re-imagining tales in advertising imagery, marketing the princess lifestyle, etc.)
• Tales and pedagogy: using tales as teaching and learning tools
• In tourism through destination marketing of spaces associated with fairy tales, Disneyfication of tales, etc.
• In the formation of national/cultural/ethnic identity
• In the publishing business
• Communities, biography and fairy tales: How social communal identity is forged around telling and re-telling tales

Tales, Health and Happiness

• Tales and magical thinking in the human development
• Tales and psychological/clinical practices involving tales
• Tales and unhealthy behaviour/beliefs
• Effect of tales on shaping notions of (un)happiness, (in)appropriate ways to pursue it and how to respond to respond to others’ (un)happiness
• Tales and aging (“growing old” as a theme in tales, how tales shape perceptions of old age, etc.)

Live Performances of Tales

• Theatrical, dance and other types of staged presentations
• Pantomime
• Vocal performances
• Art installations
• Readings

Curated film screenings

Further details can be found on the project web site:

http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/probing-the-boundaries/persons/fairy-tales-folk-lore-and-legends/call-for-participation/

Call for Cross-Over Presentations

The Fairy Tales, Folk Lore and Legends project will be meeting at the same time as a project on Health and another project on Happiness. We welcome submissions which cross the divide between both project areas. If you would like to be considered for a cross project session, please mark your submission “Crossover Submission”.

What to Send

300 word abstracts, proposals and other forms of contribution should be submitted by Friday 2nd October 2015.
All submissions be minimally double reviewed, under anonymous (blind) conditions, by a global panel drawn from members of the Project Team and the Advisory Board. In practice our procedures usually entail that by the time a proposal is accepted, it will have been triple and quadruple reviewed.

You will be notified of the panel’s decision by Friday 16th October 2015.
If your submission is accepted for the conference, a full draft of your contribution should be submitted by Friday 5th February 2016.

Abstracts may be in Word, RTF or Notepad 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: Fairy Tales Abstract Submission



Where to Send

Abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs:

Organising Chairs:
Stephen Morris: smmorris58@yahoo.com
Rob Fisher: fairytales@inter-disciplinary.net

This event is an inclusive interdisciplinary research and publishing project. It aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting.

It is anticipated that a number of publishing options will arise from the work of the project generally and from the meeting of Fairy Tales, Folk Lore and Legends stream in particular. Minimally there will be a digital eBook resulting from the conference meeting. Other options, some of which might include digital publications, paperbacks and a journal will be explored during the meeting itself.

Ethos

Inter-Disciplinary.Net believes it is a mark of personal courtesy and professional respect to your colleagues that all delegates should attend for the full duration of the meeting. If you are unable to make this commitment, please do not submit an abstract for presentation. Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.

Contact Info:
 Dr. Rob Fisher

Priory House

149B Wroslyn Road

Freeland, Oxfordshire OX29 8HR

United Kingdom

Tel: +44 (0)1993 882087

Fax: +44 (0)870 4601132

Contact Email:
fairytales@inter-disciplinary.net
URL:
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/probing-the-boundaries/persons/fairy-tales-folk-lore-and-legends/call-for-participation/

CFP Preternatural Environments: Dreamscapes, Alternate Realities, Landscapes of Dread (proposals by 3/1/2016)

Preternatural Environments: Dreamscapes, Alternate Realities, Landscapes of Dread
Announcement published by Richard Raiswell on Thursday, August 27, 2015
https://networks.h-net.org/node/73374/announcements/80115/preternatural-environments-dreamscapes-alternate-realities

Type: Call for Publications
Date: March 1, 2016
Location: Prince Edward Island, Canada
Subject Fields: Anthropology, Art, Art History & Visual Studies, Cultural History / Studies, Environmental History / Studies, Geography

Preternatural Environments: Dreamscapes, Alternate Realities, Landscapes of Dread

CFP for special issue of Preternature (issue 6.1)

Deadline for submissions: March 1, 2016

This special issue of Preternature seeks papers that examine elements and/or depictions of the preternatural in all sorts of environments. Scholars are increasingly drawing attention to the importance of spaces and their contexts, the stories we tell about them, and our interactions with them. This volume focuses on preternatural aspects of natural and unnatural environments such as dreamscapes, alternate worlds, and eerie landscapes.

Papers should investigate the connections between preternatural environments and literary, historical, anthropological, and artistic forms of understanding. Topics might include, but are not limited to:

• Defining the “preternatural environment” / preternatural aspects of an environment.
• Superstition and spaces.
• Demonic domains.
• Artistic representations of preternatural environments across the ages.
• Aspects of the uncanny in various physical settings.
• The pathetic fallacy and narrative theory.
• “Unnatural” landscapes and environments.
• Bridging natural and preternatural spaces.
• Preternatural ecology and ecocriticism.
• Connections between material environments, literary narratives, and the preternatural.
• Eerie landscapes as characters or significant presences in literature, history, and culture.
• How preternatural environments inform human behaviour, or how behaviour informs preternatural environments.

Preternature welcomes a variety of approaches, including narrative theory, ecocriticism, and behavioral studies from any cultural, literary, artistic, or historical tradition and from any time period. We particularly encourage submissions dealing with non-Western contexts.

Contributions should be 8,000 - 12,000 words, including all documentation and critical apparatus. For more information, see http://www.psupress.org/journals/jnls_submis_Preternature.html

or submit directly at https://www.editorialmanager.com/preternature/default.aspx.

(First-time users: click on “Register” in the menu at upper left.)

Preternature is published twice annually by the Pennsylvania State Press and is available through JSTOR and Project Muse. This periodical is also indexed in the ATLA Religion Database® (ATLA RDB®), www: http://www.atla.com.

Contact Info:
Richard Raiswell

Editor, Preternature

Contact Email:
rraiswell@upei.ca
URL: http://www.editorialmanager.com/preternature/default.aspx

CFP Horror and Fashion (proposals by 10/31/2015)

An intriguing idea for a collection:

CFP: Horror and fashion
Announcement published by Gudrun Whitehead on Monday, August 31, 2015

Type: Call for Papers
Date: August 28, 2015 to October 31, 2015
Subject Fields: Cultural History / Studies, Film and Film History, Literature, Popular Culture Studies, Women's & Gender History / Studies

This is a call for proposals for chapters to comprise a potential new publication, which has had strong interest from Bloomsbury. Editors of this volume are Dr. Julia Petrov, Alberta College of Art and Design, Canada and me, Dr. Gudrun D. Whitehead, University of Iceland.

Overview
Recently, academic attention has turned to exploring the links between popular culture and dress. Thematic approaches to sub-cultural dress have included Gothic: Dark Glamour (Steele and Park 2008), Punk: Chaos to Couture (Bolton et al 2013). The role of media in fashion dissemination and reception has been discussed in Fashion in Film (Munich 2011) and Fashion in Popular Culture (Hancock et al 2013). Furthermore, scholars have recently noted fashion’s obsession with subversion (Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty; Bolton et al 2011), as well as the dark side of fashion production and consumption (Fashion Victims; Matthews David 2015).

At the same time, horror has gained a wider audience than ever before, moving from sub-culture into mainstream culture. No longer content with lurking in the shadows, vampires, zombies, ghouls, murderers, and mythical creatures can now be found on the big screen and in bestselling books, mesmerizing audiences in old roles and new. Previously securely identified through mannerisms and dress, monsters and villains are now fully integrated into society, attending high-school, going to work and dressing according to the latest fashion, rather than the clothes they perished in. This is evident from teen horror going mainstream such as the Twilight book and film series, but also from multiple current TV shows, such as Z nation, iZombie, the Walking Dead, and more. Cult TV program The X-files is returning to the small screen and Bruce Campbell will sport his Evil Dead chainsaw once again, this time as a major television program, rather than in a film. These are only a few examples from many, demonstrating the recent surge in the horror genre, both as mainstream and independent productions. The proposed volume seeks to explore these recent trends in horror through one of their basic components, costume design.

To date, apart from a few articles and book chapters (e.g.: Tseelon 1998, Nakahara 2009), there has been no thorough investigation of fashion and horror. This edited volume, therefore, proposes to explore the links between the horror genre and dress in all its forms, from costume to fashionable clothing. Disciplinary approaches may include fashion studies, media studies, film, literature, folklore, costume design, sociology, popular culture studies, gender studies, material culture studies and others. The editors seek contributions from scholars at a wide variety of institutions from around the globe on topics such as:

1. Fashion in horror:
Dress is an important element for developing narrative and characterization in both literary and film horror. Within this theme, chapters could explore:

• Costumes as expression of plot 
• Costumes and character archetypes
• Costumes and villains: instant recognition of horror film-series villains from costume designs
• Costumes identifying sub-genres 
• Costume style and production companies (such as Hammer Horror)
• How can costumes act as an emotional stimulus for audiences? 
• Gender and horror: costume differences between male and female characters in horror
• Collecting horror film costume
• Horror cosplay
• From burial-dress to prom-dress: History of horror through costume design.

2. Horror in fashion:
As fashion exists in a world of popular culture references, this theme seeks to explore the mutually-referential relationship between high-street/high-fashion designs and horror. Chapters might address:

• Designer clothing that references horror films or literature
• The influence of horror films on fashion
• How is horror communicated in fashion? 
• How fashion has expanded horror? Has it given the horror movie genre a new set of references or a new audience?

What the proposal should include:
300-400 word chapter summary of no more than 8,000 words (including notes and references), including a chapter title and keywords, information on central argument/research question, a summary of main points, theoretical approach, and relevant sources.
Contact information, institutional affiliation, and biographies for authors and co-authors (please note corresponding author for collaborative chapters).

Deadlines:
Please submit proposals to Dr. Petrov and Dr. Whitehead at CostumedHorror@gmail.com, no later than on Halloween, 31 October 2015.

Authors will be informed about acceptance or rejection of their proposals no later than 30 November 2015. The entire book proposal will then be sent to Bloomsbury for a thorough review by international scholars. Contributing authors will receive a contract once the proposal has been successfully peer reviewed and accepted at the publisher’s board meeting. Authors will then be sent article guidelines, and full chapters should be submitted for review and subsequent revision. The entire book manuscript will then be submitted to Bloomsbury where it will go through the publisher’s own manuscript peer review. It is anticipated that the volume will be published in late 2016, or early 2017.
Contact Info:
For further information please feel free to contact me, Gudrun D. Whitehead or Julia Petrov.  The contact email is: CostumedHorror@gmail.com

Contact Email:
CostumedHorror@gmail.com

CFP Race, Gender, and Sexuality in The Walking Dead (1/11/2016)

CFP, Collection of Essays on Race, Gender, and Sexuality in The Walking Dead, abstracts due Jan. 11, 2016
Discussion published by Dawn Keetley on Saturday, August 29, 2015
https://networks.h-net.org/node/13784/discussions/80322/cfp-collection-essays-race-gender-and-sexuality-walking-dead

RACE, GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN THE WALKING DEAD FRANCHISE

The Walking Dead franchise has become a popular culture juggernaut that shows no signs of slowing down. Yet, despite its soaring popularity, there has been a longstanding critique that the franchise, in both its comic book and television incarnations, advocates an explicitly patriarchal and predominantly white world order. Zombie narratives have shown themselves to be uniquely qualified to deconstruct the many illusions (and injustices) of our social order, so why have so many felt that The Walking Dead has only hardened the conventional boundaries of race, gender, and sexuality? Nonetheless, in all its forms, The Walking Dead is an evolving narrative—and many would argue that, specifically in its representations of what women and men of all races may become, the franchise is working toward more utopian possibilities.

All four of the collections of essays on The Walking Dead—James Lowder’s Triumph of the Walking Dead (2011), Wayne Yeun’s The Walking Dead and Philosophy (2012), Dawn Keetley’s “We’re All Infected”: Essays on AMC’s The Walking Dead and the Fate of the Human (2014), and Travis Langley’s The Walking Dead Psychology (2015)—cover a wide swathe of topics, and take up gender, sexuality, and race only fleetingly. We think it’s time for a collection addressed squarely at these issues, so crucial to the franchise’s vision of a post-apocalyptic world.

To that end, we are currently accepting chapter proposals for an edited volume exploring the interlinked representations of gender, sexuality, and race in all The Walking Dead franchises. This edited volume will explore the many ways in which all three crucial identity categories are constructed/deconstructed on television and in the comic book series. Because our intention is to present a highly diverse collection, we are interested in chapters exploring all facets of race, gender, and sexuality related to the television shows and comic books, as well as in tie-ins and connected materials (e.g. the AMC webisodes, Walking Dead Specials, etc.).


Possible topics may include (but are not limited to) the following:

• The relationship between undeadness and race/gender politics in The Walking Dead
• The role a dystopian, post-apocalyptic environment plays in shaping gender and race construction in The Walking Dead
• How race, gender, and sexuality intersect in The Walking Dead
• Queer visibility and gender in in The Walking Dead
• How The Walking Dead reflects/challenges the traditional depiction of gender and race in its predecessor zombie narratives
• How either the comics or the TV series has evolved in its representations of women, men, and people of color
• How fan conversation on the internet (on blogs, for instance) has critiqued and potentially shaped the ways race, gender, and sexuality are depicted in the franchise.

Please submit a 500 word abstract and short biography to Dawn Keetley (dek7@lehigh.edu) and Elizabeth Erwin (eerwin@lccc.edu) by January 11, 2016. We anticipate a tentative due date of August 1, 2016, for full essays. We will be more than happy to respond to any and all queries in the meantime.