Join us in Corvallis, Oregon August 21-24, 2025

We invite you to the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts 38th Annual Conference that will take place on the campus of Oregon State University in Corvallis, Oregon on August 21-24, 2025.

The Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts welcomes colleagues in the sciences, engineering, technology, computer science, medicine, the social sciences, the humanities, the arts, and independent scholars and artists. SLSA members share an interest in problems of science and representation, and in the cultural and social dimensions of science, technology, and medicine. https://litsciarts.org/

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.

Schedule:
(SUBJECT TO CHANGE)
We anticipate decisions by March 15, 2025

The early registration deadline will be April 11, 2025

The final registration deadline will be May 16, 2025