Aug. 21-24, 2025 • Oregon State University • Corvallis, Oregon

Program

The 2025 Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts Schedule is available below and as a PDF.
(SUBJECT TO CHANGE)

Wednesday, August 20
8:00am to 5:00pm Pre-Conference Trip
Location: Meet at N. Entrance to PRAx
Pre-Conference guided trip to the Andrews Research Forest in Central Oregon with Forestry Emeritus Professor Fred Swanson. (Please Note: Space will be limited to 20 participants, so the activity is open only to pre-registered attendees. Visit the Pre-Conference Trip page for more information and to register to join.)
Thursday, August 21
10:30am and Onward Welcome and Registration, Coffee Services
Location: PRAx Toomey Lobby N
12:30pm to 2:00pm VIRTUAL TRACK INCLUSION
Memory and Representation in an Era of Large Language Models
Location: PRAx Lynne Hallstrom Detrick Concert Hall|

  • E. Arellano (Southern Oregon University) – “At Risk of Forgetting: LLMs, Platform Abandonment, & the Hypertext Hotel’s Endangered Legacy in American Literature”
  • Joshua Sarinana (Independent Scholar) – “Utilizing Large Language Models and Art to Represent Cognitive Networks”
  • Carlee Baker (University of Texas) & Alexandra Gunnells (University of Texas) – “Rhetorically Situating the Risk of AI-Assisted Reading Practices”
  Risk and the Technologized Body
Location: PRAx Edward J. Ray Theater

  • Treyden Chiaravalloti (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) & Tryanni Chiaravalloti (University of Florida) – “Artificial Wombs: A Technical and Societal Risk Analysis of Artificial Womb Development and Implementation”
  • Chelsea Kai Roesch (UC Santa Barbara) – “Model Dealers: Women’s Work and the Facilitation of Risk in the Digital Casino”
2:15pm to 3:45pm VIRTUAL TRACK INCLUSION
Risking Connection with Artificial Intelligences
Location: PRAx Lynne Hallstrom Detrick Concert Hall

  • Thomas Rickert (Purdue University) – “Stochastic Parrots, Narcissistic Mirrors, or Occasions for Joy?: Risky Metaphors and Artificial Intelligence”
  • Won Jeon (UC Santa Cruz) – “The Risk of Learning: Predicted Futures and the End of Contradiction”
  Transcorporeal Subjectivities
Location: PRAx Toomey Lobby S

  • Alba Tomasula y Garcia (University of Mississippi) – “Fungal Fears: Mushrooms and the Cost of Malice”
  • Anna-Maria Senuysal (Ohio State University) – “Dangerous Allies – Fungal Uncertainty and the Productivity of Threat”
  Risk and Responsibility: Feeling Nature as a Precursor to Ethical Action
Location: PRAx Edward J. Ray Theater

  • Sochuiwon Priscilla Khapai (CUNY Graduate Center) – “Coleridge and Visions of Harmony in Nature”
  • Steven Denison (Eckerd College) – “Nature in a Crisis and Crisis of Nature; Poetry and Science of Wordsworth and Wilson”
  • Travis Merchant-Knudsen (North Carolina State University) – “Animating an Ambient Climate Crisis”
  • Ricky D Crano (UC Irvine) – “Fingers like a Bank: Financial Media, Assurance Networks, & the Dream of Universal Accounting”
  Affective Risks in the Performing Arts
Location: PRAx Rehearsal Classroom Building

  • Lukas Wood (Loyola Marymount University) – “Amorality”
  • Lucas Dietsche (Adams State University) – “Subversion of Poietic Law: A Heideggerian Inquiry through Hugo Ball’s ‘Gadji Beri Bimba’”
4:00pm to 5:30pm Cultural Hybridity, Technology, Emotion, Art, and Risk
Location: PRAx Greenroom

  • Michael Filas (Westfield State University) – “Oscar Pistorius & the Ninth Station of the Uncanny Valley”
  • David Clark (virtual, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design) – “Because It’s There”
  • Dennis Summers (Strategic Technologies for Art, Globe, and Environment) – “Barbara T. Smith Risks All in a Life of Public Exposure”
  Game Studies 1: Definitions
Location: PRAx Edward J. Ray Theater

  • Samuel Pizelo (New York University) – “The Nature of Risk: How Computer Games Gave Us a Systemic Definition of Agency”
  • Matt Horrigan (virtual, Alexander College) – “Play in Security: Hauntologies, Horror Games, and Epistemic Joy in Too-Late Capitalism”
  • Luna Loganayagam (UC Davis) – “The Fool: Embracing Uncertainty in the Persona Series”
  VIRTUAL TRACK INCLUSION
Animal Studies 1: Pests, Parasites, and Pollution
Location: PRAx Lynne Hallstrom Detrick Concert Hall

  • Samantha Brierley (Arizona State University) – “Vermin v. Victorians: Risks and Repercussions of Human Exceptionalism in Haggard’s She”
  • Hayden Bytheway (virtual, University of Toronto) – “Being Mad About Cows: On Dark Waters (2019) and the Limits of Ecocriticism”
  • Maria Lux (Whitman College) – “Advanced Warning: Artwork that explores sentinel species in a risky, speculative future”
  Risking the Economy: Capitalism and Crisis
Location: PRAx Rehearsal Classroom Building

  • Melanie Swan (University College London – “Categorical Risk. Crypto, Quantum, AI, and Markets. The Formalization Turn”
  • Daniel Russo (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) – “COVID-as-economic-event and the Federal Reserve’s perception of reduced purchasing power as macroeconomic risk”
  Risk in Contemporary Fiction
Location: PRAx Toomey Lobby S

  • Case Pharr (Oregon State University) – “What kind of garbage will that make?’: Risk Management, and Narrative Form in DeLillo’s Underworld”
  • Jay Labinger (Cal Tech) – “The Understory or Galatea 22.2? Thwarted Expectations in Richard Powers’s Playground”
  • Melissa Wills (UC Davis) – “Bursting the bubble? Redefining quarantine in post-Covid American literature”
  • Carol Colatrella (Georgia Institute of Technology) – “Risky Compassion: Narrative Representations of Gendered Interventions in Evolution”
5:30pm to 6:30pm Executive Committee Meeting
Location: PRAx Seminar Room
6:30pm to 8:30pm Opening Reception
Location: PRAx Toomey Lobby N, Tooimey Lobby S, and Kate and John Stirek Gallery
7:00pm to 9:00pm Special Collections and Archives Research Center
Location: Research Center on the 5th floor of Valley Library
Join OSU’s Special Collections and Archives Research Center to explore dozens of compelling selections curated from our rich cultural heritage collections around the conference theme of Risk. Ranging from early printed books to modern comics and artists’ books, these captivating materials are viewed through lenses of economic, environmental, exposure, scientific, artistic, and personal risks. See rare items from our collection strengths of history of science, natural resources, nuclear history, alternative medicine, and the history of the Pacific Northwest.This session will take place in the Special Collections and Archives Research Center on the 5th floor of Valley Library. The space can only host about 35-40 people at once. If more than 35-40 folks come at once, we will need to ask people to wait for the room to clear before coming in.

 

Friday, August 22
8:00am to 9:00am Outreach & Breakfast, sponsored by SLSA
Location: Celia Strickland Austin & Ken Austin III | Loni Austin Parrish & Scott N. Parrish Arts Plaza
Please note that this event is open only to graduate students and post-doctoral candidates. It is designed to help our most junior colleagues foster networks and build community within the organization.
8:30am and Onward Registration, Coffee Services, Morning Continental Breakfast
Location: PRAx Toomey Lobby N
8:30am to 10:00am Game Studies 2: Art/Games
Location: PRAx Edward J. Ray Theater

  • Doug Stark (University of Texas at Arlington) – “On Protective Play: Risk, Farocki, and Operational Games”
  • Mayshu (Meixu) Zhan (Stanford) – “Navigating Risk in the Nationalist Digital Landscape: Feminism, Misogyny, and Subversive Play in Chinese Gaming Culture”
  • April Riddle (Ohio State University) – “Navigating the Futility of D.I.Y. Individualism in Michael Smith’s Art Game”
  • Yvette Granata (University of Michigan) – “DOGE Dogs vs. Laser Cats: Gaming the Oligarchic Impulse”
  VIRTUAL TRACK INCLUSION
Animal Studies 2: Human–Animal Entanglements
Location: PRAx Lynne Hallstrom Detrick Concert Hall

  • Melissa Littlefield (virtual, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) – “The USDA’s ‘New Potion’: EQ-53 & the Forgotten War on Wool Clothes Moths”
  • Fabian Winkler (Purdue University) & Shannon McMullen (Purdue University) – “Ecophones: Birdsong, Global Ecologies and Technologies”
  • KS Brewer (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) – “Kinship with Contamination: Encountering Risk through Entanglement with Flesh Flies”
  Performance Studies 1: Unstable Matter: Risk in Performance
Location: PRAx Rehearsal Classroom Building

  • Danielle Adair (Stanford) – “Siri: Fiction and Forgetting in AI”
  • Gillian Hemme (Northwestern) – “’Making the Invisible Visible’: Improvisational Performance of Imaginary Objects in Carceral Spaces”
  • Angenette Spalink (Texas A&M) – “Risky Entanglements: Mosses and (Im)Materiality in Cryptic’s Below the Blanket”
  Ecofascist Aesthetics
Location: PRAx Toomey Lobby S

  • Lisa Han (virtual, Pitzer College) – “Recruiting the Sea: Nonhuman Labor and Ecofascist Remediations of Marine Life”
  • Diana Ruíz (University of Washington) – “Immigration Detention Expansion through Ecofascist Aesthetics”
  • Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa (Seattle University) – “Migration without Migrants: Wildlife-Friendly Infrastructure and the Ecofascist State”
10:15am to 11:45am Performance Studies 2: Precarious Senses
Location: PRAx Rehearsal Classroom Building

  • Leonardo Cardoso (Texas A&M) – “Mud, Sirens, Wind: An Acoustic Approach to Environmental Risk in Contemporary Brazil”
  • Devon Baur (UCLA) – “There is a Gap Between: Sensory Schisms and Posthuman Languages”
  • Cory LaFevers (Texas A&M) – “Tyler Childers Performing Risk Management in Country Music”
  • Elizabeth McQueen (UC Davis) – “On Petrol: Aroma Wheels, Sensory Science, and Risking a Taste for Plastic”
  • Allie Wist (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) – “Slow Hedonism: Sensing Toxic Worlds Through Taste and Smell in Art Practice”
  VIRTUAL TRACK INCLUSION
Animal Studies 3: Animal Containment and the Open
Location: PRAx Lynne Hallstrom Detrick Concert Hall

  • August Hoffman (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) – “The Bite that Binds: Aporias and Generative Possibilities of Violence in Wolf Sanctuary”
  • Susan McHugh (University of New England) – “Elephant Ears in the Room: Hazarding Plant and Animal Studies”
  Risky Exercises: Aesthetics, Training, Habit
Location: PRAx Edward J. Ray Theater

  • Gabriel Trop (UNC-Chapel Hill) – “The Digital Philosophy of Mythology as Risk Ontology”
  • Doug Stark (University of Texas at Arlington) – “Playing 4D: Discorrelation, Adaptation, Speculation”
  • Josy Raheem (virtual, Yale) – “Proof That They Exist: Robert Bresson’s Exercises of Attention”
  • Sonja Bertucci (University of Richmond) – “Night Practices: Repetition, Risk, and Spectatorship in Abbas Kiarostami’s Homework (1989)”
  This is me!: Declarations of Self & personhood across modern Northeast Asia
Location: PRAx Greenroom

  • Rosaley Gai (Stanford) – “Amakusa Girls in Every Corner of the World: Transpacific Migration Narratives in ‘Human Sausages’ (1936)”
  • Michelle Ha (Stanford) – “The Risk of Law in Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave”
  • Luo Jia (Stanford) – “Attention at Risk, or How Korean Modernists Rediscovered Reality”
  Mapping Technological Environments
Location: PRAx Toomey Lobby S

  • Natasha Lushetich (virtual, University of Dundee) – “All by Itself: Automaticity and Techno-Volatility”
  • Sara Bimo (virtual, York University) – “‘The Backrooms’ and the instrumental horror of the liminal”
  • Zachary Furste (University of Amsterdam) – “Input, Output, Inside Out: Tracking Exposure on i-o.tv”
11:45am to 12:30pm Lunch Break
Location: PRAx Toomey Lobby N
We will have a grab-and-go style lunch for attendees in the lobby. Various sandwich wraps and sides will be available.
12:30pm to 2:00pm Media, Aesthetics, Theory, and Risk I
Location: PRAx Toomey Lobby S

  • Danielle Adair (Stanford) – “Sing Me a Song, AI”
  • David Cecchetto (virtual, York University) – “Visceral Abstraction and Listening After Computation”
  • Shane Denson (Stanford) – “Hazarding the World: AI as Existential(ist) Risk”
  Security, Simulation, and Surrogate Witnessing
Location: PRAx Rehearsal Classroom Building

  • Tory Jeffay (Dartmouth) – “Shooting the Looters: Cameras, Cops, and Racialized Risk Management”
  • Jason Ludwig (UC Santa Barbara) – “‘There are No Utopias’: Computer Modeling and the Politics of Race and Risk in American Cities”
  • Greg Siegel (UC Santa Barbara) – “Falling Fireballs, Imponderable Audibilities”
  Extraterrestrial Posthumanism: The Search for Life in Astrobiology, Science Fiction and Bio Art
Location: PRAx Edward J. Ray Theater

  • Ana Salvan (Independent Scholar) – “Microbial Encounters and the Risk of the Unknown in Astrobiological Research”
  • Elizabeth Smith (University of Warwick) – “Risk, Life, and Alien Poetics in The Xenotext”
  • Joao Guimaraes (virtual, University of Porto) – “Risk, Alien Life, and Speculative Futures in Life Beyond Us Anthology”
  VIRTUAL TRACK INCLUSION
Exposure as Keyword: Risks, Materialities, Possibilities
Location: PRAx Lynne Hallstrom Detrick Concert Hall

  • Dylan Blackston (New Mexico State University) – “Barrier Relations, or Risking Trans Life”
  • Kerry Banazek (New Mexico State University) – “Seeing Through and Into: X-Ray Exposure as Cultural Force”
  • Daniel Gilfillan (Arizona State University) – “Sonic Exposure: Risk, Soundscapes and Ecological Transformation”
  • Celina Osuna (University of Texas at El Paso) – “Exposure as a Practice of Intimacy”
  Risk and Revolution
Location: PRAx Greenroom

  • Kim Kattari (Texas A&M University) – “The Risk of Raving in Ukraine”
  • Nicholas Fazio (virtual, York University) – “Victory and Tragedy: Languages of Risk in Voltaire’s Brutus and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar”
2:15pm to 3:45pm VIRTUAL TRACK INCLUSION
Fluxakucha 10: Risking Fluxus (part 1 of 3)
Location: PRAx Lynne Hallstrom Detrick Concert Hall

  • Hannah B Higgins (University of Illinois Chicago) – “Fluxus Flags & Flag Protection (1966-1970)”
  • Lauren Sudbrink, (Independent Artist) – “Flux of Fortune”
  • Chris Reeves (School of the Art Institute of Chicago) – “‘So What Are You Doing Here?’: Henry Flynt, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry”
  • Craig Saper (University of Maryland, Baltimore County) – “Fluxakucha Stream: Fluxfunus”
  • Susan Jarosi (Hamilton College) – “The Rewards of Risk”
  Media, Aesthetics, Theory, and Risk II
Location: PRAx Edward J. Ray Theater

  • Casey A. Boyle (UT-Austin) – “What Holds Just Before It Doesn’t”
  • Michael Richardson (virtual, University of New South Wales) – “Synthesis, Aesthetics, War”
  • Anna Davidson (Cornell University) – “Flood Risks: Documenting Flooding of Upstate New York through Art”
  Animal Studies 4: Vulnerability
Location: PRAx Rehearsal Classroom Building

  • Natalie Lozinski-Veach (Arizona State University) – “Risky Encounters: Animals and Holocaust Studies”
  • Peter Sands (York University) – “Paranoid Ecologies: Extinction, Nuclear Risk and Gravity’s Rainbow”
  • Lucinda Cole (University of Illinois) – “Bovine elegies and the medical posthumanities”
  Queer Mediations
Location: PRAx Greenroom

  • Chris Wildrick (Syracuse University) – “Mirroring and Mutability Among Trans and Other Queer Comic Characters”
  • Joel Humphries (RMIT University) – “Queer community on the blockchain: the utopianism of LGBTQ+ NFT collectors”
  • Srishti Chatterjee (virtual, Northwestern University) – “Navigating Visibility: Embodied Rhetoric, Risk, and Hypervisibility Under the Alt-Right Gaze”
4:00pm to 5:30pm VIRTUAL TRACK INCLUSION
Fluxakucha 10: Risking Fluxus (part 2 of 3)
Location: PRAx Lynne Hallstrom Detrick Concert Hall

  • Nicole Woods (Loyola Marymount University) – “The Risk of/for Peace: Revisiting Yoko Ono’s ‘Cut Piece’ and George Maciunas’s ‘Flux Fortress’”
  • Doug Stark (University of Texas at Arlington) – “Risking My Career”
  • Anne Collins Goodyear (Bowdoin College) – “A Case of Magnetic Flux-us: Alice Hutchins”
  • Roger Rothman (Bucknell University) – “Fluxakucha 10: Risking Fluxus”
  • Dennis Summers (Strategic Technologies for Art, Globe, and Environment) – “Barbara T. Smith Risks All in a Life of Public Exposure”
  • Lukas Wood (Loyola Marymount University) – “Guide (or The McLuhan Meditation)”
  • Michael Filas (Westfield State University) – “A Review of Owen F. Smith’s ‘DEfLUXE Fragile Event’”
  Affective Practices for Managing an Uncertain Future
Location: PRAx Edward J. Ray Theater

  • Ranran Fan (University of North Texas) – “Divination as Risk Management Strategy”
  • Dan Paz (UC Davis) – “Materializing Power: Aesthetics of the Mutable Chair”
  • Coral Pereda Serras (UC San Diego) – “Shadow Spaces: Perceptions of Contingency in Artificial Intelligence, the Body, and Magic”
  • Roger Whitson (Washington State University) – “Time Lapse and Time Travel: Operational Archives in HG Wells’s The Time Machine”
  Risks of Interdisciplinarity Roundtable
Location: PRAx Rehearsal Classroom Building

  • Paul Jaussen (Lawrence Technological University)
  • Marcel O’Gorman (virtual, University of Waterloo)
  • Terrence Schenold (Cornish College of the Arts)
  • Zachary Tavlin (School of the Art Institute of Chicago)
  • Raquel Velho (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)
5:45pm to 7:15pm VIRTUAL TRACK INCLUSION
Plenary #1: Risk Panel: Risk Across the Disciplines
Location: PRAx Lynne Hallstrom Detrick Concert Hall

  • Tekla Bude (Oregon State University)
  • Ehren Pflugfelder (Oregon State University)
  • Shawn Hazboun (Oregon State University)
  • Yanni Ma (Oregon State University)
  • Xuerong Lu (Oregon State University)

 

Saturday, August 23
8:30am and Onward Registration, Coffee Services, Morning Continental Breakfast
Location: PRAx Toomey Lobby N
8:30am to 10:00am Animal Studies 5: Animal Capital and Animal Data
Location: PRAx Rehearsal Classroom Building

  • Rodrigo Martini (University of Georgia) – “Poetics of Postmortemism: Natural History, Media Ecology, and Taxidermy”
  • Terike Haapoja (Independent Scholar) – “A Multispecies Struggle Against Animal Capitalism”
  • Christina Shiea (University of Washington) – “Aquariums, Animals, and Risk: The Lived Experience of Glass”
  Black and Indigenous Sciences: Materiality
Location: PRAx Toomey Lobby S

  • Damian Enyaosah (University of Texas at Dallas) – “Risk and Ritual: The Perilous Intersections of Ifá-ING, Afro-Posthumanism, and Performance Aesthetics”
  • Nat Mengist (University of Washington) – “Whose materialism is it anyway?”
  Contemporary Art and the Aesthetics of Risk
Location: PRAx Edward J. Ray Theater

  • Mary Brink (Young Harris College) – “Appalachia, Art, and the Anthropocene: Ecological Impacts and Contemporary Art”
  • Stephanie Chadwick (Lamar University) – “Mel Chin, Artistic Intervention, and Risky Business”
  • Allen Riley (University of California, Santa Cruz) – “Risk Aesthetics in Participatory Art”
  • Georgina Ruff (Willamette University) – “The Risk of Technical Malfunction in the Gallery”
  VIRTUAL TRACK INCLUSION
Is Post/Critique Worth the Risk?
Location: PRAx Lynne Hallstrom Detrick Concert Hall

  • Chris Mays (University of Nevada Reno) – “Creating Uncertainty to Undermine Critical Expertise in Weather and Climate Discourse”
  • Brendan Johnston (UC Davis) – “Risking Opacity: Critique and Composition; Mythopoetics, Theory, and Practice”
10:15am to 11:45am Game Studies 3: World(s)Building
Location: PRAx Edward J. Ray Theater

  • Haoran Chang (virtual, York University) – “Reconsider Mindfulness Game Design with Taoist Practice”
  • Stephanie Kinzinger (Northeastern University) – “Transgressive Play, or The Ephemerality of Rule-Based Systems”
  • Trevor Redd Smith (UC Irvine) – “Procedural Generation in Videogames: Risk and the Sublime”
  Farm Media: From Agrotechnology to Design
Location: PRAx Greenroom

  • Hayley Birss (University of Chicago) – “The Vertical Farm: Modularity as Settler-Colonial Logic”
  • Yangqiao Lu (University of Chicago) – “Two Images of Pollination”
  VIRTUAL TRACK INCLUSION
Future Faculties of Deep Time Roundtable
Location: PRAx Lynne Hallstrom Detrick Concert Hall

  • Aaron Jaffe (Florida State University) – “Malfunctioning Data and Submedia Space”
  • Kate Marshall (Notre Dame) – “Ancient Futurity In Ascension”
  • Charles Tung (Seattle University) – “Media Sewershed Epidemiology and the Far Future”
  • Mackenzie Tygh (Johns Hopkins University) – “Dante’s Contingent Cosmology: Computing the Temporal Labyrinth in Purgatorio”
  Mediating Risk: Between Proliferation and Containment
Location: PRAx Rehearsal Classroom Building

  • Zach McLane (UC Santa Barbara) – “Disaster Disavowed: Frameless Data and the Cinematic Screen in Twister and Twisters”
  • Thomas Pringle (USC) – “Aesthetics and Externalities: Streaming Biodiversity in Netflix’s ‘Net Zero + Nature’”
  • Carrie Jiang (virtual, UC Santa Barbara) – “Lights On: Infrastructural Policing of Queer Bodies in Urban China”
  • Matthew Ellis (Portland State University) – “The Shape of Risk: Narrative Logics and Historical Consciousness After Neoliberalism”
  Animal Studies 6: Literature, Science, and Animal Advocacy in Canada: Practical Zoocriticism Book Panel
Location: PRAx Kate and John Stirek Gallery

  • Lucinda Cole (University of Illinois) – “Bovine elegies and the medical posthumanities”
  • Candice Allmark-Kent (Independent Scholar) – “Literature, Science, and Animal Studies: The Risks of Taking Animals Seriously”
  • Peter Sands (York University) – “Paranoid Ecologies: Extinction, Nuclear Risk and Gravity’s Rainbow”
12:00pm to 1:15pm SLSA Member’s Lunch
Location: PRAx Toomey Lobby S
Please note that all SLSA members are invited to attend. There will be brief president’s and financial report in addition to presentations of 2025 Bruns and Schachterle essay prizes, the Kendrick book prize, and the Lifetime Achievement Award.
1:30pm to 2:45pm VIRTUAL TRACK INCLUSION
Plenary #2: Techno-intimacies: Worry-love, Risk, Political economies, Governance
Location: PRAx Lynne Hallstrom Detrick Concert Hall
Geeta Patel (University of Virginia)
3:00pm to 4:30pm VIRTUAL TRACK INCLUSION
Fluxakucha 10: Risking Fluxus (part 3 of 3)
Location: PRAx Lynne Hallstrom Detrick Concert Hall

  • Emilio Taiveaho Peláez (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) – “What Will Have Had to Be Fluxus Poetry?: Risking Reading Something Else Press”
  • Lauren Mitchell (Vanderbilt University) – “Affective Risk: Surgery, Alienation, and Empathy”
  • Laurel Jean Fredrickson (Southern Illinois University Carbondale) – “The Risks Inherent to Fluxian Scores and their Interpretation: Danger, Destruction, Extreme Exposure, Contingency, Chance, even Possible Death”
  • Meredith Tromble (Feminist Research Institute, UC Davis) – “Madam Entropy: I’ve Got A Feeling”
  • Chris Wildrick (Syracuse University) – “Flux-Feast: A Class in Creative Eating”
  • Andrea Buckvold (Independent Scholar) – “Risk: A Clean Slate”
  Animal Studies 7: Science & …
Location: PRAx Rehearsal Classroom Building

  • Candice Allmark-Kent (Independent Scholar) – “Literature, Science, and Animal Studies: The Risks of Taking Animals Seriously”
  • Arundhati Ghosh (Southern Methodist University) – “The Risks of Bridging Haraway’s Great Divides as Represented in Tender is the Flesh”
  Risks and Collective Thinking in the Age of the Individual
Location: PRAx Greenroom

  • Kendra Atkin (UC Irvine) – “Telepathic Risk and the Disabled Body in Octavia Butler’s ‘The Evening and the Morning and the Night’”
  • Carlos Colmenares Gil (Indiana University) – “Necro-technologies of language in Igor Barreto”
  • Luis Rosa (University of Nebraska Lincoln) – “The desire for collective consciousness in the age of private property”
  • Juan Lupi (UC Santa Barbara) – “Gesture and Vectorization”
  Performance Studies 3: Performing Humans: Post-, Non-, In- and Other Risky Prefixes
Location: PRAx Edward J. Ray Theater

  • Damian Enyaosah (University of Texas at Dallas) – “Shamans and Objects in America: The Material and Healing Culture of the Ifa Posthuman Practice”
  • Daniel Jackson (Stanford) – “Giving Over and Letting Go: personalization and distributed agency in ‘The Unit Operations Here Are Highly Specific’”
  • Claudia Kinahan (Northwestern University) – “‘Oh, she’s unstoppable!’: Sophia the Robot and Unexpected Acts of Intelligence”
  Health Risks and the Practice of Care
Location: PRAx Toomey Lobby S

  • Suisui Wang (University of Massachusetts Boston) – “Towards a Performative Theory of Listening-Acts: Histories of Suicide Hotlines and Genres of Care”
  • Soohyun Jeon (Texas A&M University) – “Beautiful Cancer and the Oankali’s Sustainability Project in Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood”
  • Coleman Nye (virtual, Simon Fraser University) – “Toward a Poetic Science of Cancer Risk”
4:45pm to 6:15pm Cones, caution, and the precarity of signals in a time of collapse
Location: PRAx Edward J. Ray Theater

  • Matt Bell (Arizona State University) – “Nuclear Waste, Futureproofed Language, and Black Monoliths: Writing Speculative Fiction Based on Our Warnings to Our Descendants”
  • Ron Broglio (Arizona State University) – “Feral Cones”
  • Erika Lynne Hanson (Arizona State University) – “Geo-linguistics, or, observations in volcano + human dialogue”
  Risky Bodies: The Representation of Queerness and Disability in Narrative Form
Location: PRAx Greenroom

  • Lydia Cooper (Seattle University) – “No Greenwashed Fantasy: Queer Disidentifications and Mutual Aid in Contemporary Cli-Fi”
  • Brooke Kowalke (Creighton) – “Dancing with the Forms: Linguistic Risk in Non-Speaking Autistic Poets’ Works”
  • Matthew Reznicek (University of Minnesota) – “The Consequence Should be the Total Derangement: The Risk of Crip Time in Scott’s Waverley Novels”
  Media History and Political Ecology: Simulation, Planning, and Pedagogy in Postwar America
Location: PRAx Toomey Lobby S

  • Riley Gold (USC) – “Ecological Perception, c. 1947: James J. Gibson and the Psychological Test Film Unit”
  • Henry Osman (Brown University) – “Liquid Circuits, or What An Economy is Not: A Media History of the MONIAC”
  • Suiyi Tang (USC) – “‘Doing is Living’: Ruth Asawa’s ‘Cold War Games for Thought’”
  • Rebecca Uliasz (University of Michigan) – “Computing ‘without romance:’ Political Ecology as a Historical Problem”
  Human in the Machine: Risk Management, Concealment, and the Enactment of Instrumentalized Speculation
Location: PRAx Rehearsal Classroom Building

  • Kris Paulsen (Ohio State University) – “Double Vision: Risk and Robotic Entanglements on Mars”
  • J. Rhee (Virginia Commonwealth University) – “Artificial Intelligence: Technologies of Concealment”
  • Scott Richmond (University of Toronto) – “The Automation of Instrumental Reason”
  VIRTUAL TRACK INCLUSION
Risky Translation Theories
Location: PRAx Lynne Hallstrom Detrick Concert Hall

  • Emilio Taiveaho Peláez (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) – “Risking Misreading Walt Whitman: A Baroque Approach”
  • Danlu Yang (Oregon State University) – “Translingual and Interpretive Perspectives on Chinese Anthropology in Portuguese: A Case Study of Xiangtu Zhongguo”
  • Derek Lee (Wake Forest University) – “Climate Change is a Hoax!!! Or, the Parascientific Politics of Conspiracy Fiction”
6:30pm to 8:00pm VIRTUAL TRACK INCLUSION
Reconsidering Risk and Rationality
Location: PRAx Lynne Hallstrom Detrick Concert Hall

  • Arnaud Mery (virtual, Université de Montréal) – “Discorrelated Diffusion: thwarting the pre-formatting of the imagination at the risk of nonsense”
  • Justin Gallant (IDSVA) – “Aesthetics of Post-Reality”
  Risk and Futurity: World-Building in Uncertain Times
Location: PRAx Edward J. Ray Theater

  • Hannah Hopkins (University of Texas at Austin) – “What Will Have Been Risked”
  • Laura Cechanowicz (Arizona State University) – “Speculative Worldbuilding: Risk, Uncertainty, and Play as Method”
  • Jennie Baker (University of Washington) – “Being (Global) Human in Masamune Shirow’s and Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell”
  Tracing the Analog in Digital Environments
Location: PRAx Rehearsal Classroom Building

  • Frances Mckenzie (Virginia Commonwealth University) – “Peepholes; New Realities and the Space Between Frames”
  • Runjie Wang (University of Washington) – “Cinemetric/Cinematic Encodings: Industrial Films, Machine Vision, and Their Aesthetic-Technical-Epistemic Operations”
  Modelling the Emergent
Location: PRAx Greenroom

  • Marcella Faria (virtual, University of São Paulo) – “Endless Forms of Endless Formation – morphogenesis in life, science and the arts”
  • Kyle Gonzalez (UC Santa Cruz) & Hongwei Zhou (UC Santa Cruz) – “Administer like a Scientist: The Play Aesthetics of Emergence in Agent-based Modeling”
8:00pm to 10:00pm Conference Reception
Location: PRAx Toomey Lobby S
Hors d’oeuvres and a cash bar at PRAx.

 

Sunday, August 24
8:30am and Onward Registration, Coffee Services, Morning Continental Breakfast
Location: PRAx Toomey Lobby N
8:30am to 10:00am Game Studies 4: War/Games
Location: PRAx Edward J. Ray Theater

  • Zach Yost (University of Chicago) – “‘A Computer Game Where People Do Not Play at All!’ Core War’s Unpredictable Programming Pedagogy”
  • Mikael Sebag (UC Irvine) – “Born of Risk, Made to Marvel: The Wargaming Origins of the Modern Magic System”
  • Zachary Horton (University of Pittsburgh) – “Cold War Games: Managing Risk Through Bi-Scalar Play”
  VIRTUAL TRACK INCLUSION
Narrativizing Risky Climates
Location: PRAx Lynne Hallstrom Detrick Concert Hall

  • Alba Tomasula y Garcia (University of Mississippi) – “Re-Making the Frontier: The Lure of Risk, the Rise of Eco-Catastrophe, and Confronting Apocalyptic Desire”
  • Lynn Badia (Colorado State University) – “The Performativity of Scenario Narratives in Climate Science”
  What Does Risk Sound Like?
Location: PRAx Rehearsal Classroom Building

  • Lauren Knight (virtual, University of Toronto) & Aline Zara (virtual, University of Toronto) – “Risky Soundings: Mapping acoustic communities through audio zines”
  • Chiu-Hua Su (virtual, Soochow University, Taiwan) – “Sound and Risk: Radiation, Frequency, and Sonic Warfare in Lovecraftian World”
  Error Messages
Location: PRAx Greenroom

  • Madelene Veber (University of New South Wales) – “Where there is error, there is system: Reading Mary Douglas’ concept of pollution toward a theory of error”
  • Stephen Ramsay (University of Nebraska Lincoln) – “Moths in the Machine: Human Agency and the Origins of Software Engineering”
  • Christopher O’Neill (Deakin University) – “Foucault and Information Theory: Noise and the ‘Non-Silence’ of the Body”
10:15am to 11:45am Sensing the Digital
Location: PRAx Rehearsal Classroom Building

  • Emma Waldron (UC Irvine) – “What Do We Risk When We Watch ASMR?”
  • Ania Malinowska (University of Silesia) – “Calculated Togetherness: Mitigating Risk in Emotional Profiling for Relationships”
  • Avital Meshi (UC Davis)  – “The AI On My Shoulder”
  VIRTUAL TRACK INCLUSION
Risk as an Instrument of Control
Location: PRAx Lynne Hallstrom Detrick Concert Hall

  • Kathleen Gekiere (University of Oregon) – “‘Risk Time’ and Indigenous Resistance in Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves”
  • Wayne Miller (Independent Scholar) – “Risky Silos: Descending into the CISSP Common Body of Knowledge and Hugh Howey’s Wool”
  Publication and Content Moderation: A Risk Analysis
Location: PRAx Edward J. Ray Theater

  • Lisa Sarish (Oregon State University) – “Mitigating the Risk of Identity in the Commonwealth: Australian inter-war writers’ fight for national identity”
  • Ji Hae Koo (Kookmin University) – “Performance, Repetition, Copyright: Curbing Fan Creativity in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child”