CFP for the AAS/LFA Online Joint Conference “Only Connect”
After fifteen years of pursuing parallel paths, largely on opposite sides of the Atlantic, the Literature/Film Association and the Association of Adaptation Studies are excited to announce their first joint conference, an online event scheduled for 17 and 18 February 2022. “Only Connect” is a conference aimed at fostering more global conversations among adaptation scholars, promoting closer interaction between LFA and AAS, and encouraging participation from scholars who would not normally consider traveling to the UK or the US for an in-person conference. Although all presentations will be in English, we hope that the event’s online format will attract adaptation scholars from around the globe, interested colleagues in related fields, and anyone else who would like to get a crash course in contemporary adaptation studies.
Even as the COVID pandemic continues to ravage the world, it provides both remarkable opportunities for online conferences that can bring together scholars who would not otherwise have the opportunity to meet and lessons that have special poignancy for adaptation scholars. The title “Only Connect” explicitly urges members of the LFA and AAS to open themselves more fully to each other’s work in order to share its riches, explore their differences more openly, and make common cause with each other. At the same time, the indefinite period of shutdowns and self-quarantines that have stricken social gatherings around the world has highlighted the pivotal importance of textual, intertextual, social, and biological adaptation in the conduct of what we can no longer take for granted as normal human affairs. The pandemic has reminded us in the most urgent way possible that the ability to adapt our fictions, our voices, our means of communication, and ourselves is indispensable to whatever aesthetic, moral, or cultural values we wish to recover, renew, celebrate, and share.
We invite ten-minute presentations that deal with any aspect of adaptation. Given the historic circumstances behind this joint conference, we are especially interested in adaptation as an activity that provides opportunities for connection, recovery, or renewal. These presentations, which may focus on particular adaptations or consider adaptation as a more general practice, may highlight archives, performances, and networks, borders and contact zones, divisions and bridges, epistemological and phenomenological experiences, new media and transmedia, linearity, spatiality, and seriality, and challenges, defenses, and alternatives to the humanities. We particularly encourage submissions on the following topics:
- adaptation and survival
- adaptation and individual and collective identity
- adapting the humanities to a post-human world
- crossing medial, national, and methodological borders
- risky business: the costs and benefits of adaptation
- working the networks: building and maintaining adaptation studies
Please send proposals of 250 words and bios of 100 words to Reconnect2022@gmail.com by 30 November 2021. More general inquiries may be directed to the same address. We will notify all participants whose proposals are accepted for presentation by 15 December.