Tag: international

CFP: Star Wars 50 Years: Pasts, Presents, and Futures

The Star Wars 50 Years academic conference will be held by the University of Leicester and the Leverhulme Centre for Humanity and Space at Space Park Leicester on 21-22 May 2027 in anticipation of the 50th anniversary of the original release of the film on 25 May 1977 in the U.S. We are now inviting proposals for conference presentations.

Conference Organisers:

Xiyuan Gao, PhD Candidate – Conference Director
Dr David Christopher – Conference Co-Director
Dr James Aitcheson – Leverhulme Centre Partner
Dr Tara Smith – Leverhulme Centre Partner
Helen Bruce, PhD Candidate – Director, Festival of Media Stories

Overview

Star Wars: A New Hope was first released in the United States on 25 May 1977, inaugurating a screen franchise whose cultural, industrial, and imaginative afterlives now span half a century. The Star Wars 50 Years Conference will mark the anniversary by bringing together scholars, researchers, practitioners, archivists, and fans at the Leverhulme Centre for Humanity and Space in Leicester contiguous with The National Space Centre.

The Centre hosts numerous Star Wars-themed public events throughout the year, and we will be excited to follow their developing programme with an eye to connecting their events and screenings to the conference.

Leicester and Leicestershire occupy a distinctive place in the history of Star Wars in the UK. Leicestershire was home to Palitoy, the toy company that held the coveted manufacturing contract in the UK during the original trilogy era.

Palitoy’s Star Wars figures, vehicles, packaging, and playsets remain central to British collecting cultures and to the material memory of the franchise, linking Leicestershire to the commercial and affective history of Star Wars childhoods, fandom, and merchandising. Indeed, Matt Holt’s upcoming documentary In a Landfill Far, Far Away (Spoon Jar Films) seeks to discover the so-called ‘lost toys’ from the Palitoy factory putatively buried somewhere in Leicestershire which is sure to create a scholarly buzz: ‘Filmmaker unearths legend of buried Star Wars toys’.

Leicestershire’s connection to the franchise is also embodied in personnel history. The late Jeremy Bulloch, born in Market Harborough, was the first actor to perform Boba Fett in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, helping to create one of the most enduring and enigmatic figures in Star Wars. His association with Boba Fett further situates Leicestershire within the lived and performed history of Star Wars, extending the county’s relevance beyond merchandising and into questions of screen performance, character embodiment, cult stardom, and fan memory. Gareth Edwards, director of Rogue One also calls Nuneaton home.

More broadly, the franchise has launched or fostered the careers of myriad British performers from Sir Alec Guinness and Peter Cushing though to John Boyega, Felicity Jones, and Daisy Ridley. And so much of Lucas’s production efforts were located at various studios and locations across the UK including locations in Leicestershire.

Star Wars 50 Years invites contributors to reflect on the franchise’s pasts, presents, and futures, especially with regard to the participation of UK production inputs or international franchise phenomena, but not necessarily limited by this parameter as such. The conference welcomes papers on Star Wars across film, television, animation, games, publishing, merchandising, fan communities, transmedia storytelling, race, gender, class, politics, technology, nostalgia, and global reception, etc.

By gathering in Leicester, the conference asks not only what Star Wars has meant over the past fifty years, but also how particular places, objects, performances, institutions, and communities have shaped the franchise’s meanings across the UK and beyond.

Topics of Interest

We welcome papers on, but not limited to, the following research topics:

  • Star Wars histories, legacies, and cultural memory.
  • Directors, writers, producers, showrunners, designers, performers, and other creative workers across the franchise.
  • Star Wars and transmedia storytelling across film, television, animation, novels, comics, games, audio, toys, and digital platforms.
  • Expanded universes, canon, continuity, retconning, and the relationship between Legends and Disney-era canon.
  • Star Wars television and Disney+ distribution.
  • Star Wars animation (The Clone Wars, Rebels, and more recent animated projects).
  • Star Wars games, interactive storytelling, virtual worlds, and player agency.
  • Ethnicity, class, disability, age, and embodiment in Star Wars.
  • Feminism, female characters, creators, audiences, and female-led fan practices.
  • Masculinity, fatherhood, family, lineage, inheritance, and dynastic storytelling.
  • Queer readings, slash fandom, transformative works, and alternative affective attachments.
  • Stardom, performance, voice acting, physical performance, puppetry, motion capture, and creature performance.
  • Practical effects, digital effects, CGI, sound design, editing, and the aesthetics of technological change.
  • John Williams, musical themes, soundscapes, voice, and sonic memory.
  • Merchandising, toys, collecting, licensing, branding, and commercial culture.
  • Museums, exhibitions, archives, private collections, fan collections, and the preservation of Star Wars objects.
  • Global Star Wars: international reception, translation, dubbing, subtitling, censorship, distribution, and localisation.
  • Fandom, fanfiction, fan art, cosplay, fan films, podcasts, conventions, online communities, and platform cultures.
  • Fan controversy, anti-fandom, canon disputes, toxicity, moderation, inclusion, and community governance.
  • Nostalgia, childhood, memory, intergenerational spectatorship, collecting, and affect.
  • Science, space travel, astronomy, robotics, artificial intelligence, and the relationship between Star Wars and public science imagination.
  • Theme parks, immersive experiences, live events, exhibitions, tourism, and commercialised fan participation.
  • Archives, lost materials, production histories, oral histories, memory work, and fan-led preservation.
  • The future of Star Wars: franchise fatigue, renewal, legacy, and new audiences.

The conference is scheduled to be on-site and in-person. The submission of remote presentation proposals will be considered only under specific mitigating circumstances.

Submission Details

Individual Papers

The individual proposal shall include the following information, all in the same document:

  • A title.
  • An abstract (maximum 300 words) for a 15-20-minute presentation.
  • Speaker’s short biography (maximum 150 words), including affiliation.
  • Speaker’s email address.

Pre-constituted Panels

The panel proposal shall include the following information, all in the same document:

  • A panel title.
  • All individual abstracts (maximum 300 words each).
  • All speakers’ short biographies (maximum 150 words each), including their affiliation and email address.
  • If you wish to designate a panel chair, please indicate this in the panel proposal. Otherwise, the committee will assign one for you.

To submit, please email your proposal as an attachment (Word file preferred) to sw-conf-50@leicester.ac.uk by 1-November-2026. Please clearly state in the email subject either “Star Wars 50 Years individual proposal” or “Star Wars 50 Years panel proposal”.

Notification of accepted papers and panel proposals will be returned on or before 31st January 2027.

Conference Address

Space Park Leicester
Space City, 92 Corporation Rd, Leicester
Postcode: LE4 5SP

Contact Information

If you have any queries regarding the conference, please email conference director Xiyuan Gao (xg92@leicester.ac.uk) or co-director Dr David Christopher (dc435@leicester.ac.uk).

General enquiries: sw-conf-50@leicester.ac.uk

Contact Email

sw-conf-50@leicester.ac.uk

URL

https://le.ac.uk/media/research/star-wars-50-years

CFP: Scottish Council on Archives Annual Conference 2026

ARCHIVES AND RECORDS AT THE HEART OF SOCIETY

Date: Tuesday, 3rd November 2026
Venue: Meeting Rooms, Tynecastle Park, Heart of Midlothian FC, McLeod St, Edinburgh EH11 2NL

Deadline for papers: Monday 21st September

The Scottish Council on Archives (SCA) is pleased to invite proposals for papers for its 2026 annual conference with the broad theme of ‘Archives and Records at the Heart of Society’. This year, we want to explore the essential role that archives and records play in underpinning democracy and accountability as well as inspiring creativity, wellbeing and community building.

The conference is an opportunity to highlight how archives and records management services underpin and support every almost aspect of society. Archives and records provide us with the evidence to challenge decisions and hold authorities to account. Archives and records contribute to vibrant and cohesive communities by telling the stories of places and the people who have lived there; to health and wellbeing, through use of archival material to help with a variety of conditions, including dementia; and to economic impact, by supporting the growing ancestral tourism market.

Whether you work in archives, records management, conservation, community archives, research, education or policy, we want to hear how your work is contributing to a more transparent, accountable, vibrant and healthier society.

We welcome proposals that may include (but are not limited to):

  • Archives and records as infrastructure for democracy, justice, and governance — case studies, advocacy work, or reflections on the importance and impact of the sector
  • Records management and accountability — examples of how good records practice has supported transparency, efficiency and/or public trust in institutions
  • Supporting the case for a future national strategy for archives and records
  • Inspiring and engaging with communities and/or promoting wellbeing
  • Responding to contemporary challenges and inquiries — engagement with public inquiries, emerging crises, or rapidly changing societal and technological issues such as AI
  • Demonstrating how archives and records support local and/or national economies
  • Case studies on any aspect of recordkeeping that speaks to the conference theme

Format:

  • 20-minute individual papers/presentations (in-person is preferred but a pre-recorded presentation will be considered)

Submission Details:

To submit your proposal, please email Marissa Trimble at m.trimble@scottisharchives.org.uk by the deadline of 21st September 2025. Your submission (maximum five hundred words) should include:

  • Presentation title and description
  • Name of your organisation (if applicable)
  • Your preference for presenting in person or prerecorded

Speakers will have their conference attendance fee and reasonable travel expenses covered. Please note that as a small charity, SCA is unable to offer speaker fees.

If you would like to discuss the event before submitting, please contact SCA Director, John Pelan at j.pelan@scottisharchives.org.uk

Deadline for papers: 21st September

Other Key Dates:

Bookings open: w/b 17th August

Programme decision made: 25th September

Full programme published: w/b 28th September

Conference: 3rd November

Call for Submissions: Archiving “Wrong” (Association of Canadian Archivists at University of British Columbia)

The ACA@UBC Conference team is thrilled to invite proposals for our February 2027 Conference that reflect on, expand on, or challenge the theme of “Archiving ‘Wrong.’” The conference provides a venue for archivists, librarians, records managers, information professionals, students, and all interested to share their research and experiential case studies.

Topics and prompts could include (but are not limited to)

  • Is there a “right” or “wrong” way to archive?
  • Instances when it may be necessary or beneficial to archive using methods that are not sanctioned by official standards or theory
  • Strategies for working with archival materials that record histories of wrongdoing or harm
  • Strategies for working with archival materials that could themselves cause harm
  • Making mistakes in the archives, or encountering mistakes made by others
  • Working in the archives without a recognized archival education; “rogue archives”
  • Archival projects undertaken by non-archivists 
  • Archiving “against” the theoretical canon
  • “Good enough” archiving: doing the best you can without enough resources/knowledge
  • Expanding archival user groups or challenging “traditional” notions of who archival users are

More about Archiving “Wrong”…

The professionalization of the archival field over the twentieth century came with the increasing entrenchment of a body of “canonical” archival theory and the consolidation of professional standards and practices. Not all archival practice followed suit, however, and scholars continue to identify a tension between theory and practice in the archival field.

This disconnect is also invoked when archivists reflect on the many situations in which their archival theory education is inadequate or even unsuitable in practice. Archives that employ workers without traditional training, that utilize nonstandard tools, supplies, and methods of processing, or that adopt alternative modes of stewardship, may not conform to sanctioned notions of what an “archive” is, but in doing it “wrong,” still perform a vital, and essentially archival function.

Archiving “wrong” could also refer to the task of preserving evidence of wrongdoing. While archives can function as instruments for accountability by maintaining records of “wrongs,” attendant discussions consider questions of the ideal ethics and standards for providing access to such materials, and identify the harm these records can still do, including to archivists themselves.

With growing political unrest and direct challenges to the ability of information organizations under governmental control to fulfill socially progressive mandates, archiving wrong may take on a new dimension, acknowledging the inability of governmentally-directed institutions to respond effectively to those whose needs they serve.

Some archivists have advanced strategies of archiving beyond the institution—and even against the law—as an important act of care and resistance. “Doing it wrong,” in this sense, might mean a willful rejection of what tradition has deemed the “right” way to archive.

Submission deadlines

September 18, 2026 — General proposal deadline (all non-student submissions)

October 16, 2026 — Student general proposal deadline *

November 27, 2026 — Student poster proposal deadline *

* The student deadline applies to all students at any College or University, including those in MAS, MASLIS, MLIS, MACL, and PhD programs. Students in other undergraduate or graduate programs are also welcome to submit for this deadline.

Full Call for Submissions

CFP: Between Big Data and Obsolescence: Born-Digital Sources, Contemporary History, and the Politics of Access

Ninth Conference on Digital History and Digital Humanities
Location: German Historical Institute Washington
Date: March 18–19, 2027
Deadline for Submissions: September 6, 2026

Co-convened with the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH), the Chair for Digital History at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, the Leibniz Institute of European History (IEG) in Mainz, the Chair for Contemporary History at the University of Mannheim, and NFDI4Memory.

Digital technologies have fundamentally transformed the production, circulation, preservation, management, and interpretation of historical sources. Contemporary history is increasingly confronted with sources that are not simply digitized versions of analog records, but born-digital traces: emails, databases, social media posts, websites, digital images, messaging apps, spreadsheets, geodata, audiovisual files, code, metadata, and AI-generated content. These sources are unstable, fragile, platform-dependent, and often inaccessible both for research and even to the institutions that initially produced them. At the same time, they constitute crucial evidence for political, social, cultural, legal, and economic histories of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

This conference takes the problem of born-digital sources as a central challenge for contemporary history and digital history alike. It asks how historians, archivists, information scientists, legal scholars, and digital humanities practitioners can work together to ensure that born-digital materials will be accessible as sources for research, while also developing tools and strategies that support their critical analysis.

One of the starting points for this conference in the German context is the position paper “NFDI4Memory: Damit wir auch zukünftig eine Vergangenheit haben” (Ensuring that the Future Has a Past). The authors argue for much closer cooperation between archival science and historical research in response to the changing conditions of the production of historical evidence. The mass availability of cataloging and metadata, they note, produces volumes of information that humans can no longer productively oversee, requiring new digital tools for enrichment, standardization, and analysis. Such tools are already being adopted in both archives and research communities. 

Comparative perspectives reveal that the preservation of born-digital records depends on distinct professional cultures, legal frameworks, and institutional responsibilities. In the United States, for example, records management, including electronic records management, has long served as an important bridge between administrators, archivists, and, potentially, historians. For government records, standards are shaped by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), including guidelines for official social media records, as well as by state archives. Private and non-governmental organizations often develop their own practices, resulting in a more uneven landscape of preservation, access, and accountability. Yet even where standards exist, major challenges remain: records managers may lack enforcement authority; institutions may lack funding, staffing, and technical infrastructures; and political priorities may undermine commitments to transparency and preservation. These problems point to broader international differences in how born-digital records are managed, preserved, and made available as future historical evidence. For more than two decades, scholars and practitioners have warned that overcoming divides between archivists, historians, records managers, and computer scientists is essential if we are to avoid the losses associated with a possible “digital dark age,” as Roy Rosenzweig already argued in 2003.

The challenges become even more urgent when we shift our focus from archives to producers of born-digital records, including government agencies, legislative bodies, and courts. Even more complex are challenges for institutions not subject to federal and state electronic records management requirements and guidelines, such as political parties, corporations, NGOs, and media organizations. Common problems include a lack of guidelines, a lack of enforcement abilities, a lack of staffing and training, and a lack of affordable platforms and infrastructures. Records disappear in deletion routines, remain locked in proprietary systems, or become inaccessible due to changing software environments, legal restrictions, platform obsolescence, or phaseouts. Whether in democratic or in authoritarian regimes, political decisions and developments influence whether governments are committed to ensuring transparency, oversight, and accountability governed by processes accountable to the public, or whether electronic traces of evidence may be repressed or destroyed. 

Born-digital records are therefore not merely a technical or archival concern. They are central to public accountability, democratic transparency, and the very possibility of writing contemporary history. Or as Sarah Weicksel, Executive Director of the American Historical Association (AHA), recently observed in an interview with the Max Weber Foundation’s “Weltweit vor Ort”: “Part of the question, then, is whether the American public and researchers from around the world will have access to a full and complete accounting of governmental actions and records, both through the executive branch and throughout other branches of government.”

The transformation process requires new skills and offers new opportunities for researchers. Traditional methods and working practices must expand, and new research questions and opportunities are emerging. The advent of born-digital data has given rise to entirely new categories of sources, raising new questions about data management and analytics, as well as enhanced methods of source criticism. Born-digital materials therefore force us to rethink traditional historical and archival training, and disciplinary and professional boundaries between historical scholars, information and data professionals, including archivists, digital humanists, and computer scientists. What does it require to preserve a database, a social media feed, a messaging thread, or a dynamic website? How can historians reconstruct the provenance, integrity, and context of digital records? What forms of digital source criticism are needed when documents are produced, modified, enriched, compressed, deleted, or algorithmically reordered by technical systems? How should we treat AI-generated images, texts, videos, and synthetic media as sources of contemporary history? And how can historians respond when politically significant digital records vanish before they ever become archival objects?

Submission Guidelines 

The conference aims to create a forum for sustained exchange between those who preserve born-digital materials and those who interpret them as historical sources. By bringing together archival, methodological, technical, and historiographical perspectives, we seek to ask not only how born-digital records can be saved, but also how they can be made meaningful for contemporary history. We especially welcome contributions that combine methodological reflection with concrete case studies, project presentations, or hands-on approaches.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Digital forensics and born-digital evidence
    How can methods from digital forensics help historians and memory workers identify, preserve, authenticate, and interpret born-digital materials? What can forensic approaches reveal about deleted files, metadata, file systems, version histories, timestamps, or chains of custody? How can such methods be made accessible for historical research without reducing sources to purely technical artifacts?
  • Digital source criticism 
    Born-digital sources require new forms of source criticism. Contributions may address provenance, authenticity, metadata, platform infrastructures, interface effects, algorithmic mediation, software dependencies, and the interpretive challenges of large-scale digital corpora. We are particularly interested in approaches that connect computational methods with hermeneutic interpretation. How can historians critically analyze sources that are too large, dynamic, or complex to be read through conventional methods alone?
  • Working with born-digital governmental sources
    Present your in-progress or finished project based on the aforementioned new types of sources. What institutional, technological, and methodological challenges did you encounter? Are there advantages to the sources’ genuinely digital nature, which is unburdened by the time-consuming and error-prone aspects of retrodigitization?
  • AI-generated content as sources of contemporary history
    Generative AI has rapidly become part of everyday communication, political campaigning, cultural production, journalism, administration, education, and memory work. How should historians approach AI-generated text, images, audio, video, or code as historical sources? What evidentiary status do synthetic media have? How can scholars distinguish, contextualize, and interpret AI-generated materials, especially when provenance is uncertain or deliberately obscured?
  • Democratic fragility, deletion, and political accountability
    Digital records are central to democratic accountability, yet they are also vulnerable to deletion, manipulation, privatization, and selective preservation. We invite papers that examine the disappearance of data by political actors, the fragility of administrative records, the destruction or withholding of digital evidence, and the challenges of documenting political decision-making in digital environments. How can historians, archives, journalists, and civil society organizations respond when records disappear before they can be preserved?
  • Archives, infrastructures, and national differences
    The preservation of born-digital sources depends on legal frameworks, archival mandates, technical infrastructures, institutional cultures, and funding structures. We welcome comparative perspectives on national, regional, and institutional differences in the collection, preservation, and accessibility of born-digital records. How do archives in different countries deal with government records, web archives, social media, email collections, or digital audiovisual materials? What can be learned from transnational comparison?
  • Ethics, law, and data protection
    Born-digital sources raise pressing ethical and legal questions. How can researchers balance public interest, privacy, consent, copyright, data protection, and the right to be forgotten? What responsibilities do historians have when working with personal digital traces, leaked materials, or sensitive administrative data?
  • Access, platforms, and the privatization of historical evidence
    Many born-digital sources are produced on commercial platforms that restrict access to researchers. Social media data, search engine results, messaging apps, and platform moderation records are often unavailable, incomplete, expensive, or legally difficult to obtain. Contributions may address the epistemological and political consequences of restricted data access. What kinds of contemporary history become impossible to write when platform data is inaccessible? What alternative methods, collaborations, or advocacy strategies are available?

We invite proposals in two formats:

  1. Individual presentations of 20 minutes. Papers may present case studies, methodological interventions, archival projects, theoretical reflections, or comparative perspectives.
  2. Workshops of 90 minutes for hands-on presentations of projects, tools, workflows, methods, or skills. Workshops may introduce participants to digital forensic methods, born-digital archival workflows, web archiving, metadata analysis, platform research, AI source criticism, or other practical approaches.

Proposals should include a title, an abstract of no more than 500 words (introducing state-of-the-art, research questions and objectives), a short biographical note of no more than 150 words, and an indication of the preferred format: workshop or individual presentation. Workshop proposals should also include a brief description of the intended structure and any technical requirements. Please submit your proposal to our conference platform https://app.smartsheet.eu/b/form/019e0327d9be7cc5b158b9b7cab2fc4f by September 6, 2026. 

Registration and Contact Information

Although we favor in-person attendance of participants and presenters, facilities for hybrid participation will be provided with the aim of making the event as inclusive as possible. Accommodations will be arranged and paid for by the conference organizers (for one presenter per paper or workshop). Participants will make their own travel arrangements; funding subsidies for travel are available upon request for selected scholars, especially those who might not otherwise be able to attend the workshop, including junior scholars and scholars from universities with limited resources. For further information regarding the event’s format and conceptualization, please contact Daniel Burckhardt, burckhardt@ghi-dc.org. For questions about logistics (travel and accommodation), please contact our event coordinator Nicola Hofstetter, hofstetter-phelps@ghi-dc.org.

Conference Committee

  • Daniel Burckhardt, GHI Washington
  • Andreas Fickers, Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH)
  • Philipp Gassert, Chair for Contemporary History at the University of Mannheim
  • Katharina Hering, GHI Washington
  • Torsten Hiltmann, Chair for Digital History at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
  • Jana Keck, GHI Washington
  • Atiba Pertilla, GHI Washington
  • Thorsten Wübbena, Leibniz Institute of European History (IEG) in Mainz

Contact Information

For further information regarding the event’s format and conceptualization, please contact Daniel Burckhardt, burckhardt@ghi-dc.org. For questions about logistics (travel and accommodation), please contact our event coordinator Nicola Hofstetter, hofstetter-phelps@ghi-dc.org.

Contact Email

burckhardt@ghi-dc.org

URL: https://www.ghi-dc.org/events/event/date/between-big-data-and-obsolescence-born-digital-sources-contemporary-history-and-the-politics-of-access

CFP: Talking Records (National Archives, Britain)

Talking Records is an annual themed symposium hosted by The National Archives, bringing together researchers and practitioners working with archival collections.

Talking Records 2026: Spaces and places of care

Call for papers

Call for papers deadline: Friday 18 September 2026

Symposium date: Monday 7 December 2026

The 2026 symposium will explore histories of care and welfare and their intersections with histories of spaces and places. These histories leave complex traces in archival collections, entangled with histories of medicine, public health, poverty, government, social security and more.

Histories of welfare and care can be found across the collections at The National Archives. These range from records relating to welfare legislation to detailed documentation of particular institutions. These include the evolving responsibilities of the state for health and social care, the establishment of the National Health Service, and of documentation of institutions from medieval hospitals to Poor Law Unions.

The historic records of government offer rich insights into the diverse places and spaces associated with care and welfare. Plans, drawings, photographs, correspondence and many other documents testify to the ways in which space and place have shaped the provision of care and welfare in Britain and beyond. They also show how places and spaces have, in turn, been shaped by changing care and welfare practices, theories, and experiences.

We invite researchers and practitioners working with archival collections to present 15-minute papers exploring the spatial dimensions of care and welfare in any time period or global context. We particularly encourage contributions from early career researchers, and welcome alternative presentation formats, including creative responses.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

  • institutions of care and welfare: hospitals, sanitoriums, hospices, almshouses, orphanages, clinics, creches, asylums, shelters, refuges, charities
  • architecture and built environments: rooms, wards, facilities, buildings; planning, design, and use
  • homes and households: family and domestic caregiving
  • medical and therapeutic understandings of place and space: hygiene, climate, infection control, rest and recovery, convalescence
  • outdoor spaces of care: ‘open air’ nurseries, hospital gardens, green spaces
  • liminal, improvised, repurposed, or temporary places of care, such as field hospitals and ships
  • embodied, subjective, and affective experiences of space and place: senses, emotions, memory
  • community spaces of care, marginalised histories
  • alternative places and spaces of care, such as ‘green’ and ‘blue’ social prescribing
  • archives as places of care: for records, documents, artefacts, people, histories, readers, staff

Please note that Talking Records is an in-person only event, and therefore contributors are expected to present at The National Archives, Kew.

The event is free to attend and we have a limited number of bursaries of £150, which can be used towards travel and/or accommodation.

CfP for INTERFACE Issue 31: Rethinking Materiality in an Age of Digital Presence

Call for Papers for Issue 31 (December 2026)

Submission Deadline: October 31, 2026

Guest Editors:

Paweł Piszczatowski  (University of Warsaw)

Helga Müllneritsch (National Taiwan University)

Rethinking Materiality in an Age of Digital Presence

 “If matter itself is lively, then not only is the difference between subjects and objects minimized, but the status of the shared materiality of all things is elevated. All bodies become more than mere objects, as the thing-powers of resistance and protean agency are brought into sharper relief” (Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 2010, p. 13).

Over the past two decades, the concept of materiality has undergone a profound transformation across the humanities. Approaches such as New Materialism, Posthumanism, and Object-Oriented Ontology have challenged anthropocentric models of thought by emphasizing the vitality, agency, and relationality of both living and non-living matter. Rather than treating objects as passive entities defined solely by human perception and use, these perspectives foreground the active role of material forms in shaping human experience, cultural practices, and historical processes.

Yet questions surrounding materiality are far from new. Throughout history, philosophers, artists, writers, and cultural thinkers have explored the relationship between human beings and the material world. In the late eighteenth century, for instance, the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder argued that “sight reveals merely shapes, but touch alone reveals bodies” (Herder, Sculpture, 2002, p. 35), emphasizing tactility and embodiment as fundamental conditions of human experience. His reflections acquire renewed significance in the present moment, when increasing aspects of social interaction, creativity, labour, and intimacy are mediated through digital technologies.

The emergence of artificial intelligence, virtual environments, and digitally mediated relationships raises new questions about the status of the material in contemporary life. While digital technologies may appear to distance human experience from physical presence, they remain deeply embedded in material infrastructures, embodied practices, and affective relations. The rise of AI companions, virtual therapists, and synthetic forms of intimacy challenges established distinctions between human and non-human, physical and virtual, object and subject.

This special issue seeks to explore how materiality has been imagined, experienced, represented, and transformed across different historical periods and cultural contexts. Rather than understanding the digital age as a departure from material existence, we invite contributions that examine how new technologies, philosophical developments, artistic practices, and social transformations reshape our understanding of matter itself. How have concepts of materiality evolved across time? How do objects acquire meaning through their movement, preservation, and transformation? How might digital and technological developments alter, rather than diminish, our relationship with embodied existence?

We welcome interdisciplinary contributions from literary studies, history, philosophy, cultural studies, media studies, anthropology, art history, and related fields. Submissions may address any historical period or theoretical approach within literary and cultural contexts.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

Literary, Historical, and Philosophical Foundations

  • Philosophical approaches to being, matter, embodiment, and the material world
  • Historical transformations of concepts of materiality across cultures
  • The global circulation and intercultural adaptation of material concepts and practices
  • Handwriting as a form of embodied expression and the material trace of the self
  • Drawing, sketching, and visual practices as material expressions of thought
  • Material objects and their meanings across time and space
  • Objects as carriers of memory, emotion, and historical experience
  • Matter as palimpsest: accumulated layers of personal and collective histories

 Material Practices, Technology, and Intimacy

  • The movement of material practices across cultures and historical periods
  • Traditional Chinese Medicine in Europe and the transnational circulation of healing practices
  • Material and spiritual connections in practices such as ancestor worship
  • Bodies, prosthetics, and technological extensions
  • Understanding of materiality as a property of discrete objects or emerging through dynamic networks of human, non-human, and technological relations
  • Ethical questions surrounding AI-human interaction
  • Artificial intelligence, emotional attachment, and new forms of intimacy
  • Reshaping of our understanding of embodiment, relationality, and presence through digital objects, virtual environments, and algorithmic systems

 Cultural Representations and Imaginaries

  • Literary representations of artificial consciousness and synthetic emotions
  • Cinematic portrayals of human-machine relationships
  • Science fiction and speculative explorations of synthetic life
  • Representations of human and non-human agency
  • The role of objects and technologies in shaping identity and memory
  • Artistic engagements with virtuality, embodiment, and material presence

INTERFACE also invites papers not related to the Special Topic which will be published in a dedicated General Topic Section.

Papers should be submitted online at http://interface.org.tw/ no later than October 31, 2026; and should include an abstract of no more than 250 words.

All potential authors should consult our website for Author Guidelines (http://interface.org.tw/index.php/if/about/submissions#onlineSubmissions)

Contact Information

Paweł Piszczatowski  (University of Warsaw)

Helga Müllneritsch (National Taiwan University)

Contact Email

hmuellneritsch@ntu.edu.tw

URL

https://interface.org.tw/index.php/if/pages/view/CallforPapers31

CFP: Museums in times of Polarization: Dialogues, Complex Pasts, and the Ethical Construction of Shared Futures

Call for Papers
ICOFOM Annual Symposium 2026
19 November, 26 November, and 3 December 2026
Museums in Times of Polarization: Dialogue, Difficult Pasts, and the Ethical Construction of Shared Futures

The ICOFOM Annual Symposium 2026 will be held entirely online, through three live webinars taking place on 19 November, 26 November, and 3 December 2026.

Within this framework, contributors are invited to address—though are by no means limited to—the following themes, which will be explored across the webinars:

Webinar 1. Museums in a Polarized World

Webinar 2. Negotiating Difficult Pasts: Memory, Representation, and Ethical Responsibility

Webinar 3. Imagining the Museum of Tomorrow

Important Dates

  • Call for Papers opens: 20 July 2026
  • Submission deadline: 30 August 2026
  • Notification of acceptance: Second half of September 2026

Submission Guidelines in brief:

The Organizing Committee invites proposals under two participation formats, depending on the nature and scope of the contribution:

1. Individual or Joint Papers (15-minute presentations)

2. Quick Fire Presentations (5–7 minutes)

Contributions must consist of the full paper, with a maximum length of 12,000 characters, including notes and references, in accordance with the ICOFOM submission guidelines.

Read all submission guidelines and the full Call for Papers before applying here:

Call for papers (English version)

For additional information or enquiries, please contact:
secretary.icofom@icom.museum

CFP: Women and Cartography from the Middle Ages to the 20th century

SYMPOSIUM at Université Le Havre Normandie — 12–13 March 2027

Organisation : Comité Français de Cartographie, Université Le Havre Normandie (Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences), Identités et Cultures Research Group, Le Havre Heritage Library

In partnership with : Institut universitaire de France, Bibliothèque nationale de France, EPHE (Histara), CNRS (Laboratoire de médiévistique occidentale de Paris)

RATIONALE

This conference sets out to re-examine the place of women in the making, circulation, and reception of cartographic knowledge up to the 20th century, taking into account the various forms their participation took, the documentary biases inherent in the sources, and contemporary methodological issues. It is part of the broader field of the history of women in science and of the study of the gendered construction of knowledge.

An emerging field of research

While historiography has taken an interest in women in science since before the 1970s, and while the history of women and travel has been regularly explored, their role in cartography and their interest in maps only began to be studied around the turn of the 2000s, nearly thirty years later. This pioneering work emerged mainly in the English-speaking world (Shefrin, 1999; Hudson, Ritzlin, 2000; Dando, 2018, 2024; Tyner, 1997; 1999; 2001) and in Italy (Rossi, 2005). Christine Petto’s survey article “Women and Cartography” (2020) opened up more avenues than it closed.

This historiographical lag is even more pronounced in French scholarship. While French research has taken an interest in women cartographers of the 20th century (Robic, 1997, 2009), as well as in the important role they played in research institutions and libraries (Ginsburger, 2015; Ginsburger, Robic, 2017; Antonutti, 2020), studies of their place in the construction of cartographic knowledge before the 20th century remain too rare.

A systemic invisibilisation

As in other scientific fields, several factors combine to render women’s involvement in geography and cartography invisible. Women are difficult to trace in the archives because of their limited legal existence. Conventions of the time denied their competence or consigned them to anonymity out of modesty. Their identity dissolves into initials in place of a full name, or into the designation “widow,” which presents them as mere continuators of their husband’s work.

Women are also excluded from the historiography of authorial recognition in cartography because of a paradoxical requirement: complete mastery of the full range of skills involved in cartographic production (intellectual design, drawing, engraving). Yet almost no geographer possesses such total mastery, since cartographic production is, by its very nature, collaborative work. Thus, when a woman conceives a map intellectually without engraving it herself (the Carte de Tendre by Madeleine de Scudéry), present-day critics attribute authorship to the male engraver (François Chauveau). Conversely, women engravers are confined to the status of mere executants.

RESEARCH THEMES

Theme 1 – Trajectories and output of women cartographers

The conference will focus on women cartographers by:

  • Tracing individual trajectories, without setting aside the role of widows in the continuity of family workshops, which deserves particular attention. While widows generally ran their late husband’s workshop for only a limited period (Barker, 1997, pp. 90–92), there are several notable exceptions, such as Mary Senex, who ran the workshop for fifteen years after her husband’s death, as did Marie Desmaretz, widow of Duval, Geneviève Hourlier, widow of Antoine de Fer, and Marie Darbisse, widow of Guillaume Delisle, to name just a few examples.
  • Establishing the conditions of access to cartographic practice and the professional and family networks drawn upon.
  • Examining the possible specificities of their output: a preference for certain cartographic forms such as allegorical or thematic maps (Carte de Tendre, the map by Marie Le Masson Le Golft, the work of the astronomer Nicole-Reine Lepaute), or “informal” maps produced in a playful or educational context.

Theme 2 – The “little hands” of cartography

Following the recent work of Françoise Waquet (2015, 2022) on the “little hands” of science, and of Delphine Gardey on women’s clerical work (2001), this conference could be an occasion to bring to light the largely unexplored, invisible work of women: informants, copyists, draughtswomen, engravers, illuminators, secretaries, and workshop hands. This effort has already been made for the first half of the 20th century (Swab, 2025), but it could equally be pursued for earlier periods, since women can sometimes be identified in depictions of workshops.

Theme 3 – Women readers and the reception of maps

The question of women as readers of maps — whether elite women, schoolmistresses, booksellers, schoolgirls, or students — opens up a particularly fertile field of investigation. On what occasions did these women encounter maps? On what media? And through what modes of reading?

This question also raises the issue of education, since reading a map presupposes prior training, and thus invites attention to the full range of women’s educational practices connected with maps. 

Finally, Christine Petto also points to periodicals and advertising aimed at women, as well as playful uses of maps: games, novels, embroidered maps, among other forms of appropriation. As an example, the map of Île de France (present-day Mauritius) included in the novel Paul et Virginie by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, a major publishing success of the late 18th century with a largely female readership, illustrates this still under-explored dimension of the reception of maps.

By adopting a broad chronological framework, from the Middle Ages to the 20th century, the conference is open to all geographical areas. It is aimed at researchers in history, history of science, art history, literature, geography, and related disciplines.

PRACTICAL INFORMATION

Abstracts of c. 300 words, together with a short biographical note, should be submitted by 30 September 2026 to the following address: lucile.haguet@lehavre.fr

The selection committee will meet in early October and will announce the results of the call for papers no later than the second half of October.

The conference will take place on 12–13 March 2027 at Université Le Havre Normandie. A presentation of the heritage collections of the Le Havre municipal library is also planned.

Selected papers will be considered for publication in an issue of the journal of the Comité français de cartographie, Cartes & Géomatique, during 2028.

WORKS CITED AND SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Antonutti, Isabelle (ed.). 2020. Figures de bibliothécaires. Villeurbanne: Presses de l’Enssib, series “Papiers.” (see entry for Myriam Foncin)

Baigent, Elizabeth. 2025. “‘Octavia Always Enjoyed a Map’: Octavia Hill, Maps, and Victorian Women Reformers.” The Cartographic Journal 62 (3–4): 190–204. https://doi.org/10.1080/00087041.2025.2627791

Barker, Hannah. 1997. “Women, Work and the Industrial Revolution: Female Involvement in the English Printing Trades, c. 1700–1840.” In Gender in Eighteenth-Century England: Roles, Representations and Responsibilities, ed. Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus, 81–100. London: Longman.

Costa, Shelley. 2002. “The Ladies’ Diary: Gender, Mathematics, and Civil Society in Early-Eighteenth-Century England.” Osiris, 2nd series, 17: 49–73.

Dando, Christine E. 2018. Women and Cartography in the Progressive Era. London/New York: Routledge, series “Studies in Historical Geography.” New edition in 2024.

Findlen, Paula. 1995. “Translating the New Science: Women and the Circulation of Knowledge in Enlightenment Italy.” Configurations 3: 167–206.

Gardey, Delphine. 2001. La Dactylographe et l’expéditionnaire. Histoire des employés de bureau, 1890–1930. Paris: Belin, series “Modernités.”

Ginsburger, Nicolas. 2015. “Les premières géographes universitaires en France: enquête sur les débuts d’une féminisation disciplinaire (1913–1928).” Cybergeo: European Journal of Geography.

Ginsburger, Nicolas, and Marie-Claire Robic. 2017. “Portrait en groupe de femmes-géographes. La féminisation du champ disciplinaire au milieu du XXe siècle, entre effets de contexte et de structure (1938–1960).” Annales de géographie, 2017/1.

Hudson, Alice C., and Mary McMichael Ritzlin. 2000. “Preliminary Checklist of Pre-Twentieth-Century Women in Cartography.” Cartographica 37 (3): 3–24.

Longchamps, Denis. 2014. “Political Tourism: Elizabeth Simcoe’s Maps and Views of Canada (1791–1796).” Imago Mundi 66: 213–223.

Pastoureau, Mireille. 1984. Les atlas français, XVIe–XVIIe siècles: répertoire bibliographique et étude. Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, Département des cartes et plans.

Pedley, Mary Sponberg. 1979. “The Subscription List of the 1757 Atlas Universel: A Study in Cartographic Dissemination.” Imago Mundi 31: 66–77.

Petto, Christine M. 2009. “Playing the Feminine Card: Women of the Early Modern Map Trade.” Cartographica 44 (2): 67–81.

Petto, Christine M. 2020. Women and Enlightenment: Women as Producers and Consumers of Maps, 1650–1800. History of Cartography, vol. 4. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Robic, Marie-Claire. 1997. “Exclusion, régression… Du ‘Ladies’ Program’ au ‘sans femme’?” Strates: Matériaux pour la recherche en sciences sociales, n° 9.

Robic, Marie-Claire. 2009. “Beaujeu-Garnier, J.” In International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, ed. Rob Kitchin and Nigel Thrift, 275–276. Elsevier.

Rossi, Luisa. 2005. L’altra mappa. Esploratrici, viaggiatrici, geografe. Reggio Emilia: Diabasis, 351 p.

Shefrin, Jill. 1999. “‘Make it a Pleasure and Not a Task’: Educational Games for Children in Georgian England.” Princeton University Library Chronicle 60: 251–275.

Shevelow, Kathryn. 1989. Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical. London: Routledge.

Skedd, Susan. 1997. “Women Teachers and the Expansion of Girls’ Schooling in England, c. 1760–1820.” In Gender in Eighteenth-Century England: Roles, Representations and Responsibilities, ed. Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus, 101–125. London: Longman.

Swab, Jack. 2025. “Beyond ‘Clerical Cartography’: Gender and the (Re)Production of Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps.” The Cartographic Journal 62 (3–4): 177–189. https://doi.org/10.1080/00087041.2025.2627789

Tyacke, Sarah. 1978. London Map-Sellers, 1660–1720: A Collection of Advertisements for Maps Placed in the London Gazette, 1668–1719, with Biographical Notes on the Map-Sellers. Tring: Map Collector Publications.

Tyner, Judith A. 1997. “The Hidden Cartographers: Women in Mapmaking.” Mercator’s World 2 (6): 46–51.

Tyner, Judith A. 1999. “Millie the Mapper and Beyond: The Role of Women in Cartography since World War II.” Meridian 15: 23–28.

Tyner, Judith A. 2001. “Following the Thread: The Origins and Diffusion of Embroidered Maps.” Mercator’s World 6 (2): 36–41.

Waquet, Françoise. 2015. L’Ordre matériel du savoir. Comment les savants travaillent, XVIe-XXIe siècle. Paris: CNRS Éditions (repr. series “Biblis,” 2022).

Waquet, Françoise. 2022. Dans les coulisses de la science. Techniciens, petites mains et autres travailleurs invisibles. Paris: CNRS Éditions, series “Histoire,” 347 p.

White, Cynthia L. 1970. Women’s Magazines, 1693–1968. London: Michael Joseph.

Contact Information

Lucile Haguet, librarian at the Bibliothèque municipale du Havre, lucile.haguet@lehavre.fr

Catherine Hofmann, map curator at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, catherine.hofmann@bnf.fr

Contact Email

catherine.hofmann@bnf.fr

URL

https://cartogallica.hypotheses.org

CFP: 2026 Research Symposium: Books and Silence, 26–27 November

The Centre for the Book is pleased to announce that the theme of this year’s symposium is “Books and Silence.” Find more information at https://blogs.otago.ac.nz/cfb/2026-research-symposium-books-and-silence-26-27-november/ 

In today’s hurried world, noise is everywhere.  Do you want the chance to have silence to contemplate, reflect, and escape, with your best friend: the book? It is time to pen your paper on “Books and Silence.”

“Books and Silence” might suggest an exploration of deep reading, the value of uninterrupted contemplation in environments of disruption and hyper-connection, or the political or cultural implications of censorship.  The theme can cover everything from the quiet sanctuary of traditional libraries to the amplification of marginalized voices.  Presentations might consider:

The literary and psychological experience of books and reading

  • Exploring the lost art of uninterrupted reading and how stepping away from digital distractions restores cognitive focus.
  • Questioning how audio books do or do not fit within such a paradigm of reading.
  • Analysing how authors utilize ‘silence’—what characters leave unsaid or what is omitted from the narrative—to build suspense, express complex grief, and reveal hidden truths.
  • Focusing on silent (wordless or visual) picture books and how they transcend language and cultural barriers to spark communication.

The cultural and social roles of books and libraries

  • The examination of the traditional no-talk ‘shoosh’ library to the modern hub of books and bean bags and social spaces. The changing nature of these sanctuaries.
  • Censorship and anti-censorship: the silencing or amplification of ideas and thoughts; the fight against book bans and the suppression of marginalized or controversial ideas.

The philosophy of books and how readers interact with them

  • Combatting noise, anxiety and constant over-stimulation of the wired life, with mindfulness and quiet engagement with words and ideas.
  • The value of physical books and un-networked experience
  • How the physical, deliberate silence around reading cultivates an active resistance against machine culture – social, institutional, political, commercial and ideological.

We would welcome interdisciplinary contributions from e.g., Music, Psychology, Theology, Education, or other disciplines.

Suggestions for panels are also welcome.

Deadline

Please send through your abstract of 250 words by 1 September 2026, by email to: books@otago.ac.nz

Date: November 26-27

Plenary address (speaker TBA), Thursday 26 Nov. – Dunningham Suite, City Library Dunedin

All day symposium: Friday 27 November – University of Otago (Arts Building, Burns 2 lecture theatre)

Selection of the papers for the Symposium programme will start after 1 September, and authors will be informed of their successful inclusion mid-September.

The conference will be free to attend, though registration will be required to ensure adequate catering for afternoon tea.  The Friday conference presentations will be recorded and made available afterward for viewing by those who register for access, but there will be no livestream or interactive connections on the day of the symposium.

Please contact any of us if you have any further queries:

CFP: TRANSPOSITIONES, Vol. 6, No. 2 (2027) Call for Papers: Earth / Sediment / Trace: Geologies, Material Memories, and the More-than-Living World

TRANSPOSITIONES

Journal for Transdisciplinary and Intermedial Culture Studies /
Zeitschrift für transdisziplinäre und intermediale Kulturforschung
ISSN 2749-4128 (print), 2749-4136 (online)

Vol. 6, No. 2 (2027)

Call for Papers

Thematic focus of the issue:

Earth / Sediment / Trace: Geologies, Material Memories, and the More-than-Living World

Across the environmental humanities, increasing attention has been devoted to the geological dimensions of culture and the cultural dimensions of the Earth. Geohumanities, critical mineral studies, energy humanities, environmental justice scholarship, and related fields have opened new perspectives on extraction, sedimentation, toxicity, waste, material memory, and deep time. At a moment marked by accelerating ecological transformations and growing awareness of the material infrastructures that sustain contemporary life, geological matter has emerged as a crucial site for rethinking history, memory, environment, and cultural imagination. Rather than treating the Earth as a passive backdrop to human activity, recent scholarship has approached rocks, minerals, soils, fossils, sediments, and other material formations as archives of planetary processes, environmental change, cultural memory, and political conflict. Questions of resource extraction, environmental justice, and slow violence increasingly intersect with inquiries into deep temporalities, material traces, sacred landscapes, and the long afterlives of human and more-than-human actions.

This issue invites contributions that explore how literature, art, media, philosophy, religion, and cultural practices engage with geological matter, deep time, sedimented histories, and the material conditions of planetary life. We especially welcome work that investigates the cultural significance of rocks, minerals, fossils, soil, waste, ruins, and other forms of more-than-living matter, while also addressing questions of environmental justice, resource extraction, toxicity, and slow violence. We welcome analyses of literary, philosophical, historical, and cultural texts from a wide range of regions and traditions, including comparative and transnational perspectives. Topics may include:

• geohumanities and geological imagination;

• earth, stone, sediment, dust, and soil;

• lithic ecologies and critical mineral studies;

• deep time, planetary temporalities, and environmental history;

• extractivism, mining, resource conflicts, and energy humanities;

• environmental justice and slow violence;

• toxic landscapes and contaminated environments;

• waste, ruins, landfills, and material afterlives;

• fossils, paleontology, and material histories of life;

• material memory, archives, traces, and sedimented histories;

• sacred geographies, holy mountains, stones, and pilgrimage landscapes;

• archaeology, antiquarianism, and the materialities of the past;

• textual strata, sedimented knowledge, and epistemic layers;

• geological trauma, memory, and post-catastrophic landscapes;

• petrofiction, climate fiction, and environmental storytelling;

• artistic and literary engagements with earth materials;

• relations between living and non-living matter;

• fungi, decomposition, and processes of material transformation;

• posthumanist, new materialist, and decolonial approaches to geology and the earth.

Proposals comprising a 250-word abstract in English or German and a brief biographical note should be sent to: transpositiones@uw.edu.pl by October 20, 2026.

A final decision regarding abstract acceptance will be made by October 31.

Deadline for submitting completed manuscripts: February 28, 2027.

The issue is expected to be published in the autumn of 2027.