Finncon 2022 Academic Track — Hope and Resilience

Huone / Room YY229A

Finnconin akateeminen ohjelma toivottaa kaikki con-kävijät tervetulleiksi kuuntelemaan spekulatiivisen fiktion tutkimuksen tuoreimpia avauksia! Ohjelman kunniavieraana on Malka Older ja puheenjohtajana Esko Suoranta. Akateemisen ohjelman järjestävät yhteistyössä Finfar — Suomen science fiction- ja fantasiatutkimuksen seura ry sekä Finncon 2022. Kukin esitelmä kestää 15 minuuttia, minkä lisäksi jokaisessa paneelissa on varattu aikaa keskustelulle. Akateeminen ohjelma on salissa YY229A, paitsi että Conference Keynote on lauantaina klo 13–14 B-salissa.

The Academic Track at Finncon 2022 welcomes all con-goers to hear about the latest research into speculative fiction! Malka Older is our academic guest of honor and Esko Suoranta chairs the conference. The Academic Track is organized in cooperation with Finfar — The Finnish Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy Research and with Finncon 2022. Each presentation is 15 minutes, followed by discussion. he academic track takes place in room YY229A, except for the Conference Keynote, which is in hall B on Saturday at 13–14.

A PDF file containing the abstracts is available at this link. The file has been updated twice; the latest version was uploaded on 27 June.

Perjantai / Friday

16:00–17:00 — Agency and the Self

• Aleksi Haukka: Amnesiac Hero and the Resiliency of Self: Existential Semiotic Interpretation of the Representation of Self in Planescape: Torment
• Meeria Vesala: “Isn’t There Any Hope Left Doctor?”: Hope as Action in Albert Camus’s The Plague

17:00–18:00 — Fantastic Hope

• Bettina Burger: Hope, Despair, and a Fairy’s Tales in Gillian Polack’s The Time of Ghosts
• Nicholas Wanberg: Dangers of Racial Tolerance Done Wrong in Harry Potter

18:00–20:00 — The North of the Future, the Future of the North — Speculation Workshop

Lauantai / Saturday

10:00–11:00 — Lessons of Hope and Resilience

• Laura E. Goodin: The Role of Speculative-Writing Pedagogy in Inspiring Works of Hope and Resilience
• Liz MacWirther: Imagining a New Poetics of the Fantastic and Resilient Through a Medieval Dream Vision Poem

11:00–12:00 — Theorizing Hopeful Fictions

• Elise Kraatila: A Fool’s Hope? Pragmatic “Metamodern” Optimism in 21st-Century Fantasy
• Veera Mäkelä: Of Ravens and Writing Desks: Historical Romance as Speculative Fictions

12:00–13:00 — Responses to Ecological Crises

• Yue Zhou: Hope Sits in the Technological Advancements: Exploring Five Liu Cixin’s Ecology-Themed Science Fictions
• Elizabeth Oakes: Environmental Embeddedness as a Source of Resilience in Woman-Authored 1960s and 1970s Science Fictions

13:00–14:00 — Conference Keynote (B-salissa / in hall B)

• Malka Older: Hope in Uncertainty: Predictive Fictions and Speculative Resistance

14:00–15:00 — Apocalypse, Post-Apocalypse, and Possibilities of Hope and Resilience

• Joona Koiranen: Selviytymisoppaita tulevaisuuteen — vastarinta ja kulttuurinen resilienssi Pohjois-Amerikan alkuperäiskansojen tulevaisuusfiktiossa
• Lucas Mattila: Apocalyptic Hope in Jay Kristoff’s Empire of the Vampire

15:00–16:00 — Questions of Authoring

• Tristan Reid: Handling Criticism: Ursula K. Le Guin’s Approaches to Gender Problems in The Left Hand of Darkness and Beyond
• Essi Varis: Obligation to Imagine: How Speculative Fiction Writers Ascribe Political Importance to Their Work

16:00–17:00 — The North of the Future, the Future of the North — Speculation Workshop: Open Session

17:00–18:00 — The Changing Stories of Chinese Science Fiction

• Eero Suoranta: “For Every Lonely Childhood, There is a Doraemon”: Alienation, Generic Hybridity and the Vindication of Optimism in A Que’s “Farewell, Doraemon”
• Regina Kanyu Wang: Social Utopian Experiments in Eco-Dystopias: Martian Exploration in Chinese Science Fiction
• Mia Chen Ma: Variations of the “Blood-soaked Bun” in Chinese Science Fiction: Medicine, the Womb, and Neohumans

Sunnuntai / Sunday

10:00–11:00 — Alien and AI Others

• Grace Borland Sinclair: Grafting Symbiosis: Alien Mothering and Feminist Science
• Xiuqi Huang: Humanity and Artificial Intelligence in Hao Jingfang’s Short Stories

11:00–12:00 — Exploring Utopia and Dystopia

• Jessica Norledge: Imagining a Woman’s World
• Mika Oksanen: An Analysis of the Concept of Utopia and a Defence of Its Application

12:00–13:00 — Speculation in Practice

• Hanna-Riikka Roine: Speculative Strategies of Finding Resilience in Stories about the Future of
  Finnish Democracy
• Paul Graham Raven: Utopias in the Making: Speculation as Co-Production, and a Praxis of Hope

13:00–14:00 — Hostile Cosmologies

• Thomas Kristjansen: Malevolent Cosmologies and Possibilities of Hope in Dark Fantasy Fiction
• Charles Simmons: Cataclysm, Catastrophe, and Hope: Political Action in Michael Swanwick’s Stations of the Tide

14:00–15:00 — Formal and Metafictional Hope and Resilience

• Oskari Rantala: Hopeful and Playful End of the World in Alan Moore’s ABC Universe
• Merja Polvinen: The Infinite Kindness of the House: Speculative Environments and Mental Resilience in Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi