Ryerson University, Toronto
July 25-27, 2019
This 2nd annual conference seeks to bring together scholars, artists, and other members of the international Comics Studies community for critical conversations about the intersections between comics and politics across forms, genres, media, experiences, regions, and cultures. Presentations may take the form of traditional 20-minute research papers or shorter contributions in roundtables organized around a specific theme.
Topics may include, but are not limited to:
- The political histories of comics, canonization, censorship, awards
- The politics of comics historiography, periodization, surveying, mapping
- The politics of publishing, translation, distribution, consumption
- The politics of genre: traditions, rewrites, mash-ups
- The politics of the page: form and style
- The politics of creation and production
- Political comics, editorial cartoons, propaganda, educational & activist comics
- Comics journalism, documentary comics, graphic witness
- Comix, indies, mini comics, zines, countercultural, underground, taboo comics
- Critical race theory, ethnicity studies and comics
- Queer theory, sexuality studies, the body and comics
- Women’s comics, wimmen’s comix, gender studies and comics
- Indigenous comics and settler colonialism
- Migration, diaspora, conflict comics
- Ecopolitics, the Anthropocene, animals, non-humans, and comics
- Disability studies and comics studies
- The politics of the family, childhood, coming-of-age
- Politics of the future: fantasy, speculative, SF comics
- Politics of the past: nostalgia, retro, pastiche comics
- Intermedial politics, adaptations, remediations, hypermediations
- The politics of comics research, scholarly publishing, academia
- Pedagogical politics, comics in the classroom, literacies
- The politics of comics collecting, curating, display & exhibition
- Comics librarianship, acquisitions, cataloguing
Guidelines for Submission
We are accepting submissions for:
- Individual papers (20 min.)
- Panels of three papers
- Roundtables of short (5 min.) presentations by 4-5 presenters followed by discussion
A presenter’s name may appear twice in the program.
The deadline for all submissions is January 15, 2019.
Go to the conference website to download submission templates in Word: http://www.comicssociety.org/conference/ All proposals should be sent as Word files or PDFs by email to: conference@comicssociety.org. The conference organizers will send out notifications of acceptance by February 15, 2019. Please add our conference email to your trusted senders to ensure email delivery. Conference presenters need to be current members of CSS in 2019 at the time of registration.
The Comics Public Archive: CSS Conference Zine, Edition 2
Inaugurated at the 2018 CSS conference, all participants and attendees will be encouraged to take notes and/or document their conference experience in zine format (i.e. pencil, pen, crayons, markers, etc.). After the conference, participants can submit their zine (in PDF format) to conference organizers to be included in the official CSS 2019 zine to be made available on the CSS webpage. More details forthcoming.