Crisis in Contemporary Writing (BACLS Virtual Conference, 26 June 2020)

There is still time to register for the British Association of Contemporary Literary Studies’ first virtual conference, on ‘Crisis in Contemporary Writing’—free access to this event closes on Monday 22nd June.

The conference will open with a roundtable discussion of contemporary crisis. It will then feature live online discussions of pre-circulated papers, readings, and videos (most already available via the BACLS website) on contamination and contagion, economic, cultural, and social crises, as well as relationships to technology and between the human and the non-human. I will be presenting in Panel 2: Human – Non-human, with a discussion of ‘mindful’ consumption and the rehabilitation of the zombie in twenty-first-century popular culture. Using the metaphor of mindfulness and the mindful consumer, I suggest that rather than dehumanising the other outside of the community, in these narratives the horror is directed inward, to the twin monsters of modernity that cannot be escaped, destroyed, or ignored, and must be embraced and ethically managed: capitalism and consumerism. This work is related to what I have been writing for the forthcoming edited collection Embodying Contagion (UWP 2021).

Still from the title sequence of the TV series iZombie (The CW, 2015-2019).

The conference will close with a Q&A with contemporary writers. A more detailed draft schedule for the day is available at: https://www.bacls.org/conferences/bacls-virtual-conference-june-2020/schedule-draft/

Register here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/bacls-virtual-conference-2020-crisis-in-contemporary-writing-tickets-107232567496

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