For the past three years, the Nine Worlds convention hosted an academic conference. We ran a combination of solely academic sessions, as well as placing academic speakers on panels and tracks in a more casual manner – details of last year’s sessions on the Academia and History tracks are still available on the Nine Worlds website. This year, we’re looking for content in a similar vein for the new Academia and Humanities content area, which has an even broader remit than previous years’ Academia track.
With that in mind, we’re inviting submissions for papers and suggested panels, as well as volunteers to talk on pre-organised panels. All areas of study surrounding ‘geek media’ are accepted – from video games to classic fantasy, and we welcome submissions from anyone who is a current student or has graduated with a degree in a field related to their topic. Talks will be ideally 20-30 minutes in length, and the standard panel time is 1 hour.
Nine Worlds will take place August 12th-14th 2016 at Novotel London West. Tickets are available for purchase, and they will grant you access to the whole convention – not just the academic content.
Suggested areas of submission include:
Video Games and their impact/role within wider culture
Board, Social and Role-playing Games
Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature
Diversity and representation in geek culture
‘Geek’ film and TV
Comics
Fanfiction
Research as a fannish practice
History and its relation to geek media/culture
Science and its relation to geek media/culture
Religion and philosophy and their relation to geek media/culture
Please ensure your paper/panel is suited to non-academics. Ideally, you may assume the audience has full knowledge of primary sources, but little secondary, so please take this into consideration. We intend to each session be accessible and understandable to those outside of the usual academic groups. In addition, please take note of our anti-harassment policy.
Please send a title, a 300 word abstract, your name and affiliation (the university you are currently at or most recently graduated from) to humanities-academia@nineworlds.co.uk.
The deadline for submissions is April 30th, 2016. This deadline is for abstracts/submissions to be a panellist only.
Registration will be completed through the purchase of a ticket to the convention as a whole. Accommodation should be booked separately by individual participants. All profits from the conference/convention will go to charity. Please do email if you have questions or concerns about finance, as we do have a limited budget available to assist those otherwise unable to attend.
Nine Worlds deliberately tries to promote parity of race, sexual orientation, genders and creeds as a part of its programming remit. We aim to follow this in our selection of panellists, and would also be interested in including papers or panels that address these issues. However, we are aware that some people do not want to discuss these as direct topics, and wish to be sensitive to this, so you will only be asked to speak on topics that you offer to.
Thank you,
Claire Wilkinson & Tony Keen
Academia and Humanities Content Group Organizers
The Fan Studies Network 
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