The Fan Studies Network

Youth and Horror: An International Conference
1-2 July, 2025
University of Birmingham, UK

The Youth and Horror Research Network is delighted to invite submissions for its international conference, taking place in person on 1-2 July, 2025, at the University of Birmingham, UK.

A collaboration between the University of Birmingham and Northumbria University, the Youth and Horror Research Network is an AHRC-funded, interdisciplinary, international network of scholars, educators and cultural partners, which aims to investigate and impact scholarly and public understandings of the relationship between children, youth and the horror genre. The relationship between children and horror has persisted throughout the history of youth culture, from fairy tales and nursery rhymes to the ongoing popularity of Halloween and transmedia franchises like Doctor Who, Goosebumps and Stranger Things. For today’s youth, who are growing up in an age characterised by anxiety and instability, horror has the potential to help them understand the world around them, other people, and themselves. However, the meeting of young people and horror consistently attracts controversy due to unsupported perceptions that the genre is a harmful influence upon children and young people, echoed by an emphasis in scholarly research on ‘negative’ media effects.

The Youth and Horror Research Network therefore aims to encourage renewed scholarly consideration of the benefits, pleasures and risks of youthful interactions with horror, building on foundational work in this area (e.g. by Martin Barker, David Buckingham, Kate Egan) and recent contributions to the field (e.g. by Filipa Antunes, Sarah Cleary, Catherine Lester). We invite submissions for 20-minute papers on topics examining the intersections of horror, youth and childhood, with an inclusive and flexible approach to how any of these terms may be defined, and in relation to a broad range of media (including film, television, video games, online cultures, literature, comics, toys etc.). Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:

– Interpretations and/or histories of horror texts addressed to children, or other horror texts which are encountered in youth;

– Intersectional approaches to the relationship between youth, horror, identity and/or monstrosity, e.g. race, gender, sexuality, disability, class;

– International perspectives on youth and horror, especially outside of the UK and the US;

– New reflections on media debates and moral panics about youth and horror, e.g. the 1950s Horror Comics Campaign, the 1980s ‘Video Nasty’ scandal, the 1980s Satanic Panic;

– Attitudes of censors and regulators to the issue of youth and horror (including parents as regulators, children as self-regulators, as well as official bodies e.g. BBFC, MPA, Ofcom, local councils);

– Children’s/young people’s fandom of horror, or adult fandom/nostalgia of childhood horror texts;

– Definitions and boundaries of genres, tastes and audiences, and how these are affected by the meeting of youth and horror;

– Cross-media adaptations of texts relating to young people and horror;

– Aesthetics and modes of horror for young people (including, for instance, animation);

– Theoretical approaches to youth and horror, e.g. cognitive, phenomenological/affective, psychoanalytic, behavioural/developmental;

– Archival and memory research on young people’s encounters with horror;

– The roles and uses of horror in education and wellbeing e.g. mental health;

– The role of horror in childhood play;

– Climate crisis as horror and its relationship to youth;

– Horror-related distribution, broadcasting and marketing for children and young people;

– Practice-as-research approaches to youth and horror.

Send 300-word abstracts and 50-word bio to youthandhorror@contacts.bham.ac.uk by the end of Monday 13th January, 2025.

We also welcome submissions for papers or panels presented in non-traditional formats (e.g. video essays and reflections). Please reach out with a speculative enquiry if you have ideas.

We especially encourage submissions from scholars from backgrounds that are typically underrepresented in the academy, and scholars outside of the UK. We have a small number of bursaries to offer to international participants in order to facilitate attendance of postgraduate, independent, and precarious scholars, or scholars who are otherwise without recourse to institutional funds. If you would like to be considered for a bursary, please state this in your submission. Due to funding restrictions, we are sadly only able to offer bursaries to scholars working and residing outside of the UK.

Being Furry: Rotterdam, October 2024

In association with the Otterdam Furry Arts Festival (Rotterdam, the Netherlands)

Furries, loosely defined as fans of anthropomorphised animals and zoomorphic humans, have arguably existed since the 1970s. Yet, these remain an under-researched group. This could be due to academia viewing the fandom as “unworthy” of study (Roberts, 2015) the historically negative depiction of the fandom resulting in an aversion to being studied (Leshner, et al., 2018; Plante, et al., 2017), or any of a myriad of other reasons.

The most well-known efforts to study furries come from the International Anthropomorphic Research Project (2016; 2023), however many unique perspectives on the fandom are missing or unheard. Furthermore, those studying the furry fandom are largely disconnected from each other and lack a focal point.

This conference, the first of its kind, aims to bring together academics and furries from different fields and viewpoints. In doing so, this conference is the first step to formalising a field of ‘furry studies’ that explores and examines this creative community. Therefore, this conference marks the beginning of legitimising the field as a valid site for contemporary research, and to promote global and cross-field collaboration among furry scholars and those invested in this community.

The conference is part of the Otterdam Furry Arts Festival, a public event celebrating furry culture and art occurring in Rotterdam in October 2024. We encourage the wider furry community to take part as well as researchers, and we look forward to the insights this diverse audience will bring. Information about tickets for this event will follow shortly after the venue has been confirmed.

Theme: “Being Furry”

For the first furry studies conference, the theme, ”Being Furry”, will allow for a variety of proposals and act as a strong basis for the field’s inception. The conference aims to inspire discussion, especially given that ‘if you ask ten furries to define what furry is, you’ll end up with eleven different answers’ (Plante, 2023).

Rather than deciding on a concrete definition of “what a furry is” with this conference, our point of provocation is “What is Furry”? Here are some topics to start your thinking. This list is by no means exhaustive, and we encourage proposals about “Being Furry” that go beyond these suggestions:

• Furry history: furry media, conventions, or activities.
• Examinations of the fursona: physical ephemera, psychological attachment, aesthetics of costuming and fursuiting, species prevalence or attachment.
• Furry identity: furries and queerness, the relationships between furries and wider LGBTQIA2S+ communities, neurodiversity in the fandom, experiences of BIPOC within the community.
• Sex and the furry fandom: sex positivity, kink culture, NSFW practice and artwork.
• Furry economies: artistic output, “suspiciously wealthy furries”, furries’ charity work, the relationships between furry and ‘big media’ outputs such as Disney films.

We encourage the submission of proposals for academic papers, short workshops, practitioner-based activities, best-practice showcases, and pre-formed panels. We welcome established academics at all stages of their careers, and warmly embrace independent scholars. We also encourage submissions from non-academic furries and welcome other presentation formats such as photographic essays, alternative presentation styles, etc.

Further details can be found on the Otterdam Furry Arts Festival website: https://otterdam.art/  

What we’re looking for

Please submit 500-word abstracts and/or proposals for panels, and/or other forms of contribution, by 17:00 UTC on Monday 10 June 2024. All submissions will be double-reviewed by a panel of researchers who are actively involved in furry fandom. You will be notified of the panel’s decision on 1 July 2024. Please ensure that all submissions (if primarily written) are in PDF format.

Submissions must also contain:

• Name of author(s)
• Affiliation of author(s), if applicable
• Email address of author(s)
• Title of proposal
• A short biography of each author (up to 150 words)
• References, if applicable

All proposals must be submitted via email to submissions@furrystudies.org with “Furry Studies – Otterdam 2024” in the subject line.

Ethos

This event is designed to build connections between those researching furries, providing an inclusive trans-disciplinary research and publishing space. Though based physically in Rotterdam, the conference will be a hybrid event with online modes of participation, to allow for proceedings to be as accessible as possible.

The official language of the conference, in which all submissions and eventual contributions are expected to be presented, is English. Selected papers will be developed for publication in a special issue of Popular Communication focused on furry studies.

Organising Committee

Reuben Mount (Vanguard Husky), College of English and Media, Birmingham City University, England UK

Rhys Jones, School of Culture and Communication, Swansea University, Wales UK

Tom Geller (Jack Newhorse), Stichting Otterdam, Rotterdam, Netherlands

Informal Enquiries
hello@furrystudies.org

Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic, University of Glasgow

Deadline for submissions: 5th January 2024 (11:59pm)

Conference date: 15th–17th May 2024 (hosted online)

The Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic is pleased to announce a call for papers for Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations (GIFCon) 2024, to be held online on 15–17 May, with the theme of ‘Conjuring Creatures and Worlds’.

Fantasy is inherently an act of conjuration. When we create, dismantle, or engage with fantasy, we are conjuring magic: the impossible, the mysterious, the unknown, and the indefinable. Conjuring fantasy is an act of creation not necessarily defined by our existing modes of being or reality, yet it is always in conversation with our own world. Thus, when we enter fantastika, we necessarily enter a conjured world that invites us to reimagine fundamental aspects of our existence. One way it effects this is by encountering seemingly nonhuman creatures, through which we meet the magical, the uncanny, the monstrous, the Other, and perhaps most uncomfortably, ourselves. Brian Froud writes in Good Fairies Bad Faeries (1998) that “like any supernatural encounter, meeting a fairy—even one who is gentle and benign—is never a comfortable experience”. Samantha Langsdale and Elizabeth Coody argue in Monstrous Women in Comics that “the monster is difference made flesh”. The same is often true of the worlds these creatures exist in. Conjurations, then, are not wholly foreign; their components are knowable. Through fantasy we can conjure, and therefore communicate, with the necessarily mysterious, the otherwise ineffable.

The act of conjuration is an ambivalent one, being both beyond and outside our own world yet inherently connected to it and therefore susceptible to the same limitations and preconceptions. In Race and Popular Fantasy Literature, Helen Young argues that “the logics of race and racial difference are so deeply ingrained in Western society that it is extremely difficult, often even for members of marginalised racial groups, to imagine worlds that do not have those structures.” Indeed, Fantastika has often been concerned with narratives where creatures “function as recognizable stand-ins for majorities and minorities and the inevitable conflicts that emerge between identity groups”. We are interested in explorations of marginalised identities, including creatures, systems of magic, and worlds concerned with (but not limited to) race, ethnicity, gender, queerness, class, and (dis)abilities. These conjured creatures and worlds offer an alternative viewpoint into other modes of identity and being. Additionally, the ways in which these fantasies are conjured is important. The medium through which the reader (in the broadest sense of the word) encounters and interacts with the fantasy affects its meaning.

How do academics, creative practitioners, and fans conjure (and understand the conjuration of) fantasy, creatures and worlds? Fantasy and the fantastic have the capability to conjure the ephemeral and the horrific, the indefinable and the real, the Other and ourselves, but how do we understand these creations? And how do these encounters with creatures, magic, and worlds conform or challenge our understanding of the fantastic?

GIFCon 2024 is a three-day virtual conference welcoming proposals for papers relating to this theme from researchers and practitioners working in the field of fantasy and the fantastic across all media, whether from within the academy or beyond it. We are particularly interested in submissions from postgraduate and early career researchers, and researchers whose work focuses on fantasy from the margins. We ask for abstracts for 20-minute papers. See our Suggested Topics list below for further inspiration. Please submit a 300-word abstract and a 100-word bionote via this form by January 5th, 2024, at midnight GMT.

We also ask for workshop descriptions for 75-minute creative workshops, for those interested in exploring the creative processes of conjuring these creatures and worlds into being from a practice-based perspective. Please submit a 100-word description and a 100-word bionote via this form by January 5th, 2024 at midnight GMT.

If you have any questions regarding our event or our CfP, please contact us at GIFCon@glasgow.ac.uk. Please also read through our Code of Conduct. We look forward to your submissions!

Suggested Topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

Fantasy texts and media by creative practitioners from marginalised backgrounds, and from beyond the anglophone and Anglocentric fantastic
Creatures as corporeal and/or spiritual beings
Worlds and magic as material or conceptual spaces, realms, or structures
Multi-media representations of creatures, worlds, and creators
Creating and recreating race, class, queerness, (dis)ability and other marginalised identities in fantasy
Explorations and representations of the Other in fantastika
Attraction to, repulsion or rejection of creatures and the nonhuman
Depicting alienation, body dysphoria, body swapping and transformation in fantasy
The anthropomorphising of objects and creatures
Human and nonhuman binaries, hierarchies, and dynamics
Conforming to and challenging conventional depictions of creatures e.g., mythic and supernatural traditions, folklore, fantastic tropes and iconic and archetypal characters
Representations of fantastical creatures for example cryptids, fae, magical creatures, supernatural beings, the undead, humanoids, animals, hybrids, AI, extraterrestrials, demons, monsters, horrors, boogeymen
Environments, alternate worlds, ecocriticism, posthumanism, the Anthropocene
Conjuring futures and pasts
Organic vs. artificial worlds, spaces and creatures
Conjuring as a destructive or creative act
Conjuring magic and magic systems
How fandoms and scholars recreate, reinterpret, or conjure creatures, worlds and magic systems