The Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic is pleased to announce a call for papers for Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations (GIFCon) 2023 with the theme of 'Boundaries and Margins'.

GIFCon 2023 is a three-day virtual conference that seeks to examine boundaries and margins within fantasy, be they textual, linguistic, geographical, embodied, or imposed. We welcome proposals for papers relating to this theme from researchers and practitioners working in the field of fantasy and the fantastic across all media, whether 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 also invite ideas for creative workshops for those interested in exploring how the creative processes of fantastic storytelling and worldbuilding can engage with boundaries and margins from a practice-based perspective.

We ask for abstracts for 20-minute papers. Please submit a 300-word abstract and a 100-word bionote by January 6th 2023 at midnight GMT here: forms.office.com/r/uE7T66XWJY

We also ask for workshop descriptions for 75-minute creative workshops. Please submit a 100-word description and a 100-word bionote by January 6th 2023 at midnight GMT here: forms.office.com/r/hgJqRggvUm

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
- The mediation of marginality and marginalised identities in fantasy and fantasy worldbuilding
- Liminality, threshold-crossing, and physical or intangible borders in fantasy
- Boundaries or lack thereof between fantasy media (including but not limited to literature, film, television, theatre, oral traditions, comic books, video and tabletop games, new media, virtual reality, theme parks, podcasts, scripts, visual arts)
- Characters and creatures on the margins
- Texts and practices beyond the Anglophone and Anglocentric fantastic
- Boundaries of bodies, gender, sexuality, and romantic attraction in fantasy
- Boundaries of race and ethnicity in fantasy
- Representations of class in fantasy media, and its role in shaping fandom, creative practice, and academic research
- Transgressions of boundaries
- Boundaries between fantasy and reality or realism
- Intertextuality, metatextuality, and marginalia in fantasy
- Regional genres and traditions of fantasy
- Hybridity in genre and form, problems of classification and definition in fantasy and the fantastic
- Boundaries in magic systems
- Interdisciplinarity and cross-disciplinarity
- Fandom as marginalised community, and fans’ own practices of enforcing boundaries, e.g. gatekeeping
- Fantasy creation, fandom, and academic research as cult practices
- The role of marketing and promotional materials in shaping boundaries and margins
- Awards and notions of legitimacy as boundaries
- Fantasy, the fantastic, folklore and myth in national and regional contexts
- Worldbuilding and fictional boundaries
- Boundaries and margins on fantasy in the academy
- Negotiation of boundaries placed by cultural industries and governments