Call for Papers for Finnish Literary Research Society Conference Panel – Indigenous Futurisms Beyond the West: Arab and Global South Speculative Fiction

14 Feb Call for Papers for Finnish Literary Research Society Conference Panel – Indigenous Futurisms Beyond the West: Arab and Global South Speculative Fiction

Finnish Literary Research Society Annual Conference 2026
University of Oulu, Oulu, May 20-22, 2026

Indigenous Futurisms Beyond the West: Arab and Global South Speculative Fiction
Over the last decade, indigenous futurism has demonstrated how speculative genres have evolved as fictional spaces where indigenous communities reclaim nature-culture futurity, resist settler-colonial epistemologies, and practice ancestral belief systems and traditions in a futuristic setting (Dillion 2012). However, much of this scholarship has been theorised through Global North perspectives. This panel proposes a comparative and decolonial investigation of Arab and Global South futurisms that “transcend the Western taxonom[ies]” (Verso and Jurado 2024). The panel will primarily focus on non-Western indigenous futuristic imaginaries and be grounded in local epistemologies, ancestral ecologies, cultural memory, and ontologies of technology, time, and space that are more solution-oriented than Western speculative fiction.

In this regard, Arab and Global South speculative fiction, especially ecological and cultural texts set in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America, emerges as a reservoir of alternative knowledges and worldviews and reveals strategies of survival and environmental imagination that challenge Eurocentric frameworks. In light of Stacy Alaimo’s “trans-corporeality” (2010), Rita Felski’s conceptual understandings of attachment, recognition and modes of knowing beyond critique (2015, 2020), Anna Tsing’s multispecies assemblages (2015), Donna Haraway’s “natureculture” (2016), Arturo Escobar’s relational ontologies (2018), this panel seeks to move beyond Western critique by foregrounding creative, transdisciplinary, and cross-epistemic approaches that unsettle entrenched speculative binaries and imagine relational modes of knowledge. In doing so, we seek scholarly papers that approach literature, film, and other media formats to illuminate how indigenous futuristic narratives trouble binaries between fact and fiction, realism and speculation, technology and tradition, nature and culture.

Finally, we prefer interdisciplinary conversations that are relevant to but not limited to the following themes:
• Interconnectedness, or disconnections, between reality and fiction in speculative fiction;
• Colonial, postcolonial, decolonial, and anticolonial interventions;
• Climate futures, nature and culture;
• Technology and tradition;
• Indigenous practices, and futuristic imaginaries;
• Human, non-human, and machine space;
• Cultural Memory, histories, myth, and storytelling;
• Language, setting, and futuristic spaces;
• AI, aliens, and blurred boundaries of consciousness;
• Society, environment, and cultural modernity;
• Cryonic fiction and cultural rootedness
• Intelligent architecture vs. psychologically-imposed borders

Submission Guidelines:

We request online panel participation. Please send an abstract of 500 words (maximum) of a potential paper and a short bio (250 words maximum) to Majda Atieh (Department of English and Translation, Sultan Qaboos University, Oman), m.atieh@squ.edu.om, and Subarna De (Faculty of Arts, University of Groningen, the Netherlands), s.de@rug.nl by 8 March 2026. Also, kindly submit the same abstract online on the portal here (https://forms.gle/CxLzkMc6P7jizm4n9) and mention the name of our panel in the form. Selections will be announced by 30 March 2026. We will consider selected essays for publication in a special issue with a Q1 journal. For detailed information on the Finnish Literary Research Society’s Annual Conference 2026, please see here, and details of our panel are available here.