Joss Whedon

“Bring Your Own Subtext”: Social life, human experience and the works of Joss Whedon 29th June-1st July 2005

We take pleasure in inviting you to submit a proposal for a presentation at this exciting multidisciplinary conference on the works of Joss Whedon, which will explore the uses and applications of Joss Whedon’s work in understanding social life and human experience.

Academics from any discipline are invited to submit papers, symposia or posters relating to the wide range of issues explored in the multiverse created by Joss Whedon. Dialogue across disciplines is actively encouraged. This could take the form, for example, of proposals for symposia with a diverse range of speakers.

Abstracts (max 200 words) should be sent in electronic format, as an email attachment in Word or Rich Text Format, to: Conference.Presentations04@hud.ac.uk

The deadline for submission is Monday the 28th of February 2005. Please state in the abstract: the name, address, affiliation and e-mail address of the author(s) to be used for contact information. Proposers will be notified of the organisers’ decision by 31st March 2005

Confirmed invited speakers: Tanya Krzywinska “Demon Power Girl: Regimes of Form and Force in videogame versions of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Tanya Krzywinska is a Reader in Film and TV Studies at Brunel University and an associate editor of Slayage: The Online International Journal of Buffy Studies. Her publications include ‘Hubble-Bubble, Herbs and Grimoires: Manichaeanism, Magic and Witchcraft in Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ in Fighting the Forces: What’s at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (2002). She has an article on one of the Buffy games for the X-Box in Slayage 8 (www.slayage.tv). She is also the author of A Skin For Dancing In: Possession, Witchcraft and Voodoo in Film (2000), Sex and the Cinema (forthcoming), Tomb Raiders and Space Invaders: videogame forms and contexts (with Geoff King) (forthcoming) and Science Fiction Cinema: From Outerspace to Cyberspace (2000). She co-edits (with Geoff King) ScreenPlay: Cinema / Videogames / Interfaces (Wallflower Press, 2002). She is currently editing Videogame/Player/Text with Barry Atkins and writing Imaginary Worlds: A cross-media study of the aesthetic, formal and interpolative strategies of virtual worlds in popular media.

Zoe-Jane Playdon “Apocalypse Now and Again: Hero myths in BtVS” “The horror! The horror!” (Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness)

‘Winning does not tempt that man. This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively, by constantly greater beings.’ (Rilke, “The Man Watching”)

Zoe-Jane Playdon is head of Education at Kent, Surrey and Sussex Postgraduate Medicine and Dentistry Deanery at the University of London. Her particular interests are in participative management and education processes on the one hand, and feminist spirituality on the other. She is the author of ‘“The Outsiders’ Society”: Religious Imagery in Buffy the Vampire Slayer’, published in Slayage: The Online International Journal of Buffy Studies and of ‘“What Are You, What’s to Come”: Feminisms, Citizenship and the Divine’, which appears in Reading the Vampire Slayer: An Unofficial Critica Companion to Buffy and Angel, edited by Roz Kaveney.

More here :

http://www.hud.ac.uk/hhs/dbs/conference/byos/index.htm