You have the power to make life better for an Australian woman or girl experiencing homelessness or poverty this Christmas. Donate to the Christmas collection “It’s In The Bag”. Provide pads and tampons, personal hygiene products and everyday luxuries to homeless women, women at risk or women experiencing domestic violence.
Taking collections between Nov 18 to Dec 2, 2017. See website for further info and collection points at Bunnings.
sharethedignity.com.au
Plants have played key roles in some of the most notable science fiction, from prose to graphic novels and film: John Wyndham’s triffids, the sentient and telepathic flora in Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Vaster than Empires and More Slow,” the gene-hacked crops of Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, the agricultural experiments of Andy Weir’s The Martian, the invasive trees and mechaflowers of Warren Ellis’s Trees, and the galactic greenhouses of Silent Running represent just a few. Plants surround us, sustain us, pique our imaginations, and inhabit our metaphors — and yet in some ways they remain opaque. As Randy Laist writes in Plants and Literature (2013): “Plants seem to inhabit a time-sense, a life cycle, a desire structure, and a morphology that is so utterly alien that it is easy and even tempting to deny their status as animate organisms” (12). The scope of their alienation is as broad as their biodiversity. And yet, literary reflections of plant-life are driven, as are many threads of science fictional inquiry, by the concerns of today.
This volume will be the first to investigate the importance of plants in science fiction. We encourage contributions contending with diverse works from any and all global, national, extranational, or regional positions and all periods. In particular, we welcome essays which consider genre with broader ethical, political, aesthetic, and historical concerns tied to the representation of botanical subjects and subjectivities in science fiction across all media.
Due: April 30, 2017
Prospective contributors to this edited collection should send an abstract (300-500 words) and brief CV or short biographical statement to Katherine Bishop (kbishop@sky.miyazaki-mic.ac.jp), Jerry Määttä (Jerry.Maatta@littvet.uu.se), and David Higgins (dmhiggin@gmail.com). For full consideration, abstracts are due by 30 April 2017. Completed essays of between 4,000 and 8,000 words will be due by 30 November 2017 for a projected publication date in 2018.
female:pressure is launching an awareness and solidarity campaign for the canton of #Rojava (located in northern Syria), where women participate on all levels of decision making and building a new society from scratch, with built-in social, racial and ethnic justice, religious freedom, ecological principles and gender equality.
With a series of music, media and sound art to listen, dance and fight to, we would like to send our love and strength to these women and spread a positive message in support of their efforts.
We are calling for participation and submission of works. The work must be related and critically deal with the topic of #Rojava; otherwise there are no restrictions. Everybody is welcome!
Please submit your works via Internet Archive or any other way which can be embedded and distributed online such as Soundcloud, Mixcloud, Tumblr, Vimeo, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter or others.
IMPORTANT: please tag everything with #femalepressure for #rojava #revolution #solidarity
Spread and share the cause.
Send an informal email with the link to your submission to: rojava@femalepressure.net
This is how the submissions will be collected by a working team.
The final publication is planned for International Women’s Day on 8 March 2016.
Deadline is 15th of January 2016.
female:pressure is looking for Kurdish musicians, sound curators and cultural organisers to collaborate.
Founded in 1998, female:pressure is an international network of over 1,600 female artists from 66 countries in the broader fields of electronic music and arts. http://www.femalepressure.net/
“Our project so far– We decided to bring to life one of the projects we’re working on during 10 years of research and archiving: a Museum of working computers, a place where people can, both physically and remotely via Internet, enjoy using historical computers, know their history, learn basics of electronic and computer science, and share a piece of our history. A place where to conserve, repair, preserve in digital format and share our heritage, made of hardware but also documentation, software, electrical schemes, books, manuals and media of various kinds.”
