“We are all Warmongers, We are all Pacifists,” my first academic publication, appears in: Building Yesterday’s Future for Everyone: Academic Selections from the 2025 World Science Fiction Convention
It’s a bit early to be making an Awards Eligibility post, but I’d like to note that this book is eligible for the 2027 Hugo Award for Best Related work.
I see WorldCon as many cons wrapped up into one. One of those is the Academic Track. I’ve attended Academic Track sessions at WorldCons in the past and enjoyed them. That said, I didn’t feel like much more came out of it.
Now that I have an MFA, I look at this track even ore seriously. It’s more than just another opportunity for academics to get their research published. It’s a chance to connect academics with the broader community of fandom, while still engaging with authors.
And since the Academic Track is a part of WorldCon, it seems appropriate, if congoers feel the authors and editor have done a good job with it, that WorldCon should reward this nascent effort. So, its really exciting to be a part of that!
For my own contribution, it grew out of questions I had about literature, and the fact that I could not find a systematic process of evaluating literature with regard to representations of both violence and nonviolence, I found myself creating my own. Over the course of many essays, and working with multiple faculty mentors during multiple semesters, I developed a system.
I hope to have the opportunity to develop this system further, but the feedback from Stonecoast faculty, the people who attended my sessions at two conferences where I presented these ideas, the peer-review process of this publication and the editor, have made this paper, and the system I propose, stronger and more useable for critics and writers, and I’m extremely grateful!