CALL FOR PAPERS: HAUNTED MODERNITIES

Haunted Modernities, Present Pasts and Spectral Futures

Wednesday-Friday July 16-18 2025

Falmouth University, Cornwall, UK

This conference explores haunted modernities and spectral futures of all sorts. Looking back to the past as a haunted space and forward to the ‘spectres’ of the future, we want ‘Haunted Modernities’ to be indicative of wide open spaces and fruitful intersections in scholarship and practice. Whether work is hyper-local, global, or interstellar we welcome imaginative, creative, ethical, and diverse discussions from all disciplines and subject areas. As well as traditional papers, creative practice work is also invited in whatever form – written, film, audio, performance, exhibitions etc. 

Hosted by Falmouth University, and co-sponsored by Northeastern University, the Haunted Modernities conference will be held in Cornwall on the Falmouth Campus, which is set in lush tropical gardens a few minutes’ walk from its picturesque town and beaches.

Following on from our other international conferences which included Folk Horror in the Twenty-First Century and Haunted Landscapes I & II, please come and join us for this latest conference for the annual conference of the Dark Economies Scholarly Association (DESA).

Keywords/Possible Topics include (but are not bound by):

  • AI (affects and effects)
  • Architecture
  • Art      
  • Comics           
  • Climate Disaster
  • Consciousness
  • Crip Pasts/Futures
  • Cyber Spirituality
  • Data
  • Fugitivity
  • Futurism
  • Film
  • Games
  • Gender (of all and any sorts)
  • Gentrification
  • Ghosts
  • Heritage
  • Hauntology
  • Hyperconnection
  • Home/shelter/house/development
  • Infrastructure
  • Literature
  • Lots, allotments
  • Machines
  • Magic
  • Manifestos
  • Maps
  • Micro landscapes
  • Migration
  • Mobility/Stasis
  • Neuroscience
  • Nostalgia
  • (Post)colonial, (Post)apartheid
  • Queer geographies
  • Racial Capitalism
  • Reverberations and Echoes
  • Slippage
  • The Subterranean
  • Space – the interstellar
  • Traces
  • Trauma
  • Translocal, Transurban, Transnational
  • The Uncanny
  • Urban geographies
  • Vacancy/Vagrancy
  • The Weird
  • Work

Please send 250 word abstracts and a short bio (and any questions) to:

[email protected] and, [email protected]

Deadline: March 17 2025