[csaa-forum] CSAA 2025: Keynote announcement

[Rebecca Olive]

CSAA 2025 Keynote Announcement


So hot right now: Cultures in rising temperatures

Cultural Studies Association of Australasia conference<https://csaa.asn.au/csaa-conference-2025/>

26-28 November 2025 //University of Melbourne campus as part of the Congress of HASS

(Conveners: Rebecca Olive, Gilbert Caluya, Holly Randell-Moon, Andrew Hutcheon)

Following our announcement of an In Conversation between Professor Irene Watson & Professor Mary Graham, along with presentations by Emeritus Professor Baden Offord and Professor Emily Potter, we're pleased the share our final keynote, Associate Professor Elizabeth Stephens.

Elizabeth Stephens is Director of Research and Associate Professor of Cultural Studies in the School of Communication and Art at The University of Queensland. Her publications include the monographs A Critical Genealogy of Normality (University of Chicago Press, 2017), co-authored with Peter Cryle, and Anatomy as Spectacle: Public Exhibitions of the Body from 1700 to the Present (Liverpool University Press, 2013), as well as the forthcoming Artificial Life, co-authored with Oron Catts, Sarah Collins, and Ionat Zurr (UWA Press, 2025). Her recent Future Fellowship (2017-2022) examined the genealogy of experimental bodies from the emergence of modern biology and medicine to the present. She is the founder and convenor of the Australasian Health and Medical Humanities Network, co-Editor of Australian Feminist Studies, and Immediate Past President of the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia.

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CSAA 2025 call for papers and sessions<https://csaa.asn.au/csaa-conference-2025/>: CSAA 2025 aims to look at intersections, divergences, conflicts, and convergences of ‘heat’ in cultures, practices, media, environments, and forms of governance. Together, we will explore how our relations to each other are heating up across political, environmental and cultural challenges and to explore what rising temperatures might help us imagine or foreclose into the future.

To help spark some ideas, submissions for panels or presentations could include topics such as:

  *   Cultures of Heat: representing heat/fire in everyday cultures; the rhetoric of fire/heat/temperatures and its effects on culture, politics, society, identity, practice or praxis; theorising ‘slow burn’ in literature and film.
  *   Hot as Hell: heat/fire in religious and spiritual cultures; the cultural politics of hell.
  *   Heated media: revisiting McLuhan’s hot and cool media theory; fiery social media communities and cultures; the media of outrage and panic; reporting on/in hot conflict zones; mediated hate speech against women and minorities; toxic fandom in entertainment media.
  *   Hot bodies: the body politics of heat; screen representations of sex; the gendered and racialised politics of attractiveness; cooling off dating; hot flashes/hot flushes; heatstroke.
  *   Taking the temperature of technological developments: technological contributions to carbon emissions; AI and climate change; technology’s connections to social and political conflicts.
  *   Fiery emotions: affects of ‘passion’; passionate debates; the uses and abuses of anger; lust and desire; the politics of passionate ‘races’; the gendered politics of passion.
  *   Geographies of heat: the geopolitics of climate change; the urban politics of overheating; access to heating/coolness as a right; heat in rural and regional studies; ‘race’, empire and heat vulnerability
  *   Managing fire: governance and governmentality of heat/climate change/fires; Indigenous approaches to using fire as an environmental management tool; cladding and the cultural politics of building codes; managing fires in the culture of construction industries
  *   Cultural politics of climate change: the effects of global warming on leisure and recreation industries and cultures; non-humans and more-than-human worlds in climate change; movement, physical activities and sport under global warming; rethinking health and wellness in the context of climate change.
  *   Critical reflections on ‘the Anthropocene’: the theory of ‘climate change’ or ‘the Anthropocene’; new methodologies for the Anthropocene; the connections between humans, non- humans, and more-than-human worlds in the Anthropocene.
  *   Creative Arts in heat: creative artist responses to climate change; the role of the arts and craft in climate change politics; sustainability in arts and craft practices.
  *   Theories, ethics and practices of care in global warming: what are our responsibilities under climate change? What kind of care does the planet need? And how do we enact such care under global warming?
  *
Colonialities of heat: the geopolitics of race and coloniality in rising temperatures; environmental racism; Indigenous sovereignties and sciences


These are just some provocations to ignite your own ideas with this year’s theme. As always, the CSAA annual conference is open to any hot topics in cultural studies. We’re excited to hear your ideas so fire away!

Email submissions to csaaconference2025 at gmail.com<mailto:csaaconference2025 at gmail.com> by 25 July 2025.

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Rebecca Olive
Vice Chancellor's Senior Research Fellow<https://academics.rmit.edu.au/rebecca-olive>
School of Global, Urban & Social Studies
RMIT University

Associate Director (Regenerative Environments & Climate Action<https://cur.org.au/themes/regenerative-environments-climate-action/>) @ Centre for Urban Research<https://cur.org.au/>
President: Cultural Studies Association of Australasia (CSAA)<https://csaa.asn.au/>
Project website: Swim Melbourne<https://swimstorymaps.arcgis.com/stories/7fca14e3147041bab5e91e3f923b61c6>
ARC DECRA project: Moving Oceans<https://movingoceans.com/>

[cid:6286c96e-7652-426c-a128-14b4688f39a3]

I acknowledge the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nations on whose lands I live and work, and recognise Elders and Ancestors past and present.

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