2006 SFRA Election
These are the candidate statements from the slate selected by the Nominating Committee. Members should be aware that, by means of a petition signed by five voting members of the Association and received by the Secretary of the association by July 10, 2006, further nominations may occur. Anyone reading the bylaws will realise that, as Chair of the Elections Committee, I have arbitrarily extended the date in the regulations so that it occurs after the annual conference, the conference being an opportunity for the membership to informally meet and consider the nominations. The candidate statements offered below will also appear in the next issue of SFRAR.
Peter Brigg
Chair, Nominating Committee
President
Adam Frisch
I am honored to be nominated for the position of SFRA President. I have been a member of SFRA since 1978, and served as the organization's vice-president in 1999-2000. I have also served on several SFRA committees, most recently the Pilgrim Award Committee from 2002-2004. I am currently Professor and Chairperson of English at Briar Cliff University in Sioux City, IA., from which position I have managed to do some scholarly work on the authors James Tiptree, Jr., Ken MacLeod and Kim Stanley Robinson, as well as on the genre of SF film. If elected, I will do my best:
1) to keep the organization, its print and electronic publications, and its annual meetings running smoothly,
2) to work with the other SFRA officers to find new ways to increase our organization's diversity of interests, scholarly appeal, and membership numbers, and
3) to listen to individual members about how to make SFRA a more efficient and a more exciting organization.
Bruce Rockwood
My experience with the SFRA includes attending the annual meetings in Schenectady, Guelph, and last summer in Las Vegas, and I will be participating again this June. After serving two years as SFRA Vice President, attending the executive committee work-session in Cleveland and participating in the panel on pedagogy at the meeting in Las Vegas last summer, where I also presented a paper, I have come to realize that the SFRA is an interesting and diverse group of people I enjoy working with, and whom, if elected, I would like to serve.
My interests include the intersections of SF and Fantasy with law, politics, and ethics. I am concerned about the political distortion of science by some who see it as a threat to their religious views, economic or political power, or all of the above, and see SF as a good place for critical and satirical commentary on the alternative presents and futures we endure, or hope to create or avoid. I would like to see the SFRA continue to encourage critical and creative thinking and writing about what those futures are likely to be. We are already living in a period once regularly written about as "the future" by SF's leading figures-do we need to rewrite the past-future, or consider whether the present is an alternative time line? And what new futures are now possible that we wish to write about and, as Frederik Pohl has said, perhaps try to prevent?
My professional experience includes my current role as department chair (Finance & Legal Studies) at Bloomsburg University, where I have taught since 1985. Law & Literature, and International Law are my favorite subjects, and I have used SF texts in various classes, including my required "business law" course (I used Jane Yolen's "Briar Rose" one term in trying to get my students to think about the implications of the Solomon Amendment litigation). I attend various professional meetings, most recently the centennial of the American Society of International Law, and would work as SFRA President to get regular recognition of our work in academic circles to the extent that it would help us expand membership, and help our members improve their professional opportunities. We ran an ad for the 2006 Annual Meeting in the summer issue of the CHE's "Events in Academe" at my suggestion, and got it listed in the January issue calender, which I hope will encourage participation. I also reach out to my peers on our campus to join and participate, and hope all who read this will do likewise. If everyone who reads this notice gets one more person to join the SFRA, it would be a great step forward.
I endeavor to get my students to write well, and still find grading essays takes forever. This afternoon I tried to explain how Thomas Kuhn and John Rawls influenced my thinking about human rights to students who had heard of neither. It struck me then that SF, and the SFRA as an organization dedicated to the study and encouragement of SF, may both need a Kuhnian paradigm shift now, to rethink their mission and method, and learn from and attract into the SFRA the next several generations of writers and scholars who will carry on the work.
The world is not flat, but it is multi-dimensional and interconnected. My daughter and her partner Nick just visited from Edinburgh for their first visit since 9/11, which happened just after my son Nathan and I attended the 2001 Philadelphia WorldCon. I exchange e-mail regularly with a former student now in Iraq over the Internet, discussing Chris Hedges' "War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning" that we read in law and literature together. Nathan is now a sophomore at Earlham, and got a contributing author credit for the RPG game "Serenity" based on the film and the Firefly t.v. series. My middle son Alex has aspergers, and introduced me to Greg Egan's "Distress," which he found fascinating. Nathan introduced our younger son Corwin to Emily Rodda's novels, and Cor and I have found the Rowan of Rinn saga marvelous. During the last two years Sue went back and got her Masters in Early Childhood Education and continues teaching technology and library skills at Greenwood Friends School, and is only now coming up for air and finding time to get back into SF again.
So, thanks for your consideration. If you elect me I will do the best I can for the SFRA. In any event I look forward to working with you in the future, for the future. Thanks.
Vice President
Ed Carmien
Every so often one is called upon to take a moment and define him or her self. Whether a bio blurb to accompany a short story, a short statement to help with introductions at a new job, or a platform statement, the goal is the same: to convey information. So who is Ed Carmien? I am it seems a hybrid creature. Not one major but two in college, not one master's degree but two, not one Ph.D. but-well, ok, there the trend skipped a step. Write two dissertations? My working life has been equally diverse: SF writer (and member SFWA) and academic? Yes. Couldn't imagine living any other way.
Previous service to the Association includes working as a member (last year) and chair (this year) of the Graduate Student Award Committee, and it has been an honor to be allowed to organize and chair a panel for the upcoming conference about the role of fantastic literature in English composition and other courses. It is as a writer and Associate Professor of English at a New Jersey community college that I offer to serve the SFRA as vice-president. In addition to sundry supportive duties our vice-presidents are charged with "special responsibility for membership recruitment."
I envision a membership drive that makes a direct appeal to all institutions that offer a science fiction (&/or fantasy) related course. Those who teach such courses would be enriched by membership in SFRA-seeing to it all appropriate institutions have a representative in our membership is a clear goal that can be pursued through a letter (or email) campaign. To support this endeavor I have received confirmation that my institution will support extensive mailing costs in the event I am elected.
In addition, secondary or indirect activities that enhance the value of membership in "our thing" can help boost retention. James Gunn mentioned the academic program repository, for example: between that and ongoing efforts in the SFWA (note the "W") to promote SF through better coordination of press resources, we can leverage our knowledge and talent into the public arena more effectively. By advertising our sundry programs (the repository) and making it possible for members of the press to contact those of us who know what they want to learn about aspects of popular culture that are constantly proving relevant to our broader intellectual culture, we can help make SFRA more relevant and useful than it already is, and hence an organization in which it is worth retaining membership.
And there's the hybrid thing again-the joining together of otherwise disparate parts in order to create a better whole. My interest in this concept extends to enthusiastic support for the idea of combining our upcoming 2007 meeting with the Heinlein centennial. No more useful hybrid concerning our organization comes to mind, and I sincerely hope our current leadership makes it possible for us to hold a combined event. As I mentioned earlier, making the SFRA more relevant to ongoing activities in our area is the handiest recruitment tool there is.
I promised myself I would quit at the end of one single-spaced page, and as I write this I can see the bottom margin. I will cheerfully answer any questions posed by the electorate: contact me by email at carmien@mac.com. Learn more about me and my work as a writer of SF by visiting: http://www.sfwa.org/members/carmien/index.html
Lisa Yaszek
I'm Assistant Professor in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at Georgia Tech, where I also serve as curator for the Bud Foote Science Fiction Collection. My first book, The Self Wired, explores cyborg writing as a new way to represent the impact of postwar technologies on American subjectivity. My forthcoming book, Galactic Suburbia, shows how women writing science fiction in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s developed a unique body of literature that critically engaged emergent technocultural institutions and prefigured the literature we now recognize as feminist science fiction. My essays on gender, science, and science fiction appear in journals including Extrapolation, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, and electronic book review.
I have been involved in SFRA since 2003 as a conference presenter, panel organizer, Pioneer Award recipient, and Pioneer Award judge. If elected Vice President I would work to raise the profile and increase the membership of SFRA by forging new connections with interdisciplinary academic and artistic organizations. At first we might simply announce our presence by advertising our conferences, publications, and awards with such groups; later we could use the SFRA webpage, email list, and newsletter to circulate information about organizations amenable to science fiction studies and to organize panel submissions for their conferences. The Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, SIGGRAPH, and the National Women's Studies Association would all welcome our presence, and I'm sure that my colleagues in SFRA can identify a number of other groups that would do so as well.
I would also like to explore the possibility of advertising SFRA to students in appropriate graduate and undergraduate programs and creating profiles of our organization in popular online communities such as myspace.com and facebook.com. Extending our recruitment efforts in these directions will enable us to reach a wide range of up-and-coming scholars and artists both within and outside the science fiction community.
Treasurer
Donald 'Mack' Hassler
I have worked with this organization a long time because I enjoy the people and the projects so much. It is important to keep our records and our money straight. When I served as treasurer back in the eighties, we did not have the cool database software that we have now, and so in this past term I have had to adapt my 'file card' approach to the changes--not a bad idea for someone interested in science fiction. I think I know the new system now and would love to continue with it for two more years. Because of my age, if elected I shall be the Alan Greenspan of our community. Also, as you know he began as a disciple of Ayn Rand--and I of Heinlein. But perhaps I should stop now lest I lose more votes.
Warren Rochelle
I am honored to be nominated. This is a wonderful group of scholars and teachers, and I will continue to do what I can to help it flourish. I feel that active participation of the membership is essential for this to happen. I am passionate about the teaching and scholarly study of science fiction and want to be involved in the betterment of each. Service on the Executive Committee is a way to do this.
Secretary
Stacie Hanes
My name is Stacie Hanes, and I'm a Teaching Fellow at Kent State University. Academically, I specialize in 19th century British literature, contemporary British fantasy, and Queer Theory; my most acute interests are in ethics and literature, particularly in Terry Pratchett's Discworld and Joss Whedon's Buffyverse.
I've been involved in the SFRA since sometime in 1999, when Joe Sanders asked me to be on the committee planning the 2000 conference, which was held in Cleveland that year. At the time I was an undergraduate, so you might say that I have grown up with the organization, presenting papers and chairing sessions in Cleveland, Chicago, and Las Vegas. Beginning my involvement by helping to organize the very first professional conference I attended was, I have to say, plunging into the deep end. I've tried to keep up that involvement, most notably by spending 2004 and early 2005 helping to design and edit the SFRA website, a task for which I, Samuel McDonald, and Elizabeth Monier-Williams volunteered at the Chicago meeting in 2004.
Though the SFRA was the first professional organization I joined, I've been steadily involved with major student organizations for a long time, always as a member of the directing board. At Lakeland Community College, I was president of the Campus Activities Board for two years, while also serving as one of the nine Student Government officers. As CAB president, I directed teams of student volunteers who organized large-scale events at least monthly; we were responsible for a budget of over $30,000 per year, which we used to purchase promotional items and materials, pay performers, book the performers' accommodations, and assist other student organizations in funding their niche events. During that time, I worked with student volunteers, college administrators, agents, artists, and the governing boards of other organizations on a regular basis. I received several service awards from the college for my work with CAB, which included writing its Constitution and bylaws. I've always taken the awards as signs of approval, but since two were clocks, perhaps they just valued punctuality.
After I moved on to Youngstown State University, where I completed my Bachelor's degree, I had to look for some other organization that might need me. I found YSUnity, the campus gay/straight alliance. I performed similar duties for YSUnity, but without the budget. I designed promotional materials and a website that I still maintain. After about a year with YSUnity, I was elected president of the group; I held the office for two years, while I worked for the English Department as a graduate teacher. As YSUnity president, I ran meetings, produced documents, organized events, and built the organization up from a handful of core members to a thriving activist group of several dozen regular attendees. My two-year term (not reign of terror, whatever you might have been told) coincided with my graduation from YSU's Master's in English program. When I left YSU and YSUnity, I was given the Edna K. McDonald Cultural Awareness Award; it was a purely ornamental object, so I like to think that it wasn't for just showing up on time.
Since then, I've been a part of other organizations, such as Omicron Delta Kappa (a leadership honor society), Phi Kappa Phi, and the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts; for the last, I am now the Division Head of the brand new Visual & Performing Arts section of the organization, with responsibility for building it into a successful division.
The ability to take small or new groups, or projects, and help build them into thriving entities strong enough to stand without me may be my greatest strength; it's what I'd like to offer to the organization: a continued, perhaps intensified effort increase our membership. I would like to see growth for the benefit of younger scholars like me, who find mentors among the senior scholars in the field, for the secure perpetuation of the SFRA itself, and for a still broader exchange of ideas within sf scholarship; I see the continued improvement of our web presence as an important means to this end, as might be increased development of mentoring efforts toward graduate students and other young scholars.
My last qualification might be that I'm from the Volunteer State, and therefore helpless in the face of polite requests to serve-please keep that quiet, I don't want the MLA to know.
Shelley Rodrigo
I am currently a faculty member at Mesa Community College in Mesa, Arizona. I primarily teach writing and film studies classes. My scholarly interests all intersect under the umbrella of how technology interfaces with humanity. As a rhetoric and composition scholar this includes studies of usability, distance learning and professional development. As a film studies, and humanities scholar in general, this includes science fiction studies and what I call "cyborg theory." I have attended and presented at the annual SFRA conference, on and off, for the past seven years. I was also the co-editor for The SFRA Review from 2001 to 2003.
I appreciate the open and welcoming atmosphere of SFRA as a conference and organization. As a young graduate student the scholars at SFRA made me feel a part of a scholarly community. I believe it is important to continue SFRAs legacy of being open to young scholars, as well as scholars making connection from and through other disciplines. As an elected officer I want to give back to the organization as well as continue to promote the organization with other scholars. I would especially like to see the organization target the various upcoming media scholars; much of their work can, and does, benefit from science fiction studies.