(Meta)Cognition
The 47th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA 47)
March 18–21, 2026 | Marriott Orlando Airport Lakeside | Orlando, Florida
Guests of Honor: Ted Chiang and Ann Leckie
Guest Scholar: Sherryl Vint
Call for Proposals
Submission deadline: Friday, October 31, 2025 [Submit Here]
If cognition is the process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and sensation, metacognition is a thinker’s awareness of their own processes of thought. Thinking about thinking is a task of profound urgency in the present moment, as technologies labeled as “artificial intelligence” provoke us to ask whether machines can think and whether algorithmic pattern outputs are something similar to, or different than, what we usually think of as thought.
The metacognitive artist, writer, or critic is not only immersed in thinking but also in reflecting upon the act of thinking itself, generating forms of awareness that exceed statistical prediction. This doubled perspective makes possible new kinds of art, new theories of mind, and new critiques of power. Where algorithms identify patterns, metacognition cultivates reflection, questioning, and transformation. Through cognition and metacognition, thought is refined, authoritarianism is challenged, and hegemony unsettled. Reality is shaped by thinking—and then reshaped by thinking about thinking.
For ICFA 47, we invite proposals that engage with the theme of (Meta)Cognition in literature, media, and culture. We particularly welcome work that approaches cognition and metacognition through the lens of the fantastic, broadly defined, across literature, film, television, comics, games, art, design, and other media. Papers and panels may focus on the conference theme or on any topic concerning the fantastic. We especially encourage innovative, interdisciplinary, and cross-cultural approaches, as well as proposals from scholars, creators, and graduate students at all career stages.
Possible topics include (but are not limited to):
- (Meta)cognition in fiction; fiction as (meta)cognition
- (Meta)cognition and artificial intelligence, animal intelligence, or plant intelligence
- Social (meta)cognition and the fantastic
- Sentience and speculative media
- Teaching methodologies and learning patterns
- (Meta)cognition in/and the bildungsroman or the hero’s journey
- Social and personal philosophies; ethics and morality
- The nature of reality and metamemory in/and fiction
- Minds, bodies, and prosthetic intelligence
- Language and (meta)cognition
- The avatar’s destiny in games and intermedia experiences
- Thought and eco-crises
- Second-order cybernetics and communication systems
- Utopias, dystopias, and philosophies as guiding principles
- Care structures and awareness
- (Meta)cognition and the creative process
We also welcome open-topic proposals in any area of the fantastic.
The International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA) is an annual scholarly conference devoted to all aspects of the fantastic (broadly defined) as it appears in literature, film, and the other arts. The ICFA is held every year in March in Orlando, Florida, USA.
Special Guests
Ted Chiang
Winner of the 2024 PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the art of the short story, Ted Chiang is one of the most respected and admired science fiction authors alive. His best-known work is probably “Story of Your Life,” which was the basis of Denis Villeneuve’s award-winning film Arrival (2016), but Chiang’s short fiction has won praise and prizes for more than 20 years, including multiple Nebula, Hugo, and Locus awards. Recognized in 2023 as one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence and awarded the American Humanist Association’s Inquiry and Innovation Award in 2024, Chiang has been celebrated as one of the world’s most original and innovative thinkers, especially in the areas of AI and metacognition. His fiction has been collected in Stories of Your Life and Others (2002) and Exhalation (2019).
Ann Leckie
Ann Leckie is a celebrated American novelist and short-story writer whose debut work Ancillary Justice (2013) became the first and only novel in history to win science fiction’s “triple crown”: the Hugo, Nebula, and Arthur C. Clarke Awards. Her other novels—including Ancillary Sword, Ancillary Mercy, Provenance, The Raven Tower, and Translation State—explore issues of consciousness, gender identity, and imperial power. Most recently, she published Lake of Souls: The Collected Short Fiction (2024), a wide-ranging anthology that gathers her best short fiction (including a brand-new, Hugo-nominated novelette, “Lake of Souls”) and won the 2025 Locus Award for Best Collection. Lauded for her imaginative reinventions of language, perspective, and the nature of self, Leckie stands among the most influential voices shaping contemporary speculative fiction.
Sherryl Vint
Former IAFA President Sherryl Vint is Professor of Science Fiction Media Studies at the University of California, Riverside. She is the author of Bodies of Tomorrow (2007), Animal Alterity (2010), Science Fiction: A Guide for the Perplexed (2014), Science Fiction (2021), and Biopolitical Futures in Twenty-First Century Speculative Fiction (2021). Founding editor of Science Fiction Film and Television and Director of the Speculative Fiction and Cultures of Science Program at UCR, she received the Science Fiction Research Association’s Award for Lifetime Contributions to SF Scholarship in 2020.
