The terms “whimsy,” “whimsical,” and "whimsicality" have  seen a rise in popularity in reference to both aesthetics and attitudes. The aim of this panel is to examine these terms from an interdisciplinary, academic perspective, enabling a more comprehensive understanding of the role “whimsy” both in historical, literary and philosophical analysis and contemporary culture.

Whimsy has long been a point of interdisciplinary academic inquiry, from literature to psychology, from science to cultural studies. A brief survey of published works addressing questions of whimsy and the whimsical reveals works on everything from culinary pots in antiquity to contemporary political protests, from Yoko Ono’s aesthetics to Hume’s philosophy. In our contemporary moment, we are seeing a rapid rise the use of whimsy in both popular and subculture spaces as evidenced by its pervasive usage on social media and as the focus of articles in spaces as diverse as Harper’s Bazaar and in the blog of the Institute of Network Cultures at the University of Amsterdam. Given both its origins and critical uses in literature/literary studies along with the common/popular usage of the term across a variety of media spaces, it seems the time has come to engage more deeply with the potential deployments of both the terminology and the ideas that underly whimsy and whimsicality. This panel aims to present whimsy as a productive and generative interdisciplinary category of inquiry, allowing us to consider more deeply the import of whimsy as an aesthetic category, a literary approach or attribute and/or a cultural phenomenon during times of increased political and social repression.

We offer the following suggested topics to help potential participants home in on pertinent questions for their submissions:

• How do we define whimsy/whimsicality from a literary, socio-cultural or historico-philosophical perspective?
• How has the concept/definition of whimsy changed over time? Is there a difference between scholarly and popular conceptions/uses of whimsy?
• Can an aesthetics of whimsy be determined? What might be the impact or import of such an aesthetics?
• Where are the points of intersection and conflict between whimsy and related terms like: satire, burlesque, travesty, the grotesque, etc?
• How does whimsy engage with or rebel against authoritarian, totalitarian, and/or fascistic ideology?
• What are the effects of the corporate co-opting of the language of whimsy?
• Is whimsy connected to or defined by a particular spacio-temporal presence, an affectivity, psychology, etc?
• How does whimsy relate to other radical concepts like hope and joy in the face of oppressive dynamics?
• How does whimsy appear in or relate to literary movements like absurdism, futurism, modernism, post-modernism, etc? 

We welcome any rigorous and/or generative approach to whim, whimsy, the whimsical and whimsicality.