Escapade 2018 Panel Suggestions Are Open!
Did you know that you can already start submitting your ideas for Escapade 2018 panels? The submission form is open and waiting for your meta, your squee, your outrage, your knowledge, your skills, and your questions. Is there a panel you wanted to submit last year or at another con, but you missed your chance? Have that conversation with your Escapade friends this year! Is there a panel at last year’s Escapade that you just haven’t been able to stop thinking about, and you want to continue that conversation, or rebut it, or take it in a new direction? Now is your chance! Been following a conversation online that you know some Escapade members are missing? Bring it to it Escapade! Have you discovered a new technology or learned a new skill that would be useful for fandom? Submit a panel and teach us all about it!
Escapade has long been known as a meta-oriented con, with a reputation for thinky and sometimes controversial panels. There is always room for fannish squee, for panels that provide a space for wallowing in our shared enthusiasm, and we love skill-sharing and knowledge-sharing panels and fans helping fans. But we don’t shy away from difficult topics and we really welcome panels that get people’s brains engaged and fannish blood pumping.
Escapade panels are also not like “panels” as they occur at traditional literary science-fiction and fantasy cons, or larger industry-oriented cons like ComicCon or DragonCon. At Escapade, a panel is a moderated discussion. The moderator’s role is to frame a discussion, to facilitate it and make sure the attendees get to engage and participate, and to document it in whatever way seems appropriate. The moderator(s) are up front taking notes on a flip chart, but often they speak less than anybody else in the room! In an Escapade panel, the attendees engage with each other, with the topic, and with the mods, and everybody creates the conversation together.
For a taste of what an Escapade panel feels like, check out the Escapade YouTube channel to view an Escapade panel filmed in 2016:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbP7x4SSk84jGvsNslklg8Q
So what’s on your minds, Escapade friends? What do you want to talk about at this year’s Escapade? Which shows or showrunners have made you the most excited this year and why? Which have pissed you off and made you want to write all the fic and vid all the vids and create all the art to fix their ridiculous mistakes and terrible choices? Which fandoms are doing something new, saying something new, making something new? Which fandoms are toxic dumpster fires of wank that need some panel therapy or a panel cage match to fight it out? Still having Deep Fannish Thoughts about that fandom you’ve loved since 1985? Submit a panel and see who else might still be thinking about it, too! Now is the time to start making Escapade 2018 the con experience you want to have!
Check out the panel programming page on the Escapade website:
https://escapadecon.net/panels/
Submit your panels (and toggle the tab to view topics already submitted):
https://escapadecon.net/panels/suggestions/?target=suggest-a-panel