IDEA 2025: 17th International IDEA Conference: Studies in English – The English Language and Literature Research Association of Turkey Annual Conference.
Location and dates: Fırat University, Elazığ, Turkey. 7–9 May 2025.
Deadline for proposal submissions: 15 December 2024.
Conference venue and travel
The conference will take place at Fırat University, Elazığ, Turkey. Elazığ City Centre is conveniently accessible from Elazığ Airport, which is within a 30-minute travel distance (by taxi or shuttle service).
Presentation
Founded in 2005, IDEA (English Language and Literature Research Association of Turkey) is the Turkish national association for English studies. As the only professional association in Turkey affiliated with ESSE (The European Society for the Study of English), IDEA aims at bringing together academics working in the fields of linguistics, literature, language teaching and cultural studies. The 17th IDEA Conference will be held on the basis of in-person participation and by the Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Humanities, Fırat University.
Scope
Our conference accepts papers in a wide range of topics from many different fields of “Studies in English.” We invite individual papers in the following general fields:
- English Literature
- Literatures in English
- Cultural and Critical Studies
- Linguistics
- English Language Teaching
- Translation Studies
Confirmed Keynote Speakers
- Prof. Dr. Nóra Katalin Séllei
- Prof. Dr. Mehmet Ali Çelikel
Conference Language
The official language of the conference is English.
Abstract/Short-Bio Submission
Please submit an abstract (max. 250 words) for a 20-minute presentation, including 3-5 key words and a short-bio (70-100 words) as a single Microsoft Word file (no PDF please) to the conference email address: idea17@firat.edu.tr
Please include your full name, institutional affiliation (including country information), abstract title, and email address (not included in the 250-word text limit) at the top of the abstract file.
The deadline for abstract submissions is December 15, 2024.
The receipt of submissions will be acknowledged within 3 workdays. If you have not received a confirmation after 3 workdays, please contact Dr. Gülsüm Tuğçe ÇETİN at gtcetin@firat.edu.tr
Peer Review Process
All abstracts will be double-blind peer reviewed by two reviewers.
Publication Prospects
All accepted abstracts will be electronically published as Conference Proceedings and maintained on the conference website.
A separate call for submissions will also be issued soon after the conference to invite full text articles to be selected through double-blind peer review for an edited collection of essays to be published.
Contact Person
All inquiries (other than abstract submission issues) should be addressed to Prof. Dr. Seda ARIKAN, Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Humanities, Fırat University through the conference email address: idea17sarikan@firat.edu.tr
For details of the conference, please follow the updates at: https://idea17.firat.edu.tr
For information about Fırat University, please visit the university’s official website: https://firat.edu.tr
CFP
For further details, please check the original call inserted below.
(Posted 9 November 2024)
NAES 2025: “Attending to the Islands: Archipelagic Perspectives on Anglophonia” – Nordic Association for English Studies Triennial Conference.
Location and dates: Åbo / Turku Finland. 8–10 May 2025.
Extended deadline for proposal submissions: 7 February 2025.
In an ever bustling, ever hurrying world, the concept of attention has become increasingly important. As Jonathan Crary observed in Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture, the “contemporary experience […] requires that we effectively cancel out or exclude from consciousness much of our immediate environment”. At the same time, contemporary society has been significantly impacted by seemingly conflicting forces and paradoxical processes of attention and distraction in various institutional, cultural, and technological contexts. The focus of this conference will be on any of the many ways in which the field of English Studies – and disciplinary perspectives from literature, culture, and history to linguistics and education – addresses and is shaped by various aspects of attention. These range from tensions between mediated experience and phenomenal perception to how political and cultural narratives direct our attention to some aspects of society while creating blind spots elsewhere. In addition to abstracts exploring this theme, the NAES are glad to invite panel suggestions on administrative issues as well as proposals for papers on other areas of interest related to Nordic English Studies.
Keynote Speakers:
- Fiona Farr
- Lorna Hutson
- Christopher Morash
- Andrew Newby
- Invited Poet: Desmond Egan
Themes for discussion include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Attending to the Islands: Archipelagic Perspectives on English Studies
- Surveillance, control, and the politics of attention
- Technology and the media: forms of attention and inattention
- Borders, surveys, and mappings
- Nordic English Studies and attention in education
- Local, global, and transnational attention – place, mobility, and migration
- Hotspots and blind spots: geography and the environment
- Attention, crisis, and catastrophe: personal and social perspectives
- Attention and the phenomenology of perception
- The aesthetics and poetics of attention in literature and the arts; authorship, narrative, perspective
- Generational and societal changes in attention
- Religion, politics, and social groups
- Ageing and attention
- Attending to language: linguistics, translation, and the multilingual society
- Diachronic and/or synchronic approaches and methods
Proposals for individual 20-minute presentations or panels/roundtables (3 speakers) should be sent by email to info-naes@abo.fi by 16 December 2024.
Proposals should include: name(s), institutional affiliation(s), paper title(s), a 250-word abstract and a brief biographical note of up to 50 words for each participant. (Three speaker panels may allow 200 words for the overall proposal, 200 words for each speaker’s abstract, and 50 words for each individual biography.) Panel/roundtable proposals should also identify the contact person for the entire session. Prospective speakers will be notified of a decision by 30 January 2025. At the time of the conference, accepted speakers will have 20 minutes at their disposal (with an extra 10 minutes set aside for discussion), and should be fully paid-up members of the NAES.
Hosted by Åbo Akademi University and the University of Turku, the conference is organized in collaboration with the European Federation of Associations and Centres of Irish Studies (EFACIS) whose concurrent annual conference in Åbo / Turku is titled “Attending to Ireland”.Conference Web page: https://blogs2.abo.fi/naes-efacis2025/
CFP
For further details, please check the original call inserted below.
(Posted 22 October 2024. Updated 10 January 2025)
EFACIS 2025: “Attending to Ireland” – European Federation of Associations and Centres of Irish Studies Conference.
Location and dates: Åbo / Turku, Finland. 8–11 May 2025.
Deadline for proposal submissions: 16 December 2024.
In an ever bustling, ever hurrying world, the concept of “attention” has become increasingly important. As Jonathan Crary observed in Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture, the “contemporary experience […] requires that we effectively cancel out or exclude from consciousness much of our immediate environment”. At the same time, the contemporary society, in Ireland and elsewhere, has been shaped by seemingly conflicting forces and paradoxical processes of attention and distraction in various institutional, cultural, and technological contexts. The focus of this conference will be on any of the many ways in which the field of Irish Studies – and disciplinary perspectives from literature, culture, and history to linguistics and education – addresses and is shaped by various aspects of attention. These range from tensions between mediated experience and phenomenal perception to how political and cultural narratives direct our attention to some aspects of society while creating blind spots elsewhere.
Keynote speakers:
- Fiona Farr
- Christopher Morash
- Lorna Hutson
- Andrew Newby
- Invited Poet: Desmond Egan
Themes for discussion include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Attending to Ireland as/and island(s): culture, geography, and the state
- Surveillance, control, and the politics of attention
- Technology and the media: forms of attention and inattention
- Borders, surveys, and mappings and the 100th anniversary of The Irish Boundary Commission
- Irish Studies and attention in education
- Local, global, and transnational attention – place, mobility, and migration
- Hotspots and blind spots: geography and the environment
- Attention, crisis, and catastrophe: personal and social perspectives
- Attention and the phenomenology of perception
- The aesthetics and poetics of attention in literature and the arts; authorship, narrative, perspective
- Generational and societal changes in attention
- Religion, politics, and social groups
- Ageing and attention in Ireland
- Attending to language: linguistics, translation, and the multilingual society
- Diachronic and/or synchronic approaches and methods
Proposals for individual 20-minute presentations or panels/roundtables (3 speakers) should be sent by email to info-efacis@abo.fi by 16 December 2024.
Proposals should include: name(s), institutional affiliation(s), paper title(s), a 250-word abstract and a brief biographical note of up to 50 words for each participant. (Three speaker panels may allow 200 words for the overall proposal, 200 words for each speaker’s abstract, and 50 words for each individual biography.) Panel/roundtable proposals should also identify the contact person for the entire session. Speakers should be fully paid-up members of EFACIS.
The organisers accept proposals and papers in either the Irish or English language./ Cuirtear fáilte roimh pháipéir i nGaeilge nó i mBéarla.
Hosted by Åbo Akademi University and the University of Turku, the conference is organized in collaboration with the Nordic Association for English Studies (NAES) whose concurrent annual conference in Åbo / Turku is titled “Attending to the Islands: Archipelagic Perspectives on Anglophonia”.Conference Web page: https://blogs2.abo.fi/naes-efacis2025/
CFP
For further details, please check the original call inserted below.
(Posted 22 October 2024)
Symposium: Political Narratives and their Use in Political Discourse.
Venue and date: Université Lyon 3 Jean Moulin, Lyon (France). 16 May 2025.
Proposal submissions: 23 September to 15 December 2024.
Organised by The Centre d’Études Linguistiques – Corpus, Discours et Sociétés (University of Lyon – Jean Moulin Lyon 3)
Keynote speaker: Philip Seargeant (Open University).
Operating within the prolific fields of narrative studies and discourse analysis, this one-day conference aims to contribute to our understanding of how narratives frame the political debate in today’s democracies. As “one verbal technique for recapitulating past experience” (Labov & Waletzky 1967: 13) narratives constitute a cognitive activity (De Fina & Georgakopoulou, 2012: 5) that is partly subjective and may have an emotional (Reisigl 2021) and persuasive (Polletta 2006) effect on the story recipient. This perlocutionary effect of the narrative format makes it highly relevant to the study of political discourse.
Scholars have long recognised the special relationship between narratives and politics (De Fina 2017; Seargeant 2020). Atkins and Finlayson (2012) explain that, over the past 40 years or so, narratives have become ubiquitous in political rhetoric. Shenhav (2006) defines a “political narrative” as “one that emerges from a formal political forum, such as a parliament, a cabinet, party meetings or political demonstrations, or as narrative produced by politicians and public officials in the course of their duties”. De Fina (2017) claims there are two main trends for the study of such narratives, and these will constitute the main axes of the conference, though other approaches can be envisaged:
- One approach is interested in the “master narratives” underpinning political discourse, which reveal the “overarching structures that underlie and organize discourse and interpretation”. These narratives help influence the way our brains interpret important political issues and thus frame the way we perceive reality (Seargeant 2020). Political debate can be envisaged as a battle of narratives (Spencer and Oppermann, 2020) in which the ultimate goal is to effectively “control the narrative”. Papers dealing with the construction of such narratives, with ways of assessing their influence, or with specific methodologies for their study as well as the integration of the concept of narrative into existing discourse analysis frameworks, as proposed by Forchtner (2020) for instance, are welcome. The analysis of narrative boundaries (Cordero and Frei 2024) and the creation of discursive identities, by celebrating the in-group and denigrating the out-group (Wodak 2015), are also of great interest to this conference.
- The other approach deals with political narratives as “a set of everyday discourse practices” (De Fina 2017: 233), or anecdotes, which are favoured in political discourse today because they are “seen as representing a non-argumentative, more common sense and therefore more grass-roots inspired mode of conveying political views” (Ibid: 239). We invite contributors to discuss the discursive and emotional influence of such narratives on political communication in general but also on the construction of a powerful ethos for leaders who can depict themselves as caring about the lives of other people, or as having overcome difficulties – and learned from them – and thus as being entitled to the status of hero/ leader/ guide of a community.
In addition, many linguists (Wehling 2016; Richardson 2004; Reddy 1993; Palmer 1981) have contributed to our understanding of how political narratives make use of captivating metaphorsthat shape both thought and communication in the political realm. Their works are fundamental for anyone interested in the intersection between linguistics, cognitive science, and political science, which is why all these topics may be addressed as well under the aegis of “perlocutionary power”. In their classic study Metaphors We Live By (1980) Lakoff and Johnson highlighted how metaphors structure our understanding of complex political concepts. A generation later, Charteris-Black (2005; 2007) analyzed how political figures resort to metaphorical language to influence voters by “telling the right story”. Thus, conference papers may wish to examine how metaphors nurture political narratives in salient examples of “master narratives”, “anecdotes”, and political life-writing (memoir and biography) in the Internet age.
In line with the research interests of the CEL’s “Socio-political discourse analysis” branch, this one-day conference intends to question the persuasive power of political narratives and we therefore welcome theoretical as well as methodological proposals, but also case studies (UK and US 2024 elections, European elections, populist discourses in Spain, Italy, Germany, etc.), which will broaden our understanding of this holistic and ubiquitous rhetorical device, and how they might constitute important conveyors of political ideologies, often unnoticed or underestimated because of the narrative format. A selection of papers will be published in a special issue of the journal ELAD – SILDA (Studies in Linguistics and Discourse Analysis).
Submissions should include an abstract (up to 500 words, excluding references) as well as a short biography and should be sent to:
- Mela-Pissa Martin-Kemel <melissa.martin-kemel@univ-lyon3.fr>,
- Bérengère Lafiandra <berengere.lafiandra1@univ-lyon3.fr>,
- Jon Delogu <christopher-jon.delogu@univ-lyon3.fr>,
- Almierre Bonnet <alma-pierre.bonnet@univ-lyon3.fr>
Key dates:
- Submission: September 23 to December 15, 2024
- Notification of acceptance: January 15, 2025
- Registration: March 2025
- Conference: May 16, 2024
Language: English or French
CFP
For further details and references, please check the original call inserted below.
(Posted 27 September 2024)
19th International Conference on Contemporary Narratives in English: The Relational Turn in the Literary Anglosphere: Writing Connection and Interdependence.
Location and dates: Faculty of Arts and Letters, University of Zaragoza, Spain; 21-23 May 2025.
Extended deadline for proposal submissions: 15 November 2024.
Organisers: Bárbara Arizti & Silvia Martínez-Falquina
Presentation
The past few decades are witnessing the demise of the myth of human autonomy, self-sufficiency and self-referentiality graphically and beautifully represented by Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. This iconic image of western civilisation —a naked male figure inside a protective bubble— has not withstood the test of findings in the hard and soft sciences that depict human beings as a complex node of relations. His normative masculinity has been contested by feminism and the prevalent focus on intersectionality to define identity, and his cool aloofness has also been shattered by the inescapable reality of human dependence on the environment made manifest by recent ecological developments. It is clear that we are in urgent need of updated icons for our contemporary times, icons that reconsider the limits of the traditional western conception of the subject. Whichever symbols eventually come to be representative of the current age, there is hardly any doubt that its defining quality will be relationality. This is the key value that characterizes the current phase of Transmodernity, our way of referring to this era’s socio-cultural paradigm, prompted by recent crises such as the climate emergency, the COVID-19 pandemic, non-stop migratory flows or protracted and new armed conflicts. Relationality is also the only possible response to other systemic risks and insidious forms of trauma caused by sexism, homophobia, violence against women, racism, xenophobia, aporophobia, the threats of new technologies and the long-lasting effects of colonialism.
This emphasis on relationality unveils porosity where we used to see limits, and it helps us see and value the interdependence of the various dimensions of the human being and the radical interconnection of existence. This is a way to give due visibility and attention to the change in mentality we observe, for example, in the recent emphasis on humility, vulnerability, or empathy behind the call for an ethics that includes not only the human but the more-than-human. We are now more open to appreciating and learning from the Indigenous values and ways of being in the world, thus delving into the still needed revision of western-centric attitudes. We are also ready to learn from pre-modern values as well as to relate to the world as an enchanted space and access its subtler realms, pointing to a new ecological enlightenment.
As firm believers in the pivotal role of literature in detecting and recording these changes as well as in its power to promote transformation, we invite contributions on these and related topics: 1. Relationality and literary form (networked fictions, the fragmented novel, limit-case autobiographies, Aboriginal/Indigenous realism, African/Indigenous futurism, short story cycles, -generic hybridity, cli fi, feminist dystopias, ordinary life narratives, etc.). 2. Relationality and theory (pluriversal cosmologies, transmodern feminism, material feminism, multidirectional memories, epistemic arrogance and its discontents, ecocriticism, storied places, thing theory, etc.). 3. Relationality and the human (vulnerability, narratives of care, emotional truth, affective knowledge, implicated subjects, etc.); 4. Relationality and the more-than-human (Indigenous place-thought, climate hope, eco-anxiety, spatial traumas, the geography of perception, food studies, the reenchantment of reality, etc.).
Website address
https://limlit.unizar.es/about
Contact details
Contributions to: limlitconference2025@gmail.com
- Bárbara Arizti Martín barizti@unizar.es
- Silvia Martínez Falquina smfalqui@unizar.es
CFP
For further details please check the original call inserted below.
(Posted 16 July 2024. Updated 26 October 2024)
Conference: Teaching Translation and Interpreting 7.
Location and dates: University of Łódź, Poland. 23-24 May 2025.
Deadline for proposal submissions: 14 February 2025.
Venue details: Faculty of Philology, Pomorska 171/173, Lodz, Poland.
Event description
Building on the success of previous conferences, organised by the Department of Translation Studies and Language Pedagogy, University of Łódź, Poland, TTI 7 will focus on the theoretical and practical aspects of translator training, translation didactics, and curriculum development. This event will provide a platform for academics, professionals, and students to explore the evolving landscape of translation and interpreting, addressing themes such as professional ethics, technology integration, and interdisciplinary approaches.
The conference will feature keynote speeches from distinguished experts in the field, including Professor Carmen Heine from Aarhus University, Denmark, Professor Ricardo Muñoz Martín from the University of Bologna, Italy, and Professor Aleksander Gomola from Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. Attendees can look forward to engaging panels and roundtable discussions on topics such as AI and machine translation, continuous professional development, and bridging the gap between academia and industry. Additionally, the conference will offer sessions on collaborative learning, effective feedback, and adapting to changing industry standards, providing a comprehensive overview of current trends and challenges in translation education.
Participants will have the opportunity to share their research and insights, fostering a collaborative environment for knowledge exchange and professional growth. Whether you are an experienced translator, an educator, or a student, TTI 7 promises to be an enriching experience that will enhance your understanding of the multifaceted world of translation and interpreting.
Website address
Contact detailsDr Michał Kornacki – michal.kornacki@uni.lodz.pl
CFP
For further details, please check the original call inserted below.
(Posted 7 February 2025)
Interdisciplinary Conference: Performativity and Agonistic Pluralism in a Mediatised Age: Towards a Synthetic Approach.
Venue and dates: Charles University, Faculty of Arts, Prague; 23-25 May 2025.
Updated deadline for proposal submissions: 31 January 2025.
Organiser: Professor Martin Procházka, MAE
Presentation
Since J. L. Austin’s 1955 William James Lectures, performativity has become a seminal concern in linguistics, philosophy, literature, theatre, gender and media studies. Although Michel Foucault’s influential discourse theory defines itself against the notion of speech act, performativity as a concept has undoubtedly become paradigmatic, fundamentally inflecting understandings of discursive constructions of individual as well as social identities. In philosophy, aesthetics or political science, normative-deliberative theories of discourse (Jürgen Habermas) have been critically reflected (J.-F. Lyotard) and often abandoned in favour of agonistic pluralism (Chantal Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau, William E. Connolly).
Notably, with the arrival of new media, performativity acquires new forms, including “discourse networks” no longer driven by meaning and sense but by pattern and code. These “networks of technologies” enable the selection, storage, and processing of data (Friedrich Kittler) characterized by algorithms, interaction and “flexible accumulation” (Manuel Castells) and increasingly implemented by artificial intelligence. In computer processing of natural language, “discourse parsing” has been applied, for instance in sentiment classification or question answering.
The conference invites investigation of the common features of these approaches in order to offer a theoretical reflection of mutually overlapping aspects of performativity and explore the possibility of formulating a synthetic theory of performativity which could contribute to the understanding of the dynamic of identity conflicts as reflected in modern and contemporary arts, sciences and spirituality.
Keynote Speakers
- Laura Cull Ó Maoillearca (Professor of Performance Philosophy, University of Amsterdam / Lector, Academy of Theatre and Dance, Amsterdam University of the Arts) and
- Rajni Shah (artist and researcher, Amsterdam University of the Arts)
- Pavel Drábek (Professor of Drama and Theatre Practice, University of Hull)
The issues this conference will address include:
- What are the performative aspects of:
- discursive constructions of subjective, gender, social and cultural identities,
- data processing in discourse networks, and
- computer processing of natural languages?
- What is the nature of performative aspects of modern and contemporary art, especially literature, theatre and film, and how does performativity function particularly in relation to conflict? ∙ What performative dimensions characterize contemporary trends in spirituality? Are they compatible with the above aspects of discursive constructions and networks?
- What roles have different forms of performativity in accelerating or moderating social conflicts?
The organizers welcome proposals of:
- individual contributions (maximum 20 minutes, abstracts of 300 words), and
- round tables (4-6 speakers), including a general description (300 words) and brief bio-notes of individual speakers (100 words).
The proposals should be addressed to Professor Martin Procházka, Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, Charles University Prague, martin.prochazka@ff.cuni.cz.
The submission deadline of the proposals is 31 January 2025.
The registration will open on 1 March 2025.
Contact details
CFP
For further details, please check the original call inserted below.
Conference Performativity and Agonistic Pluralism in a Mediatised Age – CfP final extended deadlineDownload(Posted 16 May 2024. Updated 19 September 2024)
Conference: Real and Imagined Spaces in Film.
Location and dates: Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain. 29-30 May 2025.
Deadline for proposal submissions: 3 February 2025.
Plenary Speaker: Áine O’Healy (Loyola Marymount University)
Event description
When Mark Shiel argued almost twenty five years ago that film is more a spatial than a textual experience (2001, 6), he was highlighting the importance of space in films and arguing for its visibility against the traditional predominance of narrative and character in film theory and analysis. He was also asking to take cinematic constructions of real places seriously, as he later developed in his study of specific cinematic cities, particularly Los Angeles (2012, 2018). His intervention was important because, with some exceptions (Krause and Petro 2003, for example), theories of space in the cinema had until then been predominantly textual, starting with those of the Russian formalists and continuing later in David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s “Space and Narrative in the Films of Ozu” (1976), Stephen Heath’s “Narrative Space” (1981), and Bordwell’s Narration in the Fiction Film (1985), among others. A more recent theory of space, Antoine Gaudin’s L’espace cinematographice: Esthétique et dramaturgie (2015), after offering a “cartography” of the most important previous work on cinematic space, departs from this formalist slant to some extent, but his phenomenological approach and what he calls “espace vécu” (lived space) (5455) are still relatively unconcerned with the social space with which cinematic space interacts.
Following Shiel, this conference aims to explore film space as more than simply a function of narrative. In that sense, we aim to expand discussions of cinematic space to the interface with social spaces and real places rather than in the isolation of the text. As Rhodes and Gorfinkel have argued, approaches to film space must take into account the cinema’s “seemingly natural ability” to record place (2011, viii, ix). In other words, film space ought to be studied through its bearing on the social world and in its relation to “real places” rather than exclusively through the lens of narrative and stylistic construction. Thus conceptualized, the cinema becomes a record of the history of places and the repository of some of the most powerful and lasting cultural discourses about those places.
In this process of incorporation of the social, the historical and the geographical into the cinematic, it must not be forgotten that films do not offer us real places but heavily mediated versions of them. Real places undergo a process of transformation and reconstruction when they become part of a film. That is, they become, in a way, “imagined places” and spatial discourses about a specific place. The places are important but so is the process of transformation, i.e., the process of construction of cinematic space. As Gaudin puts it, the cinema does not just represent space but it constitutes a spatial experience in itself (2015, 71). In that dynamic, therefore, attention must also be paid to the specific formal strategies and cinematic mechanisms that turn place and social space into film space. In sum, cinematic articulations of space play a key role in helping spectators make sense of our world, of our place in it and of our various and complex mappings of real and imagined locations.
This conference is the final event of the research project “From Social Space to Cinematic Space: Miseenscènes of the transnational in contemporary cinema” funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities. The aim of this conference is to explore and discuss the ways in which space is constructed in contemporary films, with a special emphasis on the interface between real places and cinematic spaces, or between film and the real world.
Areas to be explored include but are not limited to:
- Cinematic form and transnational spaces
- Cinematic cities
- Borders in the cinema
- Philosophy and film: cinematic headspaces
- Film space and mobilities
- Space and place in film
- Film geographies
- Imagined spaces
- Institutional and alternative film spaces
- The tourist gaze
- The miseenscénes of film genres
- Utopian and dystopian spaces
- The spaces of history and heritage
- Nostalgia and the politicised past
- Lost, erased and missing spaces
- The spaces of intimacy in the cinema
- Age and the construction of space in the cinema
- Film stars and space
Submission:
Please submit a PDF document with a 300-500 word abstract and short bio (120 words) in English by February 3rd, 2025 through the conference website: https://eventos.unizar.es/126084/upload/realandimaginedspacesinfilm.html
To send your proposal, you will need to register as a user on the platform.
CFP
For further details, please check the original call inserted below.
(Posted 22 November 2024)
Event: AICED-26 – The 26th Annual International Conference of the English Department: Writing in a World on Fire: Perspectives on War and Climate Change.
Location and dates: University of Bucharest, Romania. 29-31 May 2025.
Extended deadline for proposal submissions: 15 February 2025.
Venue: University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, 7-13 Pitar Moș St., Bucharest, Romania
Keynote Speakers
- Penelope Corfield, Royal Holloway, University of London
- Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru, University of Bucharest
- Domnica Rădulescu, Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia
Presentation
Climate change and war are often perceived as similar forms of conflict, both triggered by the human impulse to conquer and colonise, and together they fuel the perception that the world today is – literally and metaphorically – on fire. In recent years, for example, wildfires, destructive and hard to control, have raged in Europe, the USA, Canada, North Africa, Australia and Indonesia. Fire, both literal and metaphorical, also features strongly in the many armed conflicts and violent civil disorders around the world.
Such disasters have helped detonate a veritable explosion of ecological thinking that has spread across other environment-related disciplines, with literature playing an important part as a framework of artistic and imaginative reflection on the environment and the ways society relates to it. Ecology has permeated critical discourses such as postcolonialism (in the shape of Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin’s “green postcolonialism” [2007] or “postcolonial ecocriticism” [2010]), feminism (ecofeminism, as coined by Françoise d’Eaubonne in 1974 and continued by Maria Mies; Vandana Shiva; Val Plumwood; Greta Gaard), landscape studies (Adeline Johns-Putra [2010]); posthumanism and/as ecohumanism (Hubert Zapf), often in a dialogue with animal studies (Donna Haraway); critical plant studies (John Charles Ryan); sustainability studies (Greg Garrard) or interdisciplinary environmental humanities (Scott Slovic).
Environmental concerns have also entered philosophy, for instance the concepts of “deep ecology” first formulated by Arne Næss in 1973, and “dark ecology”, as explored in Timothy Morton’s Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Existence (2016). Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) was an important precursor of environmental ethics as an academic discipline, which began to develop in the 1970s, for instance in the work of Christopher Stone (1972), Richard Routley [later Sylvan] (1973), and Holmes Rolston III (1975). In the field of jurisprudence, environmental law, and especially the concept of “climate justice”, have become significant aspects of legal philosophy and practice (David Schlosberg and Lisette B. Collins [2014]; Simon Caney [2005, 2020]).
Reactions against the continuous exploitation of the environment have ranged from Donna Haraway’s concept of “natureculture”, pleading for a reconciliation of the human with the natural and, subsequently, the posthuman (2003), to ecological activism such as Peter Berg’s, who waged a whole war in defence of a reconciliation between human and non-human life on the planet, through bioregionalism and the green city concept; or, more recently, Frédéric Neyrat’s theory of an “ecology of separation” (2018) which, on the contrary, claims that nature should be left alone to cater to its own healing. Through fostering better communication between humans and “earthothers” (Greta Gaard [2017]), better communication across human communities is encouraged, which leads to the resolution of old conflicts and the avoidance of new ones. Critical ecofeminism, for example (Vandana Shiva, Maria Mies, Val Plumwood, Greta Gaard and others), brings new, stronger evidence and argument in favour of opening up repressive binaries and acknowledging the dynamic continuum that encompasses all that has life.
As pointed out in postcolonial approaches to environmental humanities (see Huggan and Tiffin), as well as Amitav Ghosh’s fictional and non-fictional work, the proliferation of a western, Eurocentric model of civilisation across the world through the colonial system and later through the post-war globalising capitalist machine has led to an excessive exploitation of non-European societies and ecosystems alike. Whatever the approach, the general feeling guiding the study of human interaction with nature has, in recent times, been similar to the reaction of societies against the many wars that have plagued our planet.
In a world on fire, pressured by climate change and rife with conflict, what is the role of writing, especially of imaginative literature? Meteorological disorder and the distress it can cause are nothing new, but the enormity of climate change and possibly mass extinction poses a huge challenge to imaginative writing today – to fiction, poetry and drama. As Ghosh acknowledged, genre fiction, especially SF, had aimed to address the issues already, even before the idea of climate change became widespread, and recent years have seen the consolidation of a subgenre dubbed “cli-fi”, science fiction that engages imaginatively, though often with substantial scientific grounding, with the climate crisis: examples would include Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future (2020) and Neal Stephenson’s Termination Shock (2021). Since Cheryl Glotfelty’s founding of the study of literature and the environment, literature has been acknowledged as a major space for voicing ecological concerns, with “cli-fi” often being grafted onto existing genres such as historical fiction (see Annie Proulx’s Barkskins [2016] or Elif Shafak’s The Island of Missing Trees [2021]), or dystopian narratives (such as Richard Powers’ Bewilderment [2021], or Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness [2020]). Often, the ecological warning against some form of human aggression against nature comes in the shape of graphic novels or adventure stories addressed to children and/or young adults (see Eoin Colfer and Andrew Donkin’s comic Global or Tochi Onyebuchi’s novels War Girls [2019] and Rebel Sisters [2020]).
Literal and metaphorical fire, in peace and war, is not only a feature of the present, of course. Fire is a primal phenomenon and the discovery of how to start and maintain fires would have been an epochal event in human history. Fire can destroy but also illuminate: it can bring light into darkness, turn cold into warmth, and transform raw into cooked food, a capacity that may mark the starting point of human culture. In ancient Greek and mediaeval philosophy, fire was one of the original four elements, along with earth, water and air, and it features as such in other early philosophical systems. In theology and eschatology, it can be both punitive and purgative; the fires of hell in which sinners burn for ever, the holy fires that refine and redeem. Fire features significantly in drama, poetry and prose from ancient times to the present, especially as an image for sacred and profane love and desire.
We invite papers that analyse and explore the relationships between writing, culture, fire, war, climate change and environmental movements, in the present and the past, as represented in narratives and discourses, in poetry, drama and dance, in music, film and television, in graphic novels, comics and video games, in painting, sculpture and installations, in mainstream and social media, or in any other relevant cultural form. We encourage comparative and interdisciplinary approaches, but we recommend that their starting point should be Anglophone literature and culture. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- Ecocritical approaches to interpreting past and present literary texts
- Encounters between conflict-driven theoretical discourses (postcolonialism and ecocriticism, plant/animal studies and war studies, environmental sciences/humanities)
- Spaces of healing and ecological utopian fiction or science-fiction: Rousseau // Bernardin de Saint-Pierre // islands, otherness and diversity
- Nature as a source of psychological healing (e. g. Richard Mabey’s Nature Cure [2005])
- Reconceptualising nature and the human, e. g. natural vs human agency in conflict resolution
- Ecofeminism and ecologies of gender fluidity
- Sci-fi and cli-fi – the relationship between genre and subgenre
- Climate change in film, graphic novels, and visual arts
- Climate change denial as a cultural phenomenon (e. g. on social media)
- Reflections on climate change, conflict, and war (see American War [2017] by Omar El Akkad)
- Shakespeare and ecology (e. g. Gabriel Egan’s Green Shakespeare [2006], Simon C. Estok’s Ecocriticism and Shakespeare [2011])
- Images of fire in poetry, drama, fiction, and the arts
- Fire and war in literature and in mythical and religious discourse
- Climate change, philosophy, and ecological ethics (see Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence [2016]); ecological considerations in relation to every possible discipline: the Anthropocene
- Proto-ecological views in past European culture and in non-European and Indigenous cultures (e. g. interactions between Sanskrit philosophy and Romantic philosophy and the ways these fed into Transcendentalism)
- Interactions between climate change and war (e. g. James R. Lee [2009], Kirsten Davies and Thomas Riddell [2017], Eoghan Darbyshire [2021]), but also anti-war warnings as reflected in the literature for children and/or young adults
- Approaches to military/colonial/agriculture-oriented terraforming – changing/doing violence to the landscape (e. g. Matteo Rizzo [2006], Stefan Esselborn [2013])
- Crime, criminality, the other, and the weird: ignitable realities
- Utopian, dystopian, and ustopian tales of war and clime
N. B. The organising committee reserve the right to reject any abstracts or interrupt any presentations/discussions that might instigate the participants to conflict or intolerance.
Continuing the structure initiated last year, our conference will also offer a number of thematic panel streams that will allow participants to group around their main fields of research and for which potential participants are asked to send their proposals both to the conference email address (listed below) and to the panel stream organizer:
- Crime and the Weird in Literature and the Arts (panel stream organiser: Dragoș Manea, University of Bucharest, dragos.manea@lls.unibuc.ro)
- Inflammatory Wars – Old, New, or Imagined (panel stream organiser: Adela Catană, “Ferdinand I” Military Academy, Bucharest, adela.catana@yahoo.com)
- Literal, Metaphorical, Archetypal Fire in Literature and the Arts (panel stream organiser: Alina Bottez, University of Bucharest, alina.bottez@lls.unibuc.ro)
- Roots and Routes in Ecofiction and Ecocriticism (panel stream organiser: Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru, University of Bucharest, sabina.draga.alexandru@lls.unibuc.ro)
- The Early Modern World on Fire – Writing in an Age of Turmoil (panel stream organiser: Alina Bottez, University of Bucharest, alina.bottez@lls.unibuc.ro)
- Utopian, Dystopian, and Ustopian Tales of War and Clime (panel stream organiser: Eliana Ionoaia, University of Bucharest, eliana.ionoaia@lls.unibuc.ro)
Panel proposals on any other topics connected to the conference theme are welcome. Potential panel organisers are welcome to submit full panel proposals to the conference email listed below.
Two round tables will be organized to commemorate important figures of English and American Studies in Romania:
- one in memoriam Professors Ana Cartianu and Leon Levițchi: Canonic Figures of Mediaeval, Renaissance, and Victorian Culture.
- one in memoriam Dr habil. Ana-Karina Schneider, associate professor at the “Lucian Blaga” University of Sibiu, editor-in-chief of the American, British and Canadian Studies journal: The ABC of American, British and Canadian Studies
All those interested in contributing short academic papers on these topics or evocations of the three late academics are welcome to contact Alina Bottez, University of Bucharest, alina.bottez@lls.unibuc.ro.
Presentations
Conference presentations must be in English and will be allocated 20 minutes each, plus 10 minutes for discussion. Prospective participants are invited to submit abstracts of up to 200 words. Proposals should be in .doc or .docx format and also include (within the same document): name and institutional affiliation, the title of the proposed paper, a short bio note (no more than 100 words), 5 keywords, and the participant’s e-mail address. Proposals for panel streams (to be organised by the participants) will also be considered. Please submit all proposals to our email address: conf.eng.litcult@lls.unibuc.ro.
Deadline for proposals: 15 January 2025.
A selection of papers from the conference will be published in the University of Bucharest Review (ISSN 2069–8658) – listed on SCOPUS, EBSCO, ERIH PLUS and DOAJ. See the guidelines for contributors at https://ubr.rev.unibuc.ro/.
For further details and updates, see: THE 24th ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF THE ENGLISH DEPARTMENT. Enquiries regarding the Theoretical and Applied Linguistics section of the conference, which will be running at the same time, should be sent to aiced.2024@gmail.com.
CFP
For further details, please check the original call inserted below.
(Posted 13 October 2024)