International conference: Naming, Renaming: the Power of the Name in English-Speaking Cultures and Literature.
Location and dates: Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3, France. 13-14 November 2025.
Deadline for proposal submissions: 25 March 2025.
Naming is an act that first echoes Saussure’s question of the arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign (does a sign have meaning in itself or does it only designate a referent?), but also questions the performative power of language. If one can do things with words (Austin, 1962), then naming a place, a person, a community, an accent, an ethnic, political or social group contributes to granting it a linguistic reality and recognizing its extralinguistic existence. Paradoxically, naming or renaming shapes and orders the way we perceive the world, but it also entails exclusionary mechanisms (Bourdieu, 1980). Thus, the original act of naming constitutes a form of violence that imposes boundaries and attempts to define identities that are by nature fluid and multilayered (Derrida, 1987-1993; Bhatia, 2005), and the act of renaming can lessen or heighten this violence. These observations will lead us to consider several approaches.
Papers related to onomastics will be welcome; studies on the subject (Hough, 2016) examine the meaning and motive behind proper names, whether in toponomastics (place names), anthroponymy (personal names) or socio-onomastics (studies of proper names in social context). Sociology and history are also interested in the meanings and evolution of names of places, particularly in public spaces (Mask, 2020a). For instance, the Black Lives Matter movement has revived debates around these names, both in the United Kingdom and in the United States (Mask, 2020b).
From an applied linguistics perspective, attention could be paid to the coexistence of several signs for the same referent, such as a human referent in a sociocultural and interactional approach (coexistence of first and/or last names, nicknames, or even insults). We could also consider the creation, evolution, integration mechanisms and role of lexical or semantic euphemistic neologisms in language, as related to the concept of euphemism treadmill (Allan and Burridge, 2006).
Submissions in the field of English for Specific Purposes could focus on the terminology used to name objects, concepts and notions in a specific field, as well as the translation of these new terminological units. Moreover, researchers label and name certain concepts, behaviours or sociological and historical phenomena, which some political movements appropriate, hijack and distort in order to demonize them (critical race theory, intersectionality…) (May, 2014; Ray, 2022). This relationship between academia and political discourse is worth studying.
Sociologists analyse the evolution of identity markers (racial and gender categories, etc.). These names or labels (Becker, 1966) can be assigned, adopted, claimed and/or undergo a semantic shift: these changes reveal transformations in power dynamics and the acceptability of “deviant” behavior (Goffman, 1963). Naming can also reflect the agency of dominated
people and groups; it can constitute a choice and a statement about the way they want to present themselves and be perceived. A choice as personal as identity markers (first and last name) can
be a political act (Almack, 2005; Boxer, 2005; Benson, 2006; Edwards and Caballero, 2008; Patterson and Farr, 2017). It can also be a matter of reclaiming a term historically used as an insult in a perspective of self-affirmation and empowerment (Rand, 2014). In healthcare studies, presentations could examine the way “pathologies” and “disordered” are named and considered over time— those labels may be questioned or not by those they refer to, as is the case for addiction and trans identities among others (Stroumsa, 2014; Castro-Peraza et al., 2019).
Naming practices are also examined in literature, as authors have often explored the subtleties of identity and questioned the role of names in its construction. While names reflect character traits, histories and symbolic meanings, the process of (re)naming often implies the transformation or rejection of identities, as a result of personal or cultural struggles. The way characters grapple with their names reflects their journey of self-discovery, resistance or acceptance in the text. Literature thus reveals the act of naming as a complex, unstable process that resists definitive closure, between the desire for a fixed meaning and the reality of inherent fluidity or multiplicity. Through naming, we can open a debate on how readers are invited to explore the complex layers of meaning in a text, questioning and redefining notions of self, identity, society and reality. This exploration also raises the question of what is not named, of what is at stake in silence, or even silencing. This can be unveiled through stylistic and narratological choices, thus the choice to refuse or deny a name becomes central in the interpretative process.
Among the possible avenues of inquiry, we will consider papers that fall under the following themes:
- Naming, renaming people, characters and places: naming practices in immigrant communities and by transgender people; choice of family names, in particular in LGBTQ+ families; naming in the context of slavery; influence of religion on naming practices (parents, conversion…); (mis)pronunciation of foreign names; naming of communities; activism around names in public space: cities, schools, streets; onomastic and narrative analysis.
- Reclaiming names: reclaiming “insults” as a way of asserting an identity (queer, N-word, tranny…); political use or exploitation of scientific terms or concepts (freedom, critical race theory, intersectionality, etc.).
- Power dynamics at work in naming processes: who has the power to (re)name? What are the political, symbolic consequences of naming people and groups? Which factors influence the choice of a name? Renaming in order to politically demonize?
- Naming as classification: (re)defining literary and cinematographic genres; evolution of names for “medical disorder” between pathologization or empowerment; classifying acts and practices in order to forbid or punish them more or less severely (war on terror, war on drugs, “obscenity”…)
Proposals of around 500 words in English or in French accompanied by a short biography should be sent to namingconference@gmail.com before March 25th, 2025. We will consider proposals analysing any English-speaking country, or adopting a comparative approach. All approaches to the subject are welcome: historical, judicial, sociological, political, cultural (literary, artistic, cinematographic…), economic. We welcome proposals from experienced researchers, doctoral and other graduate students.
CFP
For further details, please check the original call inserted below.
CfPNamingEng(Posted 10 January 2025)
Conference: Expressivity, Bodies and Language in the Twenty-First Century.
Location and dates: University of Montpellier – Paul Valéry, France. 20-21 November 2025.
Deadline for proposal submissions: 3 March 2025.
Organised by Sandrine Sorlin (University of Montpellier – Paul-Valéry /IUF – EMMA) and Julie Neveux (Sorbonne University – CeLiSo)
Presentation
That language can affect bodies is nothing new. In How to Do Things with Words (1962), Austin theorized “perlocution” as the effects generated by the act of saying something. Perlocutionary acts do imply the presence of the body. But the nature of these bodily effects has never been thoroughly analysed, remaining at an abstract level that made it difficult to think both the corporal impact of language and the corporality of language itself. The language of emotions and emotions in language, in their representational and expressive dimensions, have begun to attract the attention of linguists (Wierzbicka 1999, Fenigsen et al 2000, Majid 2012, Lüdtke 2015, Gutzmann 2019, Alba-Juez and Mackenzie 2019, Trotzke and Villalba 2021, Rett 2021, Cotte 2023) literary scholars and stylisticians who have embarked on the ‘affective’ or ‘emotional’ turn (Keen 2007, Burke 2010, Hogan et al. 2022) and, more recently, pragmaticists (Wharton and Saussure 2023, Alba-Juez & Haugh in press). But the concrete effects of emotions and expressive language on bodies – which can be immediate or long-lasting, have lingered in the shadows of analysis.
Grounded in a post-dualist approach, this conference aims to center the body in order to shed light on how language and bodies interact and “interaffect” beyond the mere perlocutionary act of language. One of the goals is to investigate the effects of insulting, racist, homophobic, xenophobic or transphobic discourse on its targets’ bodies (as well as those of the locutors). The Black-American novelist, Claudia Rankine, poignantly evokes the body fatigue provoked by implicitly racist remarks, making the “sigh” in Citizen, An American Lyric (2014) the mode of expression of an asphyxiated and powerless body in the face of invisible microaggressions. The impact of misgendering on gender non-conforming people, of certain discourses on neurodiverse people also deserves recognition from their own embodied perspective. A cultural politics of bodily affects from a linguistic point of view is overdue to uncover how emotions affect our bodies and language and what emotions make us do and say – a continuation of the work brilliantly engaged by Sara Ahmed in The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2014).
The body is not, of course, to be severed from the mind. Cognition and emotions have been shown to be inextricably linked (Damasio 2000) and cognitive linguists, in the steps of phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty (1973) have highlighted the embodied grounding of linguistic constructions. For Ruthrof (2000, vi) though, they have not gone far enough in reinstating the body “at the base of linguistic communication”. Human thought is now known to be indissociable from an organism’s embedded activity. According to enactivists indeed, we experience the world with our whole bodies, “enacting” the world in an interactive engagement with it (Noë 2004, Hutto and Myin 2013, Di Paolo et al 2023). The time has come for human sciences to embrace post-dualist approaches (Lüdkte 2015). One may therefore ask how cognitive, enactive but also pragmatic theories can concretely account for the way bodies are affected and exploited by and in language when it comes to responding to environmental causes for instance or, more insidiously, believing in conspiracy theories?
The year 2016 proved to be a turning point precipitating a renewed relationship to truth (see Frankfurt 2005 on bullshit and Neveux 2024 on satirist Stephen Colbert’s coinage of ‘truthiness’ in 2006 as harbingers of the phenomenon). While the lexical formations “post-truth” and “truthiness” account for a new, more subjective and emotionally-grounded relationship to truth, the way it acts and relies on bodies has yet to be fully interrogated. The populist rhetoric and style (Moffit 2016) as exemplified in pro-Brexit discourses, strived to elicit “gut reactions” against (im)migrants. They are construed as invaders intent on stripping residents bare, tapping into the ancestral “us versus them” mindset that Lahire (2023) has shown to be central to human evolution. Is it possible to assess the effects produced by linguistic choices regarding self and other presentation in terms of embodied cognition? Can we measure the bodily impact of Trump’s hyperbolic language on both his followers and anti-Trumpians when he claims that immigrants “are eating pets in Springfield” (during the Harris-Trump presidential campaign on September 10th, 2024)? Emotions seem to be central to polarizing discursive strategies and yet to have been mostly overlooked in politics (Wolak and Sokhey 2022, Shah 2022).
Body and therapy through language is another field welcomed by this conference as it will focus on the effects of language – in particular metaphorical devices – on bodies and also how pained/hurting bodies affect language in return (Steen 2022, Colston et al 2023, Liu et al. 2024, Lugea 2022, Semino 2023). Positive emotions (joy, gratitude, hope) as studied in psychology (see Fredrikson 2001 among others) also need further linguistic investigation. If psychology has long concentrated on negative emotions (fear, guilt, sadness, etc.), experimental research has demonstrated the benefits of activating positive emotions on health, cognitive abilities and well-being. The sciences of language would perhaps benefit from a cross-disciplinary perspective between language/interactions and positive emotions. This conference will thus seek to assess what this research can bring to pragma-linguistic and discourse analysis, by focusing on the bodily effects of certain speech acts (compliments, flattery, etc.), of polite and generous discourse on the bodies of those who receive them as well as those who produce them: how good can words make us feel? What kind of language triggers empathy, defined as perspectival alignment? Can empathetic language “take care” of bodies as it may have done during the Covid 19-related pandemic that compelled people to remain at a safe bodily distance?
This two-day event will consider all contributions addressing “in the flesh” effects and characteristics of language, highlighting the way bodies can be affected by – or pulled into – linguistic forms, whether negatively, positively, or else, with an eye to assessing in turn the impact of such bodily effects on decision-making and/or state of mind (Bottineau 2008). The sources of analysis need to be language-based (discourse of any genre or interactions of any kind) but the corpora can be found on a wide variety of media (online discourse, forums, interviews, fictional discourse, etc.).
Approaches from specialists of discourse analysis, pragmatics, stylistics, cognitive linguistics, but also enactivism, (social) psychology, sociology, anthropology, political science and philosophy in connection with discourse or interactions are all welcome.
Proposals and timeline
- Deadline for submission: 3 March 2025
- Notification of acceptance: 15 April 2025
Proposals of around 300 words to be sent to sandrine.sorlin@univ-montp3.fr and julie.neveux@sorbonne-universite.fr, along with a short bio.
Website address
Under construction on sciencesconf
Contact details
CFP
For further details, please check the original call inserted below.
(Posted 25 October 2025)
International Conference – “Monarch of All I Survey:” Literary Posterity and Cultural Legacies.
Location and dates: Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, France. 20-21 November 2025.
Deadline for proposal submissions: 15 April 2025.
Venue: ENS de Lyon, 15 parvis René Descartes, 69007 Lyon, FRANCE.
Event description
We invite submissions for an international conference exploring the literary posterity of the phrase “I am monarch of all I survey” from William Cowper’s 1782 poem. Cowper’s lines have echoed through centuries of literature and criticism, embodying themes of imperial control, sight, and isolation, while remaining notably ambiguous. How has this ambivalence been reinterpreted across different cultural contexts and literary genres, from British Romanticism to contemporary postcolonial discourse? This conference seeks to engage with the far-reaching impact of Cowper’s words across a wide array of literary and theoretical frameworks.
Keynote speakers: Julia Kühn (University of Groningen, The Netherlands) and Nicholas Spengler (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain).
Website address
https://monarch2025.sciencesconf.org/resource/page/id/1
Contact details
CFP
For further details, please check the original call inserted below.
(Posted 21 December 2024)