Calls for papers – Conferences taking place in November 2021

Keeping silent, listening, speaking up: voice and silence in audience-response to arts and literature
Université de Lorraine, Nancy, France, 3-5 November 2021
Deadline for proposals: 4 January 2021

The conference “Keeping silent, listening, speaking up:  voice and silence in audience-response to arts and literature” had initially been scheduled at Université de Lorraine (Nancy) on 4-6 November 2020
Submission deadline has been put off until January 4th 2021.
Please send abstracts to Claudine Armand (claudine.armand@univ-lorraine.fr) and Diane Leblond (diane.leblond@univ-lorraine.fr)

See the original call for papers at https://essenglish.org/cfp/conf2011/#voice-and-silence

(posted 24 September 2020)


On Going: figuring journey, position and place
Corpus Christi College, Oxford, UK, Saturday 6 November 2021
Deadline for proposals: 31 May 2021

We are looking for papers which consider journeying, place and the way as tropes in ancient or modern texts, and we look especially for associations with Christian and Biblical themes.

Papers normally have a reading time of about 20 minutes, and are followed by a few minutes of discussion. They are offered for publication in The Glass and subsequently on the CLSG website.

The deadline for offering a paper is 31 May 2021. Send a provisional title and a few lines on how you will tackle your topic. Email Dr Roger Kojecký, secretary@clsg.org

With the pandemic continuing, the annual conference will likely take place by video conferencing, in which case papers will be distributed two weeks beforehand and discussed on the day. When sending your proposal state whether you envisage participating only on Zoom or, if it becomes possible to meet in Corpus Christi College, Oxford, you would be in Oxford on 6 November 2021.

The full form of the Call for Papers is at https://www.clsg.org/html/conference.html  . The conference page will be progressively updated in the period before the conference.

(posted 25 January 2021)


Innovation in Language Learning: 14th edition
A hybrid event, in Florence, Italy, and on line, 11-12 November 2021
New extended deadline for proposals: 13 September 2021

The 14th edition of the Innovation in Language Learning International Conference will take place on 11-12 November 2021.

The objective of the Conference is to promote transnational cooperation and share good practice in the field of the application of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to Language Learning and Teaching. The Innovation in Language Learning Conference is also an excellent opportunity for the presentation of previous and current language learning projects and innovative initiatives.

Two days of inspiring sessions in the framework of a highly interactive onsite and online conference experience will be delivered. Enhanced digital contents will give participants greater access to learning, sharing and networking.

All accepted papers will be presented onsite and online.
Interactive Questions and Answers sessions will follow each paper presentation.
Poster Presentation Sessions will also be held, onsite and online.
Networking Opportunities will be organized.

Abstracts must be submitted by 13 September 2021

All accepted papers will be published in the Conference Proceedings with ISBN, ISSN and DOI codes. The publication will be included in Academia.edu and indexed in Google Scholar. The Proceedings will be sent to be reviewed for inclusion in the Conference Proceedings Citation Index by Thomson Reuters(ISI-Clarivate).

Contact: conference@pixel-online.net
Official website: http://conference.pixel-online.net/ICT4LL/callforpapers.php
YouTube promo video: https://youtu.be/WLFFP9lIETs

Health and Safety issues in relation to COVID-19:
In case participants are not able to attend on-site, online, interactive, attendance/presentation opportunities are available. Participants attending/presenting online will benefit of a discounted fee. Every precaution possible is taken to create a safe environment for participants attending on-site (masks, gloves, distance seating, disinfection etc.). Finally, should the conditions do not allow the conference to be held on-site as expected, the event will shift to a fully virtual format.

More details can be found at the following page.

(posted 12 February 2021, updated 14 June 2021, updated 31 July 2021)


Crises: Climate and Critique in the Literature and Arts of the English-Speaking World after 1800
Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris, France, 18-20 November 2021
Deadline for submissions: 20 April 2021

Our times are marked, perhaps even defined, by crisis: sanitary, economic, social and epistemic crises but also (and perhaps more prominently) ecological and climate crises, which gave rise to the “crisis of the imagination” identified by Lawrence Buell in 1995. Twenty years later, the matter stands unresolved, driving writer Amitav Gosh to declare in 2016: “the climate crisis is a crisis of culture, thus of the imagination.” Confounded by the biological, geological and planetary scales of the crisis, humankind seems unable to coherently grasp, feel or represent the ongoing catastrophe.

Yet, some writers have been warning us about ecological degradation since the 1840s (Susan Fenimore Cooper) at the very least, while others have given voice to nonhuman interests (John Muir), prefiguring the Gaian ethics today defended by thinkers such as Bruno Latour. Is it then literary criticism and theory that have been late in considering the environmental imagination? How are the fields of critique evolving nowadays as they seek to engage with a growing body of literary and artistic texts (emerging notably from speculative fiction and cli-fi) mandated with anticipating or negotiating the cataclysm, representing this “hyperobject” (Morton 2013), and tracing maps to navigate the unthinkable (Patrick Lagadec)? What new ways of reading and interpreting does this double crisis, of the climate and of the imagination, call for?

From the “crisis of the concept of literature” announced at the beginning of the 20th century (Jacques Rivière), to Edgar Morin’s theory of “crisology” (1976), the wide-ranging concept of “crisis” spans so many horizons of our contemporary consciousness it has become a “ready-made cliché” (Randolph Starn, 2005), regularly wielded to label breaks and ruptures of all kinds, ideological or political upheaval as well as aesthetic apotheosis. The word – originally carrying a dimension of decision, examination, and judgement, that closely relates it to critique – has been emptied out, even turned against itself as it has come to designate the (recurring) dysfunction of a system caught in the loop of permanent indecision. Considered both a source of instability and innovation, the concept appears thus inherently ambivalent (in Hölderlin’s words, “where the danger is, also grows the saving power”). Will the current ecological crisis signal the renewal of the relation between literature and the world, rendered so problematic by 20th century avant-gardes? Are we witnessing a rebalancing of activism and formalism, ethics and aesthetics within the fields of artistic practice? Will climate change invite literature and the arts to rethink their relationship with science?

If for McLuhan “there are no passengers on spaceship Earth, we are all crew”, we are not equally exposed to the turbulences shaking our planet, and the very idea of crisis can become the pretext for an authoritarian reinforcing of these inequalities. This conference will also be the occasion of interrogating how ecocriticism meets decolonial theory (Ferdinand 2019), and how the perspectives of animal and plant studies are connected to the minority positions that have been structuring literary studies since the 1980s (feminist and gender studies, queer theory, African-American studies, disability studies). Can we talk, with Dipesh Chakrabarty (2019), of the planetary as an “emergent regime of historicity” demanding that we reevaluate national histories (the scale at which we still mostly observe literature)? Finally, the conference will also allow us to explore how different literary genres grapple with the double crisis of climate and imagination: is poetry, which since Mallarmé (1897) has been suffering a a perpetual “crise de vers” better suited to formulate the unthinkable? What then of the theater, which thinks itself as the genre of crisis per se (Artaud, in The Theater and the Plague, 1938: ” Theater, just like the plague, is a crisis which can only be resolved by death or a cure”)? Through these explorations, we hope to better grasp the positioning of contemporary criticism in the face of global catastrophe.

Presentations may be in French or English and touch upon:

  • Climate change & the crisis of imagination
  • Representing climate change
  • Data visualizing & big data in literature and the arts
  • New genres in the era of climate change (post-pastoral, cli-fi, Anthropocene noir, etc.)
  • Close reading & distant reading
  • Ecocriticism & post/decolonial studies
  • The global or the planetary
  • Crisis capitalism
  • New discourses of futurity
  • Literature & environmental justice
  • Literary activism, ecopoethics
  • Nonhuman diplomacy
  • Geography/cartography in literature
  • The “studies” in the face of climate change
  • Critical reevaluations of notions such as:
  • – crisis
  • – precariousness and resilience
  • – the Anthropocene
  • – posthumanism
  • – Gaia / Pachamama
  • – terraforming & geoengineering

250-500 words proposals accompanied by a short bio. should be sent to:

Submission deadline is April 1st, 2021.

Proposals will be subjected to blind peer-review by the scientific committee. Authors will be informed of the results of their submission before April 20th 2021.

Organizers

Isabelle Alfandary, Sarah Montin & Pierre-Louis Patoine

This conference is an initiative of the Sorbonne Nouvelle University (EA 4398 PRISMES – Groupe 19-21 Modernités critiques).

(posted 18 December 2020)


Hashtags across Borders: Considering #Instapoetry as a Transglobal and Translingual Literary Movement
EJES Volume 27 (2023)
Deadline for essay proposals: 30 November 2021

Guest editors: Anna Nacher (Uniwersytet Jagielloński w Krakowie), James Mackay (European University Cyprus), JuEunhae Knox (University of Glasgow-)

The editors of EJES are issuing calls for papers for the two issues of the journal to be published in 2023. Potential contributors are reminded that EJES operates a twostage review process. The first is based on the submission of detailed proposals (up to 1,000 words) and results in invitations to submit full essays from which a final selection is then made. The deadline for essay proposals for this volume is 30 November 2021, with delivery of completed essays in the spring of 2022, and publication in Volume 27 (2023).

Procedure
EJES operates a twostage review process.

1. Contributors are invited to submit proposals for essays on the topic in question by 30 November 2021.

2. Following review of the proposals by the editorial board panel, informed by external specialists as appropriate, the guest editors will invite the authors of shortlisted proposals to submit fulllength essays for review with a spring 2022 deadline.

3. The fulllength essays undergo another round of review, and a final selection as well as suggestions for revisions are made. Selected essays are then revised and resubmitted to the guest editors in late 2022 for publication in 2023.

EJES employs Chicago Style (
T&F Chicago AD) and British English conventions for spelling. For more information about EJES, see: http://www.essenglish.org/ejes.html

“Instapoetry” is a label used, often derisively, to describe short original illustrated poems shared on Instagram and other social media sites. The genre has been hailed both as a publishing miracle and also as the third generation of electronic literature: certainly, it is the most popular form of poetry in the 21st century in numerous countries. Less often noted, but highly significant, is the way that the removal of gatekeepers has created a direct route to market for young, diverse, working class voices. Indeed, it is difficult to think of another mainstream literary movement in English that has been so conspicuously led by young women of colour, with its most successful voices being Rupi Kaur, Lang Leav, Nayyirah Waheed, Cleo Wade and Najwa Zebian. The global reach of the Instagram platform has also created a unique crosspollination that reaches across national and linguistic barriers. The millions of individual poems in this genre, linked by hashtags such as #poetsofinstagram,

#instapoem, or #writersofinstagram, contain examples in English, Russian, Hindi, Arabic, and many other languages. While literary movements have spread across these languages before, the process has usually relied on translation: there is no precedent for such immediate global reach. At the same time, contemporary social media platforms are becoming the gatekeepers to a widely shared social reality that transgresses national boundaries but simultaneously realigns relationships of power and dominance.

In this special issue, we investigate Instapoetry as a simultaneously global and local phenomenon. While the Instagram platform began in the United States, we areinterested in what happens when the global publishing conditions of Instapoetry meet the local poetic traditions of specific countries.

We invite discussions of the technopoetics of the networkbased literary movement which analyze the complex relationship of the rhetorical and performative aspects of instapoetry. In particular, such investigations might investigate the platformbased (and algorithmically amplified) nature of literary circulation within differing cultural contexts, along the lines of the attention and affective economies of platform capitalism.


Contributors from all over the world, and from any of the disciplines covered by ESSE, are welcome. Specific questions that potential contributors might wish to consider include:

Instapoetry as a vehicle for feminism and other forms of social justice discourse in differing cultural contexts

Instagram considered as a global nearmonopoly, and its potential to McDonaldise world poetry

Instapoetry in the English language classroom

Potentialities for subversive uses of the platform

Reappropriation of classical poetries on the Instagram platform

Using hashtags to read the global influence of Instapoetry

Cultural gatekeeping, canons of taste, and the ways that Instapoetry challenges academic concepts of “proper” poetry

Technopoetics of dissent in the distributed reading/writing practices of social media platforms

The business model of professional Instapoets as influencers in a gig economy, and the ways that this reflects a casualization of cultural labour in the contemporary world


Detailed proposals (up to 1,000 words) for full essays (7,500 words), as well as a short biography (max. 100 words) should be sent to all three editors by 30 November 2021:

Anna Nacher (
anna.nacher@uj.edu.pl)

James Mackay (j.mackay@euc.ac.cy)

JuEunhae Knox (jueunhaeknox@gmail.com).

This issue will be part of Volume 27 (2023). All inquiries regarding this issue can be sent to the three guest editors.

(posted 25 September 2021)


Rethinking Society for a Post-Pandemic World | Überlegungen zur Gesellschaft für eine postpandemische Welt
International Conference of the Goethe Society of India (virtual), 30 November – 2 December 2021
Deadline for abstracts: 30 October 2021

GSI Conference 2021 CfP

The pandemic that we are still living through has brought with it unprecedented changes, perhaps even a civilisational crisis. Unfolding much like a science fictional futuristic scenario with cities from which human beings seemed to have disappeared, the pandemic in fact accentuated ever more sharply the already existing faultlines of our globalised world. As country after country went repeatedly into lockdowns with ‘social distancing’ measures and economic life was disrupted, the ineptitude of states to control the spread of the virus, to protect people’s lives and safeguard their livelihoods was brought into sharp relief. As millions lost their jobs or faced steep wage cuts, as precarious forms of employment became ever more precarious, as schools and universities stopped functioning physically, depriving entire generations of children and young people of any effective education, as health systems broke down and the death toll mounted, entire societies seemed to be falling apart before our eyes. Climate breakdowns on an unrelenting scale have accompanied this revenge of nature.

Despite much talk about the urgent need for global solidarity and cooperation, the extreme inequities of collective human existence within and between countries have been exposed as never before. Paradoxically, ‘social distancing’ as a public health measure and a form of caring for others was accompanied by the increasing social distance in unequal societies and an inequitous global order. Divisive and sectarian ideologies and policies have compounded the injustices inflicted on people. Vaccines have brought temporary relief to a minority while their denial to countless millions in much of the developing world have left vast terrains for the virus to mutate in ever newer and deadlier forms.

It is still uncertain when the pandemic is going to end but it has thrown up a range of questions about the future of humankind on this planet. Unlike any major crisis of the past, this pandemic has found its way to every corner of the world and its consequences will continue to be felt everywhere in the foreseeable future. Will the science fiction like events that we have been witnessing lead inevitably to a dystopian future, a chronicle of a death foretold? Are we to surrender in helplessness before a tiny invisible object that can bring all our institutions – industries  private and public institutions and infrastructures, trade, business, social life – to a standstill? The binaries that have dominated much critical thinking seem to have little to offer to comprehend a crisis of such global reach. Perhaps, as several thinkers have pointed out, the pandemic compels a paradigm shift in how we think of our way of being in the world, our attitudes to fellow human beings, to states as well as to the world and nature, to the establishment of social institutions – in politics, economy, science, education, etc.

Any effort to analyse the turmoil and upheavals unleashed by the pandemic in our individual and social existence has to be directed to such rethinking. But to try to make sense of such a comprehensive crisis, we need to explore a wide spectrum of ideas. How have the different modes of expression of the human spirit – whether in philosophy, the social sciences, natural sciences, or in literature, cinema, art, whether as scientific analysis or as creative imaginings – responded to the crisis? What ideas do they propose for the future?The conference seeks to explore a spectrum of responses in an interdisciplinary framework.

Abstracts (200-300 words) may be sent in English or German by 30 October 2021 to Jyoti Sabharwal, Secretary, Goethe Society of India at goethe.india@gmail.com. Given the circumstances, the conference will be held in virtual mode.

(posted 27 September 2021)