Calls for papers – Conferences taking place in March 2022

Memory and Imagination: 7^th International Conference of the Tunisian Association for English Language Studies (TAELS)
Hammamet or Sousse (TBD), Tunisia, 7-8 March 2022
Deadline for proposals: 9 January 2022

Memory studies have brought about fundamental knowledge on the importance of memory in a variety of disciplines. With a view to gaining further insights into the configurations of memory across disciplines, reflection is directed towards understanding the mutual relations between memory and imagination while considering the ways in which academic debate, written narratives, history, visual representations, etc. form constellations of memory.

This conference seeks to address the growing interest in the ways the intersection of memory and imagination appeal to a variety of disciplines and build bridges between them. Whether transitory glimpses or intricate narratives, memories give vent to imagined pasts. Reconstructing one’s relationship to the past may possibly go through the complexity resulting from the human ability to represent and narrate truth(s). We find in literature valuable narrative constructions of the memory, not only relating to the presence of the past but also to imaginations of the future.

In our fast-growing world, where information is abundant and easily accessible, raising questions about the significance of human memory has become more important than ever. With the technological advances in computer sciences, memory is depicted as a faculty that, like a computer, “stores” and then “generates” information. Psychiatrists would compare human memory to a diary that writes itself (Jean Delay), and would attribute to the mind the mission of stitching together images and scenes rendering complex associations of thoughts and emotions.

In this regard, memory functions to store autobiographical and historical records which can affect remembrances that shape our identity as Marcel Proust argues in his magnum opus In Search of Lost Time. He stresses that “remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were”. Remembrance, then, could be seen as an idiosyncratic way of summoning up what is absent and gone but in a remodeled way that, in extreme cases, embraces the unreal or the fantastic, proposing entities and events that could not have necessarily existed according to current knowledge and understanding.

Proust overtly thinks that “The images selected by memory are as arbitrary, as narrow, as elusive as those which the imagination had formed and reality has destroyed. There is no reason why, existing outside ourselves, a real place should conform to the pictures in our memory rather than those in our dreams”.

In this context, the conference encourages developing, discussing and exchanging ideas about the dialectics of memory and imagination in relation to language. The act of remembrance validates who we are through the power of language or the different modes of communication we devise to connect with the outside. In addition, it seems interesting to examine the importance of language in the construction of memory narratives. Virginia Woolf was among those who gave credit to language in creating memories. In her essay “A Sketch of the Past”, she insists that writing is the instrument of mnemonic construction and acknowledges that remembrance is a pure act of imagination.

With a view to highlighting the multi-disciplinary queries energizing scholars and researchers alike, the conference invites reflection on the correspondences between memory and cultural studies. With the rise of migration and exile accompanying wars, disasters and the ends of empires, representation of the present rests primordially on a rich tapestry of people searching for roots and lost homes. Thus, their memories, to put it within the Proustian context, are likened to a “pharmacy…in which our groping hand may come to rest now on a sedative drug, now on a dangerous poison”. Works about memories of dispossession and trauma could be read against the backdrop of history and memory. Indeed, the stakes are huge when we refer to the interplay between historical, national and personal boundaries that delineate the concept of memory.

In language studies, memory received considerable attention in cognitive linguistics and first and second language acquisition (SLA). Researchers highlighted the difference between short and long-term memory in fostering language retention and supporting effective language teaching. Scholars also focused on memory in sociolinguistics and the role of heritage languages in preserving indigenous cultures and the local specificities of speech communities. In translation, memory has always been at the core of research on real-time transfer activities, especially the three modes of simultaneous, consecutive, and liaison interpreting. In more recent traditions, the interest in memory among linguists created new academic ramifications, including neurolinguistics, automatic language processing, and other areas focusing on the interplay between language and memory.

It is within this frame that we will be happy to welcome individual and panel proposals related, but not limited, to the following thematic strands:

• The relationship between imagination and memory
• Perception and memory
• Memory and imagination
• Memory and remembering
• Memory and the reconstruction of the past
• Lost memory and amnesia
• Forgotten history/ forgotten texts/ forgotten languages
• Stolen memory: exclusion/ manipulation/ propaganda
• Abandoned memory: indifference/ betrayal
• Historiography and fantasizing
• Memory and fiction
• Collective memory
• Creating memory
• Historiographies
• Speculative Fiction
• Literature, trauma, and memory
• Memory construction and new technologies
• Memory in language studies
• Memory in teaching pedagogy
• Memory in interpreting and translation
• Memory and representations of war
• Diaspora and memory
• Reconstructions and narration
• National mythologies
• Confabulation

The conference is intended as an interdisciplinary event. Hence, we invite presentations from different academic disciplines such as history, sociology, philosophy, psychology, literary studies, linguistics and others. Different forms of presentations are encouraged, including case studies, theoretical investigations, problem-oriented arguments, and comparative analyses.

Submission

We welcome individual abstracts for 20-minute presentations and complete panel proposals of three or four papers treating a similar theme or topic. Priority will be given to panel proposals.

Participants are kindly invited to submit their proposals via one of these links:

Link 1 (individual submissions):   https://bit.ly/3m7d5Yq

Link 2 (panel submissions):  https://bit.ly/3zZYyme

The deadline for abstract submission is January 09, 2022. Acceptance/rejection decisions will be sent by January 16, 2022.

TAELS editorial board will select a number of papers that will be published after peer-reviewing in a collective volume on the proceedings of the conference.

Registration

Presenters of accepted papers will be required to deposit a registration fee of 300 TND (300 Euros for international participants) before January 29, 2022.

The registration fees will cover:

• A full board-stay at the conference venue (one night for Tunisian participants – two nights for international participants).
• Two coffee breaks;
• Conference materials;
• Certificate of participation or attendance;
• Access to all conference sessions and workshops;
• Submission of the paper to peer-reviewing;
• Two hard copies of the conference proceedings after publication.

For attendance only, the registration fees will be as follows:

• One-day pass: 100 TND (100 Euros for international participants).
• Two-day pass: 150 TND (150 Euros for international participants)
• Two-day pass + accommodation: 250 TND (250 Euros for international participants.

For advice and more details about transportation and accommodation, please send your requests to saidiezz@gmail.com

(posted 2 October 2022)

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Narratives of Intercultural Mediation – International and Interdisciplinary Online Conference
“St. Cyril and St. Methodius” University of Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria, 11– 12 March 2022
Deadline for proposals: 31 January 2022

PLENARY SPEAKERS:

Prof. Michael Cronin, Trinity College, Dublin

Prof. Sverrir Jakobsson, University of Iceland

 Identified as a concept cutting across disciplinary boundaries and inviting interpretations from areas as diverse as communication theory, psychology, anthropology, translation and interpreting studies, philosophy, linguistics, literary studies, history, and international studies, intercultural mediation plays a key role in today’s globalized world. However, as a fruitful intervention across cultural distances and political differences, it was also an important factor in the past. Mediators such as translators, interpreters, diplomats, travellers, and merchants have always played major roles in maintaining lines of communication in different contexts. Predictably, many narratives, factual and fictional alike, deal with intercultural mediation and its agents.

This conference aims at approaching intercultural mediation from a historical perspective that considers its multiple meanings in the present but also acknowledges its numerous impacts in the past. It invites innovative contributions that analyse and compare significant narratives focusing on this complex phenomenon and its agents.

The conference is open to scholars from the research fields listed above as well as to practitioners working in translation, interpreting, and other related areas.

Topics include, but are not restricted to:

• theorizing intercultural mediation;
• forms of intercultural mediation in the past and present;
• intercultural mediation and effective/ineffective communication;
• intercultural mediation, travel, and mobility;
• intercultural mediation and globalization;
• intercultural mediation and conflict resolution;
• intercultural mediation and/in literary reception;
• intercultural mediation and/in world literature;
• problems of narrating intercultural mediation;
• intercultural mediators and their narrative representations;
• recurrent images and themes in narratives of intercultural mediation;
• borders and crossways in the context of intercultural mediation.

Abstracts (ca 250 words) and short bios are to be emailed to:

Prof. Ludmilla Kostova, University of Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria, l.kostova@ts.uni-vt.bg,

Prof. Ivelin Ivanov, University of Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria, i.ivanov@ts.uni-vt.bg, and

Dr Petya Tzoneva, University of Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria, p.coneva@ts.uni-vt.bg

Prof. Joanna Skolik, University of Opole, Poland, jskolik@uni.opole.pl

by 31 January 2022.

(Posted 14 December 2021)

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New Perspectives in Science Education International Conference -11^th Edition
A Hybrid Event, on-line and in Florence, Italy, 17-18 March 2022
NEW EXTENDED deadline for proposals: 16 December 2021

We will deliver a full 2 days programme of inspiring sessions in the framework of a highly interactive hybrid conference experience. We will provide enhanced contents that will give participants greater access to learning, sharing and networking.

– All accepted papers at the conference will be presented on-site and on-line.

– Interactive questions and answers sessions will follow each paper presentation.

– On-site and on-line poster presentation sessions will also be held.

– Networking opportunities will be organized.

All accepted papers will be included in the Conference Proceedings published with ISBN, ISSN and DOI codes.

The publication will be sent to be reviewed for inclusion in the Conference Proceedings Citation Index by Thomson Reuters (ISI-Clarivate). The publication will also be included in Academia and indexed in Google Scholar.

There will be five presentation modalities: oral and poster presentation on-site; oral, poster and asynchronous presentation on-line.

Contact: science@pixel-online.net

Official website: http://conference.pixel-online.net/NPSE/callforpapers.php

Health and Safety issues in relation to COVID-19:

Please notice that in the event the international conditions and regulations allow to organize the conference on-site, participants will have the possibility either to switch their virtual presentation with an onsite presentation (adding a supplement to the registration fee), or confirming their participation with a virtual presentation.

More details can be found at https://conference.pixel-online.net/NPSE/registration_fees.php

(posted 27 April 2021, updated 21 October 2021 and 23 November 2021)

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Hinterlands: Cultural and Literary Perspectives
Université of Wrocław, Poland March 18-20, 2022
Deadline for proposals: 31 September 2021

Dictionaries, which are written from a metropolitan perspective, tend to be biased against the term ‘hinterland’, variously defining it as the area beyond that which is visible or known; the back country that lies behind the strip adjacent to a coast or river shore; and the fringe areas of a port, town, or city. Geographically, ‘hinterland’ denotes underdeveloped heterotopias perceived as lacking an elite and ‘cultural currency’. Yet from the perspective of those who live beyond metropolitan centers, their environments are neither invisible nor unknown. Arguably, then, ‘hinterland’ stands for fullness as much as it does for lack. From a psychoanalytic or trauma studies perspective, in turn, ‘the area lying beyond that which is visible or known’ can serve as a productive metaphor, for it is in the real or metaphorical ‘land behind’, or the place over the border, that the repressed can be explored. Thus the hinterland may function as a ‘Gothic repository’ (Doolan 175).

‘Hinterland’ implies hybridity. As far back as the 1990s, the concept of the ‘spatially bounded  city’ was questioned by, among others, William Cronon (Nature’s Metropolis, 1991) and Matthew Gandy (Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City, 2002). The cities emerging from their books are both defined by and define their hinterlands, and the line of demarcation between the two spaces becomes fuzzy. We wish to go a step further and displace the bounded city concept with processes traceable within dynamically transforming spaces called hinterlands. By invoking current understandings of the hinterland, we hope to avoid the no longer sustainable demarcation of a ‘coherent urban’ and non-urban realm (Wachsmuth) naturalized by such writings as Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City. We propose that the city is no more than a ‘regulatory fiction’ (Robinson 112), an ‘ideology’ (Wachsmuth) rather than a ‘reality’. Neither can the city account either for transnational networks. As Andy Merrifield observes, ‘The urbanization of the world is a kind of exteriorization of the inside as well as interiorization of the outside. . . . The urban unfolds into the countryside just as the countryside folds back into the city’ (542). Shifting the focus from cities to real and imagined hinterlands, this conference sets out to address a spectrum of topics, ‘an assemblage of material and cultural practices’ (Foster), hitherto discussed in the urban context, and to revise their re/presentation in literary and cultural studies.

To describe a place as a hinterland in colonial and imperial contexts, Douglas Kerr argues, ‘might already be to make a territorial claim on it’ (11). It is a conceptual space imbued with connotations of imperial possession, othering and marginality (Doolan 175). In the last century or so, agglomeration centres rather than colonial empires began to draw on or engulf both near and distant hinterlands. Writing The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner acknowledged yet resisted the urban North’s perception of the American South as a hinterland. For the post-World War II Polish ‘settlers’ arriving in the former German region of Silesia, the land posed the enigma of a hinterland, a Gothic text whose hidden, obscured and unspeakable histories remained illegible, while its ‘natural’ resources retrieved from the rubble were swiftly packed and transported to the capital, to be used in the reconstruction of Poland’s urban core. The popular detective drama series Hinterland, set in Aberystwyth, Wales, is shot in and around the town, often in rural locations and emotionally charged landscapes ‘newly discovered’ by the film industry. In South African writing, the hinterland is the heartland once controlled by fortified farms (Foster). Ivan Vladislavić remarks that after the fall of apartheid, followed by massive migrations, there has been a relentless urban expansion whose symptom is the Restless Supermarket established on an ‘abandoned aerodrome in the hinterland, at the end of a country road’ (245). Once invisible, hinterlands emerge from obscurity by contributing to the rising, global high-intensity infrastructures/networks.

Our interest is in three categories of hinterlands. Firstly, in extensions of agglomeration centres into what has been historically defined as peripheries, fringes or fuzzy edges – suburban and rural developments sometimes referred to as ‘up-building’ (industrial and infrastructural clustering) and ‘un-building’ (post-industrial degradation of landscape) in hinterlands. Secondly, in far-away lands, territories, and heartlands – non-city spaces tied to urban cores and transformed into high-intensity infrastructure called operational landscapes. Thirdly, in metaphorical and real territories that function as hinterlands, and are thus invested with special qualities which contribute to their representation even though they are located close to the heart of urban cores, e.g. London’s East End.

We invite papers and presentations that address the subject of hinterlands by adopting either a literary studies or a cultural studies perspective. The welcome topics are related but not limited to the following fields of research:

• Hinterland or non-city: material and cultural practices in the rural urban fringe, urban hinterland and in distant hinterlands functioning as operational networks or historical sources of natural supplies,
• Hinterlands as neglected and disturbed landscapes of refuse, waste and loss, marked by histories of ecological violence and climate change, junkspace (Rem Koolhaas),
• Reclaiming and inhabiting hinterlands,
• Reinvention, appropriation and gentrification of hinterlands
• Hinterland as a tourist retreat and idyll,
• Memory, nostalgia, trauma and search for roots in hinterlands with histories of colonial, imperial, and political violence,
• Ethical considerations of hinterlands: incorporating otherness and embodying the self in hinterlands,
• The politics of memory in the hinterland – controlling, censoring, and restoring memory,
• Transforming and representing hinterlands: land, landscape, territory, and their populations
• Re-imagining and remapping hinterlands. Writing hinterlands as mediation between analytic maps and new pathways of meaning, between a psychogeographical understanding of particular landscapes and locations and the imagined narratives that rewrite these maps from new perspectives,
• Writing hinterlands as a ‘writing of excess’ (Botting) and the repressed to be explored, representing hinterlands in various literary genres,
• Hinterland as a projected space and metaphor; metaphorical land behind a person; the ground on which political thought, knowledge and conviction are (Doolan 177).

References
Botting, Fred. 2014. Gothic. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
Brenner, Neil, ed. 2013. Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization. Berlin: Jovis.
Browarny, Wojciech. 2020. Historie odzyskane. Warszawa: PWN.
Cronon, William. 1991. Nature’s Metropolis. New York: Norton.
Doolan, Emma. 2019. “Hinterland Gothic: Subtropical Excess in the Literature of South East Queensland.” eTropic – Special Issue: Tropical Gothic 18.1, 174-191.
Foster, Jeremy. 2008. Washed with Sun: Landscape and the Making of White South Africa. Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press.
>Gandy, Matthew. 2002 Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City. Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press.
Jameson, Fredric ‘Cognitive Mapping.’ 1990. Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture: Eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 347-60.
Kerr, Douglas. 2008. Eastern Figures. Orient and Empire in British Writing. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
Kusznik, Karolina. 2019. Poniemieckie. Wołowiec: Wydawnictwo Czarne. McEvoy, Emma. 2016. Gothic Tourism. Palgrave Macmillan.
Merrifield, Andy. 2013. ‘The Urban Question under Planetary Urbanization.’ Implosions/ Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization. Berlin: Jovis. 164-180.
Robinson, 2006. Jennifer. Ordinary Cities. Between Modernity and Development. London: Routledge.
Turner, Victor. 1969. “Liminality and Communitas”. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine Publishing. 94-113.
Vladislavić, Ivan. 2006. The Restless Supermarket. Cape Town: David Philip Publishers.
Wachsmuth, David. 2014. ‘City as ideology: reconciling the explosion of the city form with the tenacity of the city concept.’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 31, 75-90.
Williams, Raymond. 1973. The Country and the City. London: Chatto and Windus.<

This conference is planned as an online event.
The organizers intend to publish selected proceedings in the form of a journal issue or essay collection. Proposals of about 300 words, together with a biographical note, should be sent to hinterlands2022@gmail.com by September 31, 2021
Conference fee: € 50.00
Organizing committee: Ewa Kębłowska-Ławniczak, Dominika Ferens, Marcin Tereszewski, Katarzyna Nowak (Institute of English Studies, University of Wrocław, Poland)
Advisory committee:
Rainer Emig (Department of English, Gutenberg Universität, Mainz, Germany)
Zofia Kolbuszewska (Institute of English Studies, University of Wrocław, Poland)
Ruth Mayer (Englisches Seminar, Leibniz Universität, Hannover, Germany)
Michael C. Steiner (American Studies, California State University, Fullerton, United States) Michael Titlestad (Department of English, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa) Shelley Trower (School of Humanities, University of Roehampton, London, United Kingdom)

(posted 5 March 2021)

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“Seizing the day”: current research in Global Englishes
Kodolányi Janos University, Budapest-Campus, Budapest, Hungary, 28-29 March 2022
Extended deadline for abstract submissions: 20 February 2022

When: 28-29 March 2022
Where: Kodolányi János University, Budapest, Hungary
Application and abstract deadline: 20 February 2021
Notification due: 28 February 2022
Fee due: 1 March 2022
Paper submission: 30 June 2022

Global Englishes is a paradigm which reflects the way in which English had expanded and transcended its original nature and role in the world and is finding its expression in the arts in multiple and diverse incarnations. Global Englishes extends its scope of research in the fields of education, science and business, it encompasses a broad range of topics. Research in any area is welcome. 

Under the aegis of Kodolányi János University’s 30 year jubilee, the Department of English Language and Literature invites abstracts in the following topics: 

• Global Englishes in all walks of life (the media, business, science, culture, and literature)
• Language learning and language teaching from a globalized perspective
• Language assessment
• Translingual practices (translanguaging, code-switching) in multilingual communities and classrooms
• English as a lingua franca (ELF)
• Form and function in Global Englishes 
• Functional and cognitive approaches
• Global Englishes from a historical perspective
• Global Englishes and translation
• Power and inequality
• Transcultural identities in literatures in English
• The hybridisation of identity and its impact on the concept of tradition
• Myths, archetypes and cultural identities/hybrids in literature in English

Researchers are invited to submit a short bio (100-150 words) and an abstract of their paper on original and unpublished research work covering these topics for presentation by February 20, 2022 on the page https://forms.gle/UKDgxDL5znGLCqq39. Abstracts should be written in English and should not exceed 200-250 words excluding title and keywords. Please follow the Guidelines for abstracts, given on the following webpage: http://www.freesideeurope.com/submissions. 

A conference volume will be published online in Freeside Europe Online Academic Journal. 

Papers submitted will be peer-reviewed and evaluated for their originality, language perspective, correctness, relevance of topic, and presentation quality. Manuscripts must be 5000-7000 words long.

The fee for participation in the conference is 85 EUR.

Considering the unpredictable nature of the pandemic, we are planning the conference onsite at our Budapest Campus (1139 Budapest, Frangepán street 50-56), however for those unable to travel due to restrictions the conference is planned to be a hybrid one, both offline and online. Any questions might be addressed to bszele@kodolanyi.hu.

Confirmed plenary speakers:

Dr. habil. Éva Margit Illés,
Associate Professor, Deputy Head of Department, ELTE
proposed title: What is this English we use? 

Prof Dr. Katalin Kürtösi,
professor emerita, University of Szeged
proposed title: Layers of English in Autobiographic Works of Ethnic Writers in Canada 

Roundtable Discussions with internationally acclaimed authors:

Lisa McInerney, 

Lisa McInerney is the author of three novels: The Glorious Heresies, The Blood Miracles and The Rules of Revelation. She has won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Desmond Elliott Prize, the RSL Encore Award and the Premio Edoardo Kihlgren for European literature and has been nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award, the Premio Strega Europeo, the Sunday Times Short Story Award, and twice for the Dylan Thomas Award.

Lisa de Nikolits, 

Lisa de Nikolits has been hailed as “the Queen of Canadian speculative fiction” [All Lit Up] and is the international award-winning author of ten novels. Her short fiction and poetry have been published in various international anthologies and journals.

We are looking forward to your personal participation and contribution.

The organizing committee

KJU_Global Englishes conference_CFP_2nd (1)

(Reposted 3 February 2022)

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Epic and Intermediality: Third CIMEEP Colloquium
MSHS Poitiers, France, 28-30 March 2022
Deadline for proposals: 29 April 2020

Centro Internacional e Multidisciplinar de Estudos Épicos (http://en.cimeep..com) in collaboration with FoReLLIS pole B (Poitiers) Université de Poitiers

The third CIMEEP colloquium will take place in Poitiers (France), at the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme et de la Société (MSHS) at the University of Poitiers and in collaboration with the research group FoReLLIS (Poitiers).

Scientific Committee:

Charlotte Krauss, Senior Lecturerat Poitiers University

María del Mar López–Cabrales, Full Professor at Colorado State University (United States of America)

Karina Marques, Senior Lecturerat the University of Poitiers

Fernando de Mendonça, Adjunct Professor at the Federal University of Sergipe (Brazil)

Christina Bielinski Ramalho, Associate Professor at the Federal University of Sergipe (Brazil)

Maria Aparecida Rodrigues Fontes, Professor–Researcher at Università degliStudi di Padova

Key conferences (keynote):

Liliane Louvel, Professor of English Literature at the Université de Poitiers

Raúl Marrero–Fente, Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Minnesota

Languages of the event:French and English –as well as Spanish and Portuguese for topics specifically dedicated to epic matters from South and Central America.

Registration fee: 30 euros (CIMEEP and FoReLLIS members are free from registration fees).

Please, send your communication proposal (title + summary of a maximum of 2,000 characters) to cimeep.epos@gmail.com before April 30, 2021.

All abstracts of accepted articles will be compiled in the form of a summary notebook. A selection of contributions will be published in the online magazine Revista Épicas, in the number scheduled for the end of 2022 (publication with reading committee).

(posted 27 April 2021)