Call for Papers

17th SAAS CONFERENCE

"American Dreams, American Nightmares, American Fantasies"

Universidad de Alicante, April, 2025.

Visit the SAAS 2025 Website

CALL FOR PANELS

Click here for a full description of the SAAS 2025 Conference topic

For the 2025 SAAS Conference at the University of Alicante we welcome proposals for panels that include topics and areas of study related, but not restricted, to the following:

-- New readings of American utopias and dystopias.

-- The American fantasy, American escapism in the 21st century.

-- The American Dream today.

-- Foundational dreams reimagined.

-- America as a valley of ashes: migration and borderlands in the American Dream.

-- Contemporizing The Great Gatsby.

-- The DREAM Act.

-- Mythology, spirituality, religion and the American Dream.

-- Environmental threats and ecology in the American Dream.

-- Medicare and the American Dream.

-- Race, gender, sexuality and the American Dream.

-- Censorship, media and the American Dream.

The conference languages will be English and Spanish.

GUIDELINES FOR PANEL PROPOSALS

Panel proposal submissions should include:

1. A panel title

2. A brief description of the panel focus

3. A short bio of the panel coordinator and contact information

At a later date, panels unrelated to the conference theme will also be considered. At this stage, please send panel proposals to Laura Arce Álvarez (laura.arce@uam.es) and/or Martín Urdiales Shaw (urdiales@uvigo.es) before April 1, 2024, using THIS FORM. Panel coordinators will be informed whether their panels have been accepted before May 15, 2024.

All inquiries regarding the submission process should be sent to: Laura Arce Álvarez (laura.arce@uam.es) and/or Martín Urdiales Shaw (urdiales@uvigo.es).

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH STUDIES, FACULTY OF PHILOSOPHY, UNIVERSITY OF NOVI SAD

is happy to announce

THE 7TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND ANGLOPHONE LITERATURES TODAY (ELALT 7)

Celebrating the 70th anniversary of the Faculty of Philosophy in Novi Sad and of the English Department October 26-27, 2024

The conference will be held ONLINE and is FREE OF CHARGE

Conference topic:

NARRATIVES OF DISEASE IN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

Galen believed that the best physician is also a philosopher. The intersection between humanities and medical sciences is thus a long recognized one. While the unprecedented speed of medical discoveries in the recent decades and the ever narrowing specializations of medical professionals have the potential to lose sight of the person behind the disease, these trends have been countered by a growing awareness of the necessity of approaching disease and health in an integrative fashion and including insights from non-medical disciplines, reflected in the broader field of medical humanities. Non-clinical perspectives are of particular importance in the context of diseases with limited treatment options, such as dementia. As Professor Arthur Frank reminds us, treatment does not necessarily equal care, and cure is quite different from healing. At the same time, matters of disease and human health extend well beyond the confines of medicine. Disease and illness are not only medical, but also cultural and social phenomena, loaded with non-medical meanings and associations. Illness, Susan Sontag famously asserts, is a metaphor. As such, it produces cultural meanings that have the power to shape the attitudes, perceptions and practices in medical and non-medical settings alike. This comes into play even more prominently at the cross-section of illness and disease with disadvantaged or non-normative subjectivities and embodiments, and in contexts of discrimination and violence. Matters of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, (dis)ability all shape broader cultural, social and medical perceptions of disease and health.

The aim of the conference is therefore to look at the complex relationships between literature and culture on the one hand, and medicine, disease and illness on the other. It is our hope that we will create a forum for public discussion of these issues and promote more nuanced, in-depth understanding of figurations and conceptualizations of disease within the matrix of cultural and social forces and power relations, as well as their impact on lived experiences of disease, dimensions of subjectivity and agency, and a personal sense of identity and well-being.

Possible topics of interest include, but are by no means limited to:

o Representations of disease and health in literature and culture (fiction, theatre,

poetry, graphic novel, film, TV)

o Metaphors of disease, illness as a metaphor

o Disease and the Other, disease and the abject, disease and the monstrous

o Social and cultural constructions of disease and health, disease, biopolitics and

bioethics

o Disease and cultural (in)visibility

o Narratives of disability, crips and supercrips

o Deviance, transgression and pathology, cultural and social pathologies

o Culture, technology and disease

o Intersectional approaches to disease and health disparity in literature and culture

o Disease and gender

o Disease and old age, narratives of ageing

o Neuronormativity and neurodiversity in literature and culture

o The neuroscientific turn in fiction, the neuronovel

o Brain health and brain disease in literature and culture

o Disease and embodiment, the sick body, bodies in pain

o Death, loss, grief and bereavement in literature and culture

o Illness narratives and memoirs, autopatographies, case histories, caregiver

narratives

o Doctors, medicine men, healers and witches, quacks and charlatans, the doctor as

detective

o Medical mysteries in literature and culture, epistemologies of illness and health

o Cults of health, fitness and beauty, beautiful monsters and monstrous beauty

o Pandemics, contagions and outbreaks

Abstracts for 20-minute paper presentations should be submitted to

elaltconference@gmail.com

IMPORTANT DATES:

Deadline for the submission of abstracts: May 30, 2024

Deadline for the notification of acceptance: June 30, 2024

The Department of English, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb,
invites papers for the International Conference on the Occasion of the 90 Anniversary of English Studies
and the 40th Anniversary of Scandinavian Studies in Zagreb entitled

Minds, networks, narratives:
9O Years of the Department of English, University of Zagreb

8-9 November 2024
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb Zagreb, Croatia
https://angl-conf.ffzg.unizg.hr/

• FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS

Keynote speakers
Mario Brdar (Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek, Croatia)
Orvar Löfgren (Lund University, Sweden)
TBA

Important dates
15 April 2024: abstract submission deadline
31 May 2024: notification of acceptance/rejection
30 June 2024: early bird registration deadline
20 August 2024: final payment deadline for presenters
8-9 November 2024: conference

Conference fees

Early bird registration: 100 EUR
Late registration: 120 EUR
Student registration: 60 EUR

An international biannual print and online publication of the American Studies Association of Turkey, the Journal of American Studies of Turkey operates with a double-blind peer review system and publishes work (in English) on American literature, history, art, music, film, popular culture, institutions, politics, economics, geography and related subjects.

The Editorial Board welcomes articles which cross conventional borders between academic disciplines, as well as comparative studies of the United States. 

The Journal of American Studies of Turkey is indexed in the MLA International Bibliography and the Classificazione ANVUR delle riviste scientifiche (Italy). It also appears in the Ulrich’s International Periodicals Directory and the MLA Directory of Periodicals. It can be accessed online, in print, and through the EBSCO and Dergi Park databases.

The copyright of all material published will be vested in the Journal of American Studies of Turkey unless otherwise specifically agreed. This copyright covers exclusive rights of publication of printed or electronic media, including the World Wide Web. Contributors are responsible for obtaining permission to reproduce any material for which they do not own copyright.

Please see our submission guidelines for more information: https://www.asat-jast.org/index.php/jast/submission-guidelines

Spring 2024 deadline: March 1, 2024

All general submissions and correspondence should be directed to:

Editor-in-Chief

Selen Aktari Sevgi

Başkent University, Turkey

saktari@baskent.edu.tr

Editor

Tarık Tansu Yiğit

Başkent University, Turkey

tariktansuyigit@gmail.com

Call for Papers

“Model Imaginaries: Literature, Economics, Abstraction”

International Conference at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, organized by James Dorson

Deadline for submission of proposals: February 15, 2024

Models shape the world we live in. As tools for reducing complexity, models are designed to reveal patterns of interaction that remain hidden to the naked eye. Abstracting, simplifying, condensing, or miniaturizing can be ways of making the world intelligible. But models also serve more than heuristic purposes. Models can be designs for something new, blueprints for building or redesigning the world around us. And when models are put to use, they enter into and may alter the world they model. Models are then not external to but part of what they seek to explain. They can become self-fulfilling prophecies, entering into feedback loops with the world, blurring the distinction between models of something and models for something.

This blurring of boundaries between model and world occurs not least in the discipline of economics, which exerts singular influence over policy decisions. From the normativization of John Stuart Mill’s pared-down model of “economic man” to the performativity of financial models as “engines, not cameras” in financial markets today, economic modeling has long exemplified the ambiguity of models as mediating mechanisms between the real and the ideal, description and prescription, showing and shaping. While the power of models to shape our world depends on their use by institutional actors, their widespread use depends on their aesthetic and cultural appeal. The “elegant simplicity” of models is a criterion for their success. Models of economic behavior are only performative when people conform to them, and for people to conform to them they need to be made attractive. The performativity of models is greatest when they take on a life of their own, when they circulate in cultural form independently from the methods and material interests that gave rise to them.

This conference inquires into the role that culture generally and literature more specifically play in mediating between models of and models for something. With a particular interest in economic modeling and model economies, we ask: How are model abstractions made accessible and circulated in cultural form to the public? How does literature embody or provide intimate experiences of models? What genres, modes, or styles engage in modeling practices and what models of knowledge do they generate? How are models narrativized or narratives modelized, and what happens in the space between model and narrative? How does literary remodeling or countermodeling provide alternative forms of—or challenge what counts as—economic knowledge? How does literature model models? And how do literary models reflect on or redress the biases and blind spots of economic modeling?

We invite proposals for presentations on any topic that engages with these questions or others on the intersection of culture and literature, economics, and modeling. 

Please submit your abstract of around 300 words and a short bio by February 15 to James Dorson at dorson@zedat.fu-berlin.de

This seminar is intended for doctoral students in English studies who wish to present their current research. Like previous editions corroborate, this event allows students to get in contact with peers who share similar concerns and face similar challenges throughout their research years. As research in English Studies has to adapt to our ever changing world, this seminar is conceived as an opportunity for young researchers to share and compare their initiatives and their experiences as PhD students with other colleagues. During this seminar, PhD students will be accompanied by early-career researchers and postgraduates, as well as senior lecturers and experts in English Studies research.

PLENARY SPEAKERS

Dr Rosa Lorés
(Universidad de Zaragoza)

Dr Katarzyna Paszkiewicz
(Universitat de les Illes Balears)

POSSIBLE TOPICS
LINGUISTICS
● Applied linguistics
● EFL pedagogy
● Academic and professional discourses
● Genre theory and rhetoric
● Pragmatics and discourse analysis

TRANSLATION
● Audiovisual translation
● Specialised translation
● Literary translation
● Language, style, and cultural change

LITERATURE
● Contemporary and modern literatures
in English
● Recent trends in critical theory
● Literary theory
● Postcolonial and decolonial studies

FILM STUDIES
● Culture and film theories
● Globalisation in the cinema
● Transnational cinema and
cosmopolitanism

The seminar welcomes proposals for papers on all the topics listed above. We are
particularly keen to encourage contributions that engage with the department’s areas of
expertise: transmodern and posthuman literatures, transnationality and crisis in contemporary
cinema, and recontextualization and interdiscursivity in digital (scientific) genres.

SUBMISSIONS
Abstracts must be submitted both for papers and for posters. The text must be written in English, with a 250-300 word length. Please use the abstract template provided on the website (typeset in Time New Roman, 12pt, single-spaced, and properly indented). Bibliographical
references are strongly recommended, following a well-established reference style (APA, MLA). Abstracts must be sent to seing@unizar.esincluding the name and affiliation of the author(s) in the message. The author’s name must be removed from the title and from references to earlier publications. Please, name the attachment “LING”, “TRANS”, “LIT”, or “FILM”, according to your field, followed by the author’s initials. e.g. Luis Rodrigo’s paper on Literature: LIT_LR; or Luisa Galve’s paper on Linguistics: LING_LG.

IMPORTANT INFORMATION

SCHEDULE Friday, May 3rd, 9:00-14:00 / 15:00-20:00

SUBMISSIONS

Deadline for abstract submission January 30th
Notification of acceptance March 4th

America Beyond Crisis: Regeneration, Coping, Healing
May 24-25, 2024
University of Szeged contact: haas2024@ieas-szeged.hu
Department of American Studies web: https://amerikanisztika.ieas-szeged.hu/haas2024

The HAAS 2024 conference invites contributions that address diverse modes and narratives of moving beyond crisis in American culture. The presentations are to explore the possible uses of dialogue, negotiation, coping mechanisms, mobility or hybridisation in various attempts to tackle senses of crisis, ambiguity, and various forms of cultural, political, social, linguistic, mental, affective, moral disorder represented by cultural forms within the contexts of transnational American Studies. The general aim is to further explore the ways methodologies in the humanities may diagnose, process, and proactively prevent the cultural experience of crisis in diverse transnational American contexts. Scholars and PhD students from various fields including literature, history, social and cultural studies, visual culture, politics, applied linguistics, etc. are encouraged to offer their critical insights on any aspect of crisis and regeneration in American culture.
Potential paper and panel submissions can address but are not limited to:

● narratives of crisis, coping, healing
● languages of crisis and regeneration
● displacement and migration as ways of regeneration
● activism, solidarity, consciousness-raising and crisis management
● the ethics of crisis management
● crises and negotiations in diplomacy
● hybridization and healing
● climate change, climate crisis
● gendered perspectives on coping
● economic depression and regeneration
● crisis as an opportunity

Abstracts should be submitted to our website at https://between November 20, 2023 and February 15, 2024. Submitters will receive notification of acceptance by March 15, 2024.
The conference will be arranged as an onsite conference at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences of the University of Szeged (Szeged, Egyetem u 2). Conference proceedings are to be published by Americana Ebooks.

Registration

Please, fill in the registration form at the following link: https://amerikanisztika.ieas-szeged.hu/haas2024

Abstracts
For presentations, an abstract of around 250 words (in English) and a short bio of 80 words should be uploaded at the end of the registration form. Deadline for submission of abstracts: February 15, 2024.

Language, Literature, Intersectionality 2024, 27th April 2024 at the Faculty of Philosophy in Niš (Serbia)

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

Contemporaneity promises policies and programs, action plans and legislation that ensure equal opportunities and address circumstances leading us towards equity. In theory, the Western world has reached an unprecedented consensus on issues such as gender equality, race, social policies against poverty, children’s rights, etc. Yet, the crises marking the beginning of the twenty-first century testify to the institutional failure to ensure the enforcement of such laws and policies, but also uncover voices of dissent. Moreover, legacies of the past find innumerable ways of remaining in the present, either as forces countering progress, or preventing it from going into new extreme practices in less extreme examples of the clash between values, but maintaining status quo. Discourse on these sensitive issues has become a matter of political positioning and a space where visions of the future are juxtaposed – a battlefield of ideologies, old and new. Caught between the fire of progressive and conservative currents are individuals whose circumstances combine to create grounds for different modes of discrimination and privilege based on class, race, gender and sex, sexuality, religion, disability, ethnicity, etc.

Language, Literature, Intersectionality 2024 deals with the concept of intersectionality as manifested in literature, language, culture and the discourse. The conference will host panels exploring the discourses on intersectional identities, gender and gender equality (and equity), gender sensitive language, oppression and privilege, disability and language, disability and class, language and class, dialect, regional literatures and class, nationality, race, as well other theoretical discussions pertaining to intersectionality.

Abstract Submission Deadline: 1st December 2023. Notifications of acceptance by mid-December.

https://llconference.filfak.ni.ac.rs/intersectionality-2024

Early Bird discount for conference fee payments until 20 January will be available.

Payment deadline: 1st March 2024.

Book of Abstracts will be published by mid-March 2024. Conference Program and Panel Schedules will be posted by end of March 2024.

A selection of papers presented in the conference will be published in reputable journals.

CONFERENCE PANELS

LITERATURE AND CULTURE
LIT 1: ANA KOCIĆ STANKOVIĆ, Oppression and Intersectionality in Literature and Culture

The panel aims to consider various forms of oppression based on race, class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, etc. as represented in Anglo-American literature and culture. (Submissions in English and Serbian will be considered.)

*

LIT 2: ARIJANA LUBURIĆ-CVIJANOVIĆ, Literature across Boundaries

To articulate and examine experiences of disadvantage at various intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, disability, class, and other culture-specific categories of identity, literature commonly employs forms and styles which are themselves characterised by plurality, boundary crossing and fragmentation. The panel explores how literature that crosses the boundaries of genre, form, media, and/or language reflects intersectional concerns, including but not restricted to writing that relies on fragmented/dispersed/hybrid forms, plays with genre, blends poetry and prose, or combines different media of expression. The literary corpus may include writing outside Anglophone literatures. (Submissions in English and Serbian will be considered.)

*

LIT 3: SERGEJ MACURA, Road Movies as Nodes of Intersectionality

Apart from its perennial topos of journey, which it inherits from the major narrative works in all of literature, the road movie as a genre has also often served as a vehicle for discussion and commentary on pressing, troubling, even provocative contemporary issues. Although films like Easy Rider (1969) and Vanishing Point (1971), together with the “enclosedˮ road movies similar to Taxi Driver (1976), opened a lot of room for social debate, this genre is at present much more diversified than ever before. Lives of underprivileged members of society have been poignantly presented in Five Easy Pieces (1970) or Scarecrow (1973), but Nomadland (2020) is another testimony to the depth and breadth of the unemployment issue, rather global than strictly American. In addition, the road movie plot does not only show a physical journey, since such works as Rain Man (1988), The Straight Story (1999) About Schmidt (2002) and Nebraska (2013) result in previously unexpected self-awareness, and also a deeper understanding of the ageing process, mental disorders, the meaning of life and the sense of otherness. Even racial roles can be reversed, as seen on the examples of Driving Miss Daisy (1989) and Green Book (2018), which can prompt a question about the cinematic industry’s response to the major social changes worldwide and their application to the art of film. If we include Ray (2004) and Intouchables (2011), the field of intersectionality further opens onto the issue of disability, and with the inclusion of Captain Fantastic (2016), one can ponder on the necessary loss of log cabin innocence in face of economically ordered society. Just as a final suggestion, road films like Little Miss Sunshine (2006) bring up topics of dysfunctional families, generation gap and parental mismanagement of their children’s future. All of these works demonstrate some facets of the broad spectrum of intersectional relations, many even featuring multiple viewpoints, and we hope the road movie genre can spark a dynamic academic exchange.

*

LIT 4: DANIJELA PETKOVIĆ, Disability

The panel aims to explore fictional and nonfictional depictions of disability, with a special focus on how disability intersects with gender, age, race, and class, among other factors, to produce social marginalization for the disabled (and, in some instances, their caretakers). Any discussion of the representation of disability, moreover, is bound to consider the culture-specific anxieties about the vulnerability of the body and mind; the general precarity of life; the distribution of power and oppression in specific socioeconomic arrangements; the ethics and the gendered nature of care; the (in)stability of gender identity; abjection and endurance, etc. Potential topics include: Disability in (Contemporary) Fiction; Disability in Life Writing; Disability on Film; Disability in Comics/Graphic Novels (Disability and Superheroes); Disability as Subjugated Knowledge. (Submissions in English and Serbian will be considered.)

LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS
LANG 1: NADEŽDA SILAŠKI, The Dark Side of Words: Analyzing Verbal Aggression in Contemporary Public Discourse

The panel seeks articles from diverse theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches delving into the discourses that intentionally insult, belittle, label, defame, manipulate, or overtly or covertly discriminate on various grounds. Particularly welcome are topics dealing with the verbal aggression in parliamentary debates, political talk shows, newscast and infotainment programs, but also in a range of print and digital media genres. (Submissions in English and Serbian will be considered.)

*

LANG 2: TATJANA TRAJKOVIĆ, Dialects in Contemporary Linguistics

Serbian dialects and Standard Serbian – their functions and significance, place in public and internal communication, mutual influences; development of substandard varieties; dialects, substandard varieties and contemporary society; dialects and substandard varieties on social networks, etc.

Serbian dialects and language standard in the light of “gender-sensitive language”: expressing occupations, professions, titles; expressing gender and number; gender and number congruence, etc. The position of Serbian vernaculars and standards in distant or sensitive areas (diaspora, AP Kosovo and Metohija, etc.): sustainability, tendencies, the degree of research, etc. (Submissions in English and Serbian will be considered.)

*

LANG 3: ALEKSANDRA SALAMUROVIĆ, Multilingualism through an Intersectional Lens

The panel aims to approach multilingualism, defined as the usage of more than one language, through an intersectional lens. Specifically, we investigate the interplay between language practices and social categories such as citizenship, ethnicity, gender, education, religion, and region, to name but a few, to understand their influence on the ‘boundaries and hierarchies of social life’ (Anthias 2013: 4) for individuals and/or different social groups. We particularly welcome papers from socio-, pragma-, gender-, and psycholinguistics, and from the field of language teaching. (Submissions in English and Serbian will be considered.)

*

LANG 4: MARINA NIKOLIĆ, Equality and Discrimination in Language

The panel covers different examples of discriminatory linguistic practice, which appears in public discourse: in the media, politics, on the internet, etc. One of the topics will be judicial practice that deals with linguistic offenses: insults expressed in public discourse, at the workplace, in the social and living environment, due to belonging to a minority group, either on the basis of religious orientation, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or due to physical or mental disability, etc., and which lead to the violation of human or civil dignity, as well as to causing immaterial or material damage through various apparent forms. Likewise, the panel explores linguistic means and examples of good practice that achieve or encourage equality between different social groups, both in Serbia and in other countries. (Submissions in English and Serbian will be considered.)

*

LANG 5: JELENA JAĆOVIĆ, IVAN JOVANOVIĆ, Analyse de discours et intersectionnalité

Vu le fait que l’analyse du discours cherche à explorer les fonctions du langage et les manières de la construction de signification dans des contextes différents, son croisement avec la notion de l’intersectionnalité lui donne d’autres possibilités d’action. Ce panel vise à examiner les perspectives de cette synergie à travers les concepts de l’inégalité de la compétence discursive, la colonialité du discours, l’analyse conversationnelle, l’ethnographie visuelle, l’analyse du discours multimodale etc. L’intersectionnalité peut être étudiée au niveau lexico-sémantique (p.ex. déspécification lexicale et dénotation) et syntaxique (p.ex. discours indirect). (Seules les soumissions en serbe et en français seront considérées.)

INTERSECTIONS WITH SOCIOLOGY
SOC: DRAGAN TODOROVIĆ, Intersectionality in Social Sciences

The unilineal approach to overlapping dimensions in examining the human condition and structural hierarchies has been dominant in social sciences for decades – (biological) sex, gender, race, age, physical appearance, weight, caste and class, sexual orientation, ethnicity, nationality, religion, mother tongue, citizenship, and marital, work or material status, as well as parenthood, education, disability, political orientation, etc. Intersectionality as an innovative and interdisciplinary theoretical and methodological approach aims at examining and understanding the processual nature of social phenomena, as well as simultaneous points of convergence and interrelatedness of the said biological, cultural and social categories of identity which in mutual interaction produce diverse effects, shape unique individual and collective experiences. These experiences can range from being somewhat beneficial (privilege, access to resources of power, well-being and progress), but most often these are damaging experiences of discrimination, repression, subjection and defamation), and they produce substantial legal and social consequences.

Intersectionality is, therefore, the efficient starting point of contemporary discussion on the position and status of marginalized groups and rights advocacy. Intersectional reading 1. exposes the modes of production that lead to power imbalances and relations of subordination, 2. uncovers the structural causes of repression, as well as empowerment, and 3. identifies institutional and systemic discrimination. Intersectionality explains the complexity of social positioning of social agents, and allows for a critical perspective to consider alternatives in terms of intervention, as well as general changes in the domain of organizations, institutions and the system on the whole. These involve improvements in legislation, its application, developing data gathering strategies that would allow a more detailed research into the quality of individual and collective experiences, awareness-raising campaigns aimed at experts, as well as the public about discrimination, etc.

At an increased risk of multifold vulnerabilities (which just opens up a whole range of possible topics that this panel would address) are:

1. Uneducated women with disability (intersection of education, sex, and disability)

2. Disabled women in political parties (intersection of sex, disability, and political orientation)

3. Unemployed single mothers and fathers with underage children (in terms of the job market, the right to maternity and childcare leave) (intersection of sex, marital status, employment, and socioeconomic status)

4. Women working in high-risk and underpaid jobs in textile and manufacturing industry, and commerce (intersection of gender, education and socioeconomic status)

5. Roma girls in premature, forced, and underage marriages (intersection of gender, age, ethnicity, education, and socioeconomic status)

6. Roma children from unhygienic town areas due to premature school withdrawals, or overrepresentation in special schools (intersection of ethnicity, age, place of residence, and education)

7. Internally displaced Roma women from Kosovo and Roma women who were returned to Serbia without documents according to readmission agreements (intersection of gender and ethnicity, and employment, socioeconomic and legal status)

8. Older women in single-person households in rural areas (intersection of gender, age, place of residence, and socioeconomic status)

9. Same-sex persons with the possibility of registering an extramarital union (intersection of sex, gender, sexuality, marital and parental status)

10. Homosexual, bisexual, and transgender women in terms of the right to family planning, child adoption and artificial insemination (intersection of sex, gender, sexuality, marital and parental status)

11. Pregnant women and women undergoing In vitro fertilization, in terms of exercising the right to work (intersection of sex, marital and parental status, and employment)

12. Women in leadership positions in politics and management (intersection of sex, education, employment status, and political orientation)

13. Poor self-funded students from rural areas (intersection of employment status, economic status, and place of residence)

(Submissions in English and Serbian will be considered.)

Please submit your 250-300 word abstract by December 31, 2022 to gaps2023@unikonstanz.de.

Mobility systems, urban planning, markets, educational facilities, digital appliances: infrastructure organizes social life, assigns subject positions, and enables or prevents cultural exchange. Yet its powerful role often goes unnoticed as most infrastructure is designed to recede into the half-conscious background of daily life. In recent years, researchers in several fields have begun to uncover the sociopolitical hierarchies and resistant forces at work in the construction, maintenance, transformation, and dismantling of infrastructure. Postcolonial studies has much to contribute to this research—and vice versa.

After all, colonization is itself a large-scale infrastructure project. Both historically and systemically, colonization involves the transcultural transfer of military, political, economic, legal, social, and other infrastructure, and the destruction of indigenous infrastructure, in order to establish and maintain power over colonized peoples. As Édouard Glissant remarks, today’s infrastructures are “products of structures inherited from colonization, which no adjustment of parity (between the former colony and the former home country) and, moreover, no planning of an ideological order has been able to remedy.” Scholars in postcolonial studies have therefore begun to analyze infrastructure as a form of “planned violence” (Boehmer and Davies). At the same time, infrastructure can function as a social good that fosters relations and enables alternative forms of sociality. Access to infrastructure thus confers privilege, regulates participation, and erects hierarchies. In the decolonial struggle, infrastructure has therefore emerged as a key site and means of resistance.

These infrastructural dynamics require analytic approaches from the humanities, and especially from postcolonial studies, because they unfold centrally on a cultural level. Infrastructure is shaped by specific actors and processes, and it sustains cultural presuppositions, imaginaries, and ideologies. Infrastructure is also a discursive category that confers visibility or invisibility, and can thus establish epistemological hierarchies and undergird material ones. The concept of infrastructure itself emerged in France at the peak of European imperialism and first spread in anglophone military discourse. At the same time, there are comparable concepts in languages and cultures around the world whose knowledge might modify, challenge, or interrelate with anglophone conceptions of infrastructure.

The 2023 GAPS conference seeks to explore this underrepresented yet essential dimension of colonial, postcolonial, and decolonial life. Proposals may address, but are not limited to, issues such as:
• infrastructures of (post)colonial literature / literature about (post)colonial
infrastructure
• language as infrastructure / infrastructures of language
• the uses of infrastructure in postcolonial and decolonial theory
• racialized infrastructure
• infrastructure and identity
• trans/national infrastructure; cross/border infrastructures
• infrastructures of empire
• imperial and colonial entanglements of the infrastructure concept
• the temporality of post/colonial infrastructures
• the political aesthetics of infrastructures
• infrastructure and travel (writing)
• infrastructural genres / genre as infrastructure
• translating infrastructure / infrastructures of translation
• infrastructural imaginaries
• teaching postcolonial infrastructure (within educational infrastructure)
• rethinking postcolonial studies infrastructurally: which linguistic, literary, formal, theoretical, artistic, social, etc. phenomena can productively be described as infrastructural?

Please submit your 250-300 word abstract by December 31, 2022 to gaps2023@unikonstanz.de. All presenters must be GAPS members by the time of the conference.

Work in progress in anglophone postcolonial studies—including M.A./M.Ed., PhD, and Postdoc projects as well as ongoing research projects in general—can be presented in the “Under Construction” section of the conference, for which poster presentations are also welcome. Please submit abstracts for project presentations (250-300 words) indicating your chosen format (paper or poster) by March 1, 2023.

A limited number of travel bursaries are available for emerging scholars, part-time, or currently unemployed speakers who are, or will become, members of GAPS. If you wish to apply for a travel bursary, please indicate so via e-mail to the conference organizers by March 1, 2023.

GAPS strives to create a conference in which everyone can participate in critical discussions of all topics. If a paper contains discussions of and/or representations of violence, presenters are encouraged to consider whether a content note might be warranted in order to prepare audience members. Content notes should be included in submitted abstracts for later inclusion in the conference program. Presenters are also encouraged to think critically about how they might choose to present such content (visually, orally, as text on a slide etc).

Feel free to contact the organizers if you have any questions or special requirements.