interdisciplinary

In the late oughts and 2010s, critical and cultural theory across the humanities embraced the power of positive thinking. If we paid lip service to the determinations of (neo)liberal modernity, our thinking nonetheless gathered with feverish intensity around all that was said to escape or exceed its iron cage. Those of us tutored in assembling a historical ontology of ourselves turned to dreams of possible futures – or else to cultural practices and lifeways whose onto-epistemic difference enacted futurity in the midst of a seemingly endless now. This politics of utopian adjacency crystallized in a now-familiar set of keywords: affirmation, futurity, speculation, utopia, worldmaking, and (of course!) the ever-popular injunction to imagine otherwise.

Special issue of the Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies

We are issuing a brief second call for papers for the special issue Distinctly Canadian Voices in the peer-reviewed, Scopus indexed journal, the Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies.

Due to the withdrawal of one or two previously accepted contributions, additional article slots have become available.

We invite new submissions that explore the representations of Canada and Canadians in fields as diverse as literature, film, television, visual art, and other media, both in Anglophone and Francophone contexts.

Special Session Proposal for the 2027 MLA Convention (Los Angeles, 7–10 January 2027).

This MLA 2027 special session, “Unfinished Histories: Literary and Cultural Acts of Hope,” explores radical hope as an emancipatory and dynamic framework for examining how literature, film, and art cultivate creative and relational modes of remembrance. Rather than approaching the past solely through paradigms of loss, grievance, or melancholia, the panel asks how cultural narratives open generative spaces for imagining unfinished futures.

For the 2027 Modern Langauge Association Convention, the MLA Committee on Disability Issues in the Profession welcomes papers about:

• disability restricting ascent within social or academic hierarchies
• anti-hierarchical thinking in literature portraying disabled people
• representations of disabilities according to an imagined hierarchy

Please submit a 300-word abstract and CV to: Cassandra.falke@uit.no

In her introduction to Science in the Archives (2017), Lorraine Daston explores the way that scientific archives function as “repository” of scientific empiricism (10), a process through which scientists preserve scientific findings. What is occluded in this understanding, Daston explains, is that, when scientists ‘convert’ the natural world into its ‘second nature’—i.e. data—the conditions for that translation are controlled, selective, entangled, slowed, sped up, and digitized (10). Daston’s research helps us to consider how science arbitrarily constructs archivable data at an increasing rate: “more people are manipulating more information in more ways, and all at a tempo that baffles ‘what next?’ predictions” (10).

On December 9, 2014, the release of Ezell Ford’s autopsy report inspired an 18-day protest held in
record-breaking cold in front of LAPD headquarters. The evidence confirming that Ford had been shot by
police at close range inspired a group of dance activists, led by Black Lives Matter founding member Dr.
Shamell Bell, not only to occupy space but also to move within it. The protest represented what she coined
“street dance activism” based on “radical joy” and “collecting freedom dreaming.”

“I Put a Spell on You” @ 70: 3rd Annual Goth Music and Subculture Symposium

Theme: “Hyphenated Hauntings: Examining Proto-goth and Goth-adjacent Bands” 

Submission Deadline: 

June 12, 2026 

Symposium Date: 

August 15, 2026

Format: 

Online (via Zoom, Pacific)

Abstract: 

• 200 words

• Biographical Statement, inclusive of position, institutional affiliation, previous publications, accolades, research interests, etc.  

• Time Zone

Submit to: 

We invite chapter proposals for an edited volume titled Intergenerational Trauma, Memory, Truth, and Resilience Within Indigenous Communities. Across global contexts, Indigenous communities continue to confront the layered consequences of land dispossession, forced assimilation, cultural suppression, environmental destruction, and systemic inequities. Yet alongside trauma exists profound resilience—expressed through story, ceremony, language revitalization, artistic expression, community mobilization, and intergenerational renewal.

See for details and submission https://www.igi-global.com/publish/call-for-papers/call-details/9804

Natures in Translation: AI, Ethics and Environmental Conservation

Lancaster University, UK

1-2 October 2026

Conference funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and BRAID

Abstract submission deadline: 20 April 2026

Confirmed keynote speakers: Prof. Ursula K. Heise (UCLA), Prof. Şebnem Susam-Saraeva (Edinburgh University).

Confirmed keynote performance: Khairani Barokka

Speaking of the agency of nature is now common practice. The biosphere is recognised as being life sustaining and its vitality essential to human existence. Following thinkers such as Felix Guattari, nature has also been recognised has having subjective qualities, inseparable from the meaning and values humans attribute to life and the visions we conjure of what constitutes a just and habitable future. The philosophical legacy of Immanuel Kant looms large over this aesthetic terrain, notably his work on the beautiful and the sublime, which still compels us to consider the complex relationship between humans and life-world systems.  

This is the last call to submit abstracts for the Bodies of Culture: Somaesthetic Explorations conference, taking place at Florida Atlantic University on November 6–7, 2026.

Abstract submission deadline: August 18, 2026

We welcome proposals from scholars and practitioners across the humanities, social sciences, medical humanities, and the arts. Selected papers may be considered for publication in The Journal of Somaesthetics or an edited volume in Brill's Studies in Somaesthetics series.

This seminar will convene a chorus of new approaches to the study of poetry and global pop music, sister arts dynamized by dizzying asymmetries. Where and when they are practiced as distinct or differently mediated forms of cultural expression, poetry and popular song are linked by histories both long and recent, by subject matter, by patterns of figural and prosodic design, and by their shared claims to those effects some call “lyric.” At the same time, the trajectories of literary modernism and commercial music refract this common ground beyond recognition. In 1939, Clement Greenberg could decry a self-evident chasm of cultural difference between “a poem by T. S.

Conference: 22-23 October 2026 (online)

Scientific Committee:

Professor Wojciech Owczarski – University of Gdańsk, Poland

Professor Paulo Endo – University of São Paulo, Brazil

​

The 12th International Conference on Languages, Linguistics, Translation and Literature is organized by different universities and research centers.

The conference will be dedicated to current issues of linguistics, languages, dialects, literature and translation.

All are cordially invited to present their research regarding current issues of linguistics, languages, dialects, literature and translation in English, Arabic or Persian.