The “modern” disentanglement of the realms of subject and object, culture and nature, as Bruno Latour insightfully observes in We Have Never Been Modern (1993), is most evident in the former colonies of the Global South like the Bengal Delta since the entire colonial project in these locations depended on the colonizers’ privileged access to native human bodies and the non-human nature. This “metaphysic of inertness,” a term Amitav Ghosh uses to describe the worldview of colonial extractivism in The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis (2021),has in particular led to the non-human world to be framed as mere brute resources without any agency and consciousness, undermining their hybrid ecologies within socio-politico-cultural networks. Consequently, the human and non-human subjectivities and identities have become alien to each other, eventually resulting in biopolitical fractures as Achille Mbembe suggests in Critique of Black Reason (2017): “The fierce colonial desire to divide and classify, to create hierarchies and produce difference, leaves behind wounds and scars. Worse, it created a fault line that lives on.” We find recent literary and cultural representations of this fault line in such texts as Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island (2019), Numair Atif Choudhury’s Babu Bangladesh! (2019), Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments (2019) as well as James Cameron’s epic science fiction movie Avatar: The Way of Water (2022), just to cite a few examples.

Because of their violent colonial legacies, countries of the Global South as opposed to those in the Global North disproportionately experience the slow violence of modernity, as Rob Nixon suggests (2011), in a unipolar neoliberal world order, leading to the precarious existence of the human and the non-human beings. Judith Butler’s idea of precarity between these beings as well as nations of the South and North in Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009) and some other recent works provides a theoretical framework that echoes Karl Marx’s thoughts on alienation, reification and the metabolic rift. Butler’s conceptualization of such ideas as vulnerability and grievability further gestures towards the entanglement of various ecologies – human and non-human, global and local, highlighting at the same time the frames through which literary-cultural-linguistic mediations are accomplished.

These critical thoughts have profound implications for our urgent reimaginations of the natural and cultural universes as enmeshed as they are in the webs of precarity, vulnerability and grievability. Artists, creative writers, movie directors, linguists and philosophers the world over are engaged significantly in the reframing of the non-human nature with consciousness and agency in literary-cultural as well as linguistic frames. This awareness also poses a crucial phenomenological challenge to us in language pedagogy as far as the ideas of subjects (those who act) and objects (those acted upon) are concerned, as well as how they are entangled in actions (verbs). Besides, in our use of texts in English language classrooms like Aesop’s fables or mythical stories from different traditions, where the fox or the lord Ganesha talks, feels and acts, an awareness of the non-human consciousness and their Literary-Cultural-Linguistic reframing is urgently needed.

In the conference entitled “Beyond Nature and Culture: Planetary Precarity in Literary-Cultural-Linguistic Representations,” we would like to invite papers on some of the following themes and beyond:

• Colonialism and biopolitical bodies
• Nature as non-agentic and brute
• Non-human agency/consciousness and the Uncanny
• Alienation, reification and the metabolic rift
• Precarity, vulnerability and grievability
• Slow violence and neoliberal modernity
• Eco-linguistics
• Post-humanism in literature and language studies
• The language of the non-human
• Linguistic frames for imagining hybrid networks
• Objects, subjects and actions in ELT pedagogy
• The awareness of the non-human in ELT classrooms
• Human-centric identities and post-humanism ecologies
• Language, digital technologies and the non-human nature

SDG Alignments

In SDG terms, the eco-cultural rift helps us see how historical inequality and extractive power still shape whose lives, bodies, and environments are made vulnerable, linking the conference’s concern with colonial hierarchy and ongoing dispossession to SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities) and SDG 16 (Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions), especially where questions of recognition, inclusion, and justice remain structurally uneven.

The thematic emphasis of the conference on slow violence, precarity, and entangled ecologies offers a direct interpretive bridge to SDG 13 (Climate Action) and to ecosystem-focused goals such as SDG 14 (Life Below Water) and SDG 15 (Life on Land), since the Bengal Delta’s waterscapes and multispecies habitats are precisely where climate risk, ecological degradation, and uneven vulnerability converge most sharply.

Additionally, the conference aligns most explicitly with SDG 4 (Quality Education) — particularly SDG target 4.7 — by treating literary-cultural-linguistic studies as sustainability literacy, and with SDG target 13.3 by strengthening climate awareness through narrative, discourse, and classroom practice; contributors are encouraged to show how their analysis can inform teaching modules, public humanities communication, eco-humanities or other knowledge-transfer outputs. To keep this linkage precise rather than symbolic, authors may, where relevant, indicate 1–2 SDG connections (e.g., SDG 4.7, 13.3, 14.2, 15.1/15.5, 10.2, 16.7) as part of the abstract’s “relevance/impact” line, without reducing the paper’s theoretical and interpretive complexity.

Themes and Subthemes (Tracks)

Track 1 — Colonial Modernity, Biopolitics, and Precarity

• Colonial classification of bodies/nature; “nature/culture” split as governance
• Extraction, dispossession, plantation/logistics, and “resource” thinking
• Slow violence, neoliberal modernity, environmental injustice
• Precarity/vulnerability/grievability; whose lives count as “grievable”
• Biopolitical fractures, borders, policing, surveillance, displacement
• Alienation/reification; the human–earth relation as a broken social relation (metabolic rift as lived experience)

Track 2 — More-than-Human Agency, Posthuman Ecologies, and the Uncanny

• Nature “as brute” vs nature as agentic, sensing, communicative
• Nonhuman agency/consciousness; multispecies life; kinship beyond the human
• Hybrid ecologies and networks (human/nonhuman/technology/infrastructure)
• Metabolic rift as narrative: broken relations, repair imaginaries, ethical care
• Posthumanism and environmental ethics; animacy, voice, refusal
• Water/river/ocean agencies (especially useful for delta contexts)

Track 3 —Eco-cultural Rifts, Water/Landscapes, and Environmental Justice

• How form carries ethics: voice, narration, witnessing, silence, spectacle vs accountability
• Delta imaginaries: tides, storms, mangroves, wetlands, river-life
• Climate displacement, migration, borders, “who belongs where”
• Corporate/imperial infrastructures as characters (dams, ships, pipelines, data systems)
• Archive, memory, and repair: how texts hold harm without consuming it
• Myth/fable/folklore as ecological thinking (not “primitive,” but alternative knowledge systems)

Track 4 — Linguistics, ELT Pedagogy, and Sustainability Literacy

• Agency in grammar and phenomenological worldviews: subject/object/verb; transitivity and “who acts” in texts
• Ecolinguistics: stories we live by; ecological metaphors; discourses of “resources,” “development,” “waste”
• Polyphony and dialogism between the human and non-human
• Anthropomorphic and naturo-morphic imaginations
• Critical discourse analysis of climate/extraction narratives (media, policy, textbooks)
• Classroom texts that animate the non-human (fables/myths) and what that trains ethically
• Language, animation, digital technology: memes, shorts, dubbing/subtitling, AI voices, eco-narratives online
• Curriculum design: SDG-aligned learning outcomes (especially 4.7, 13.3) without moralizing

Keynote Speakers:

• Amitav Gosh (Renowned Indian novelist, essayist, and academic, celebrated for his meticulously researched historical fiction and non-fiction.)
• Dipesh Chakrabarty  (Historian and scholar, currently serving as the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor in History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College at the University of Chicago)

Publication opportunity

Selected papers will be published in two edited volumes with Springer Nature & one Volume with Star Scholars Network. The volumes are planned for inclusion in a Scopus-indexed series (subject to the publisher’s final indexing status).

Important dates (Asia/Dhaka, UTC+6)

• Call for Papers release: April 2026
• Abstract submission deadline: 15 June 2026
• Abstract review window: 16 June – 16 July 2026
• Acceptance of abstracts: 17 July – 30 July 2026
• Full paper submission window: 1 August – 30 October 2026

Submit your abstract: https://engconference.diu.edu.bd/