Humankind has always sought to explain its origins and the mysteries of life to map personal and collective boundaries, and to secure its sense of identity through the power of everyday events and occurrences. Exemplary accounts of imaginary happenings and supernatural creatures from a time beyond history and memory explain the genesis of the universe, the making of a living thing, the formation of an attitude or the inception of an institution. The essence of these traditional narratives reflects a certain system of values and code of self-conduct of a group of individuals bound together by social and cultural ties, and the cardinal virtues and vices of human nature captured in a conventional configuration.

The twentieth-century literature and culture tended to explore and to celebrate subjectivity. But this tendency did not mean the turn to the self, but beyond the self, or as Charles Taylor puts it, “to a fragmentation of experience which calls our ordinary notions of identity into question”. 

Memory is a major theme in contemporary life, a key to personal, social and cultural identity. Scholars have studied the concept from different perspectives and within different disciplines: philosophy, sociology, anthropology, geography, architecture, urban design, and the interdisciplinary "place studies". According to Pierre Nora, places of memory or lieux de mémoire refer to those places where "memory crystallizes and secretes itself"; the places where the exhausted capital of collective memory condenses and is expressed. To be considered as such, these sites must be definable in the three senses of the word: material, symbolical and functional, all in different degrees but always present.

Life-history approach occupies the central place in conducting and producing  (auto)biographical and (auto)ethnographic studies through the understanding of self, other, and culture. We construct and develop conceptions and practices by engaging with memory through narrative, in order to negotiate ambivalences and uncertainties of the world and to represent (often traumatic) experiences.

1st Aesthetix International Conference on Indian Arts and Literature(Entire proceedings to be published in the Aesthetix Journal of Indian Studies)(March 9- 10, 2024)

Organized by

Aesthetix Journal of Indian StudiesIn Collaboration WithCalifornia Institute of Integral Studies, USAGovernment Brajalal College, BangladeshVenue: VirtualOnline Platform: ZOOMKey Features

• Open Access

• Double-Blind Peer Review

• Plagiarism Check

• Systematic Archival and Preservation

• Standard Publication

• Aims and Scope of the Conference

Theme of the Conference

The Institute on Theology and Disability, hosted this year at Boston College and online in hybrid formats, invites submissions in the intersections of theology and disability. Open to academic papers in the intersection of theology, religion, interpretation, religious history, practical theology, HB/OT and NT, ethics, and disability/disability studies in any form (including mental health).
Submissions are also welcome in the form of practical ministry workshops, which may include collaborative practices and group work (unlike traditional paper proposals).

The 2024 postgraduate conference for the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, UK and Ireland (ASLE-UKI) will be hosted by the Edinburgh Environmental Humanities Network at the University of Edinburgh between 5-6 September 2024.

ASLE-UKI welcomes participation from postgraduate and early career scholars, readers, and creative practitioners interested in the relationships between literatures, arts, environments and cultures – past, present, or future from anywhere in the world.

Conference Theme:

(Le français suit)

Journal Special Issue (SI) edited by Agata Mergler and Joshua Synenko

Call for Proposals: 12 February 2024

Dissensus is not a confrontation between interests or opinions. It is the demonstration (manifestation) of a gap in the sensible itself.
         Jacques Rancière

Québec 2024

The 23rdBiennial Conference of the ACQS

October 3-6, 2024, at the Hôtel Le Concorde, Québec City

In Passage : The International Journal of Writing and Mobility, the journal of the Department of English of the University of Boumerdes (Algeria), seeks essays in English or French for its sixth issue, to be released in September 2024.  
 
 All the contributions should either be written in English or discuss questions that relate to the English-speaking world. They should fit within the broad scope of texts and mobility and their interconnectedness in the fields of literature, linguistics, and translation, among others. 

Suggested topics: 

- Travel literature and intercultural contact.

- Nomadism.

- Exile in literature

-  Literary genres and movements

LOOKING BEYOND BORDERS

March 29 & 30, 2024

Location: Idaho State University in Pocatello, ID

Times: TBA

Sponsored by the English Graduate Student Association at Idaho State University

We are pleased to announce the 2024 Intermountain Graduate Conference. This year we are seeking a variety of papers around the theme “Looking Beyond Borders” interpreted and explored broadly across topics and perspectives. Generally, to ‘look beyond borders’ is to look beyond boundaries, biases, conditions, weaknesses, limitations, and mundaneness to achieve greater unity in its many forms. 

Various approaches to our theme might include:

We are pleased to announce a special issue of JAm It! (Journal of American Studies in Italy) titled “Resurgence and Decolonization: Creating Alternative Worlds.” Our inquiry aims to explore the transformative power of Indigenous Resurgence movements, which seek to transcend the limitations of settler colonial systems by envisioning alternative ways of thinking, organizing, and being.

Call For Papers Mardi Gras Conference 2024: Legacies of Power and the Power of Legacies

Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, February 1-3, 2024. 

Enclosure is as much origin-story as it is globally contested condition. Critical accounts positioning the act of enclosure as integral to the root-systems of global capitalism, environmental catastrophe and precarity often refer to the historical effort by landowners to do away with the commons in favor of legally and politically recognized enclosures. Transforming sustainable agricultural practices into sites of energy-production primed for capital development, the early-modern enclosure movement gave rise to what Robert P. Marzec characterizes as “a model of the human that took as its direct enemy an environment thought to be threatening because it had yet to be properly secured, privatized, and cultivated” (18).