We are excited to invite submissions for our upcoming panel on Professional Writing at the South Central Modern Language Association (SCMLA) conference. This panel seeks to explore the evolving landscape of professional writing, including but not limited to technical writing, business communication, digital rhetoric, and writing pedagogy. We welcome a broad range of submissions that address theoretical, practical, pedagogical, or technological aspects of professional writing.

True crime has always been popular, and with the growing accessibility of alternative forms of on-demand media, including streaming services and podcasts, the popularity of the genre has only grown, strengthened by its appeal to the armchair detective and often the invitation to participate in the solution of the crime itself. As Larke-Walsh (2023) observes, the viewer’s compulsion to close the case—or to contest it—testifies to the text’s ‘potential for positive social impact’.

Transformative Scenes: Metamorphosis and Popular Culture

The regular session on African American Literature invites proposals for the 2024 in-person conference of the South Central Modern Language Association, in New Orlean, LA, from Sep. 19-21 (https://www.southcentralmla.org/conference/).

We welcome proposals related to any period or aspect of African American literature.

For consideration, please send an abstract of no more than 300 words and a brief bio to mchooper@pvamu.edu by March 15, 2024.

University administrators often refer to contingent faculty in nameless, generic terms. This panel invites participants to share stories from contingency (including resourcefulness, creativity, and perseverance) to demonstrate the complexity of the people delivering university instruction.

Deadline for submissions: Friday, 8 March 2024

Clark Barwick, Indiana U, Bloomington (mbarwick@indiana.edu )

Visible to students but invisible to faculty/administration for governance, pay, and benefits, this panel seeks papers defining issues and/or strategies to increase adjunct visibility providing substantive, long-term, meaningful change.

Send 200-word abstracts to: samo@uwsuper.edu & Amee.Schmidt@iavalley.edu

Deadline for submissions: Tuesday, 5 March 2024

If you are working on the artistic representation of the socio-cultural and political legacy of land dispossession and invisibility within the theoretical framework of postcolonial studies, send a 250-word abstract to this panel. All kinds of activist artworks are welcome: films, motion pictures, docuseries, plastic, textile, performance, music, paintings, literature, etc. Papers can be in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. Timeframe: 19th-21st century. Submit your abstract through the MLA CFP section at: https://mla.confex.com/mla/2025/webprogrampreliminary/Paper26535.html

Deadline for submissions: Friday, 15 March 2024

Transitions and Transformation in South Asian Folklore: Problems, Perspectives, and Prospects

Subsequent productions (of opera and musical theatre) can reveal and/or challenge the heart and soul of the original texts. This session invites 250-word abstracts regarding cautionary failures, inspiring successes, and intriguing mixtures.

Lyrica (Affiliated Organization of Modern Language Association),  Modern Language Association conventioni. January 9-12 in New Orleans.

Call for Papers: Race and Yoga Journal 8.1 (2024) - OPEN ISSUE

The Race and Yoga editorial board is currently seeking articles, personal narratives, interviews, book reviews, and creative works for the eight issue of the journal, to be published by December 31, 2024. Race and Yoga is a peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary, and international academic journal committed to critical examinations of the history, politics, and practice of yoga. For this issue, the editorial board is particularly interested in submissions that contend with relationships between yoga and contemporary crises.

Possible topics may include yoga in relationship to:

Narratives of nursing during times of war are a reminder that, as Simone de Beauvoir wrote, “the body is not a thing, it is a situation.” Narratives construct these situations through seeing or denying the seeing of them. As Carol Acton and Jane Potter both note, “seeing… [is] an important metaphor for revealing what is hidden, especially what cannot be entirely comprehended or described, and articulating it to the writing self as well as bringing it to the attention of a public audience.” The narrative problems of nursing are those of seeing the situation of bodies and registering that situation at the level of language.

Violent Femmes: The Ongoing Popular Relevance

of Psycho-Biddies and Hagsploitation Heroines

Dusty Perez

Jessica McKee

Taylor Joy Mitchell

Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

Despite being targeted at a younger demographic, children’s literature can teach many valuable things to adults. Reading children’s books can take us back to our childhoods and recapture the feeling of being filled with curiosity and imagination. It can help us to see things from the perspective of a child, and thereby help us to understand how children think. Researching these books and the methods employed by their authors can teach us about how children are viewed by adults, and what adults think is important to teach them through literature. Seeing the kinds of books children respond to and why can test the validity of views held by adults, and give us a sense of what they find valuable and engaging.

Which strands of psychoanalytic thinking might be activated today to both interpret contemporary forms of fascism – seen most readily in far-right movements and authoritarian politics but elsewhere as well – and offer avenues of thought and practice toward non-fascist formations?

This roundtable considers which literatures of psychoanalysis, broadly construed, are most relevant to the social and political circumstances of the present moment, with an emphasis on what recuperations of psychoanalytic thought could further projects of what Michel Foucault called “non-fascist life.”