Call for Papers — MLA 2027 (Los Angeles)

Black Motherhood in the African Diaspora: Narrating Care, Resilience, and Futures

Across African diasporic literary traditions, Black motherhood emerges as a crucial site through which histories of slavery, empire, migration, and racial capitalism are negotiated and reimagined. Literary representations of motherhood register both the intimate labor of care and the broader structural pressures shaping diasporic life, often producing alternative temporalities, ethical frameworks, and speculative futures.

CALL FOR PAPERS

vol. 7/2026

Forum for Contemporary Issues in Language and Literature (e-ISSN: 2719-8111)  is an international multidisciplinary periodical that welcomes for review any innovative and challenging research article encroaching upon the fields of literature, linguistics, philosophy and cultural studies.

The editorial board encourages researchers and young scholars to submit their article proposals that  comprise with the profile of the journal. The proposals can be sent in English, German, French, Spanish, Catalan and Polish. The manuscript submitted for publication is to be original and unpublished. It should not have been simultaneously submitted for review in any other journal.

It was a few years after the eve of Senegal’s independence that the first film made by an African was produced, as a way of offering an African account of Black struggles and living conditions. Ousmane Sembène viewed cinema as a more powerful medium for conveying African realities because it does not require literacy to grasp its message, making it a more effective tool for explaining the lived realities of Africa. A similar approach can be observed in the work of Alain Kassanda, especially in his documentary Colette and Justin, which not only revisits the historical context surrounding Patrice Lumumba and his death, but also dismantles claims often associated with Africans that are in fact inherited from colonialism, such as the non-schooling of girls.

CFP: The Body, Anatomy, and Aesthetics 

Special Issue: Art & the Public Sphere 

In an era marked by digital mediation, political polarization, and heightened ethical scrutiny, humour has become a high-stake cultural practice: jokes travel rapidly, provoke backlash, generate solidarity, and often become flashpoints for debates around offence, free speech, and accountability. In the twenty-first century, humour has emerged as one of the most powerful, contested, and ubiquitous modes of cultural expression. Circulating across literary texts, theatrical stages, digital platforms, popular media, and everyday social interactions, humour today functions not merely as entertainment but as a deeply performative, political, and ethical practice.

Call for Proposals:

Italian Americans and the Making of America:
Design, Diaspora, and the Architecture of Belonging

58th Annual Conference of the Italian American Studies Association
November 5-8, 2026

Tufts University, Medford, MA

https://italianamericanstudies.submittable.com/submit/348486/58th-annual-iasa-conference-at-tufts-university

We are excited to share with you all on behalf of the Conference Planning Committee for the University of Connecticut First-Year Writing Program that we are holding our 21st Annual Conference on the Teaching of Writing on Thursday, April 23, and Friday, April 24, 2026, on our campus in Storrs, CT. Our theme for the upcoming conference is: “Wicked Reading for Wicked Problems." As those who have collaborated with us in the past, we are once again inviting you to help us explore ways of approaching these 'wicked problems', such as those that evade consensus, offer multiple solutions, or may even resist resolution at all.

International Journal of Education (IJE)

ISSN : 2348 - 1552

https://flyccs.com/jounals/IJEMS/Home.html

***February Issue***

Submission System

Scope

 International Journal of Humanities, Art and Social Studies (IJHAS)

ISSN : 1832-624N 2974-5962 (Print)

https://flyccs.com/jounals/IJHASS/Home.html

*** February Issue*** 

Submission System  

Scope

 International Journal of Digital Humanities (IJDHS)

ISSN : 1832-624N 2974-5962 (Print)

https://flyccs.com/jounals/IJDHS/Home.html

*** February Issue*** 

Submission System

Scope

Under capitalism, we live separated from life. Capital’s extractive colonizing domination keeps us separated from nature, from each other, and from our own bodies, denying us a symbiotic and regenerative relationship with the natural world and with each other. Yet, certain types of bindings are integral to capitalism: capitalism depends on the combination of labour and nature for the production of value; the “emergence of capitalist accumulation and the reproduction of capitalist production” depends on “acts of violent dispossession”, on “tearing Indigenous societies, peasants, and other small-scale, self-sufficient agricultural producers from the source of their livelihood––the land” (Coulthard 2014).

International Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Soft Computing (IJAISC)  ISSN : 2819 - 101N 2974-5962 (Print)

http://flyccs.com/jounals/IJASC/Home.html

*** February Issue***

Submission System

Scope

Wilde West Coast

The Oscar Wilde Society invites abstracts for a special session at the 2027 MLA (Modern Language Association) Convention in Los Angeles, January 7–10 2027.

The song lyric occupies little space in academia, where it is less studied, less appreciated, and perceived as less-than other kinds of writing. Despite music’s ubiquitous cultural presence, the song lyric—as creative work—suffers from what renown songwriter Jimmy Webb calls a “status problem”: songwriters do not enjoy the same standing as writers of other kinds of traditionally studied literature. The most common way that song lyrics have earned scholarly attention is by conflating the form with the poem. Goldstein’s (1969) The Poetry of Rock is one of the first books to attend to lyrics as poetry.

The conference Comics and Film: A Space Odyssey explores the intersection of cinema and comics through the multifaceted lens of spatial representation. We invite scholars, PhD students, artists, and practitioners to examine how these two visual media construct
and organize space in its broadest conceptual and material dimensions.

International Conference on Myths, Archetypes and Symbols:“Models and Alternatives” 26-27 September 2026 – London/Online

 organised by

London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research

“Beyond Labels”: International Conferenceon Disability, Different Ability and Neurodiversity12-13 September 2026Birkbeck, University of London / Online

organised by

London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research

Disability, different ability and neurodiversity are concepts that traverse boundaries, challenging disciplines to rethink foundational assumptions about identity, culture and power. This interdisciplinary conference seeks to bring together scholars from different fields to critically examine the shifting narratives, representations and lived experiences surrounding ability and difference.

In the early stages of understanding the scope of the most horrifying criminal empire in American history, we are grappling with academia’s role in it. Several faculty members and institutions have been implicated. A few were genuinely innocent and ignored Epstein’s invitations, and some were willingly complicit in crimes against humanity. 

Epstein’s co-conspirators have fundamentally compromised the student-teacher relationship and the student-university relationship.

Postcolonial Interventions invites scholarly articles for an OPEN ISSUE to be published in June 2026. As the journal enters its eleventh year, we are hoping to continue critical exploration of emerging voices and recent literary creations while remaining mindful of the various threats associated with older imperial aggressions, re-appearing across the globe, fissures within nation states, multiple forms of exclusionary violence and widening inequality and precarity. The next issue of Postcolonial Interventions seeks to explore such issues and more based on postcolonial experiences across the world.

Submission Guidelines:

Concept Note

Questions in Black sound and sonic geographies

American Association of Geography

Panel Presentation

What are the spatial contours of black sound? What are some iterations, notes, scripts, or possibilities within the emerging field of black sonic ecologies and black sonic geographies? How can one detect or follow a “black sense of place” (McKittrick 2011)? What is being listened to and what is being heard? What have you been taught or teaching yourself to hear? 

What do you consider noise? Who and what hears black sound as a nuisance? What does noise, nuisance generate? 

“We are here to begin to achieve the American Revolution.” 

– James Baldwin, Foley Square, 1963

Did Baldwin mean it? Do we, who take him down from the shelf, mean it? What would it mean to pick up the idea again, with or against Baldwin? Is it too late, for America, for revolution, for both? Or is the time now finally ripe? 

For the American Studies Association convention in Chicago in 2026, James Baldwin Review invites proposals for a roundtable that takes this starting point as an occasion to leap into the unknown.  

Please send abstracts of 250 words to jbr@wustl.edu by February 20, 2026. 

In “Thoughts on Late Style,” Edward Said describes how an artist’s late works 

cannot be reconciled or resolved, since their irresolution and fragmentariness are constitutive, neither ornamental nor symbolic of something else. The late works are about ‘lost totality’, and it is in this sense that they are catastrophic.

 The late works of James Baldwin have often been dismissed as evidence of decadence, of their maker’s exhaustion after too many years of activism, as a crude failure to synthesize his fiction and nonfiction, the novels too political, the essays too aesthetic. Yet this supposedly weak synthesis rhymes with Said’s meditations on the irresolution typical of an artist’s late works. 

Edited Volume

Call for Contributions