Evidence, Experience, and Authority in Contested Knowledge

International Interdisciplinary Workshop 

Online | 27 - 28 August 2026

When we want to convince others of our beliefs, we usually offer arguments, and, crucially, evidence. Sometimes this evidence is mundane and undisputed; more often it is complex, contested, or ambiguous. But what happens when claims concern phenomena that, by their very nature, resist empirical verification?

Act quickly! Less than one month remains before the editorial deadline for Volume 53 of The Victorians Institute Journal.

Through April 1st, we are still accepting manuscripts between 7k-9k words on any aspect of Victorian and Edwardian literature, art, and culture for publication in Volume 53 of the journal, which will be published later this year.

estrema: interdisciplinary journal of humanities, a digital and open access journal from the Centre of Comparative Studies, at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Lisbon (CEComp-FLUL), has an open call for submissions for the 1st issue of its 5th volume, until June 9th 2026. The previous issue featured reflections around the theme of Speculative Fiction. In 2026, we are launching estrema’s first call for papers specifically oriented towards the potentialities of art and images in technical contemporaneity.

shooting

1. the action of filming or photographing a scene, film, etc.

Hospitality is often understood as an act of welcome, yet it also raises complex questions about boundaries, authority, and belonging. Drawing on the philosophical framework of Jacques Derrida—who describes hospitality as a tension between openness to the stranger and the conditions that regulate entry—this panel invites proposals that explore how hospitality functions as a pedagogical framework for teaching reading, writing, and interpretation. Proposals may explore hospitality through literary analysis, composition pedagogy, rhetorical theory, cultural studies, or interdisciplinary approaches.

PAMLA 2026 Seattle: “Our Ruling Classes: Class, Power, Conflict” - https://www.pamla.org/pamla2026/

The 123rd Annual PAMLA Conference will be held November 12–15, 2026, at the Hyatt Regency Seattle,
808 Howell St., Seattle, Washington 98101.

Sacred Arts 2026:
Exploring the Spiritual Dimensions of Artistic Expression and Ritual
Conference webpage: https://labrc.co.uk/2025/12/11/sacred-arts-2026/

University of Oxford
and online

May 16-17, 2026

Registration fees (for both attendees and presenters):

Perpetrators of genocide destroy people as well as their cultural legacies, including formal archives, libraries, privately held records, and culturally significant texts and other print objects. Colonial occupation both historically and currently consolidates power through destroying records of occupied peoples to deny their past, present, and future. Resistance, in turn, may take the form of preserving such records through smuggling, hiding, converting, memorizing, digitizing, translating, and reconstituting. Inspired by the Phoenix Library in Gaza, the MLA Forum on Book History, Print Cultures, Lexicography seeks papers on preserving books, print materials, and other textual records (broadly understood) in contexts of genocide.

"I don't know what Christmas is, but Christmas time is here": Santa Claus, Christmas, and Implicit Religion in SFF 

Abstracts (250 words) are invited for papers exploring Santa Claus and/or the Christmas holiday in science fiction, speculative fiction and fantasy literature, film, and graphic novels.  Considerations of the interrelation of secular and religious themes in SFF Christmas, implicit religion, and contemporary ritual welcome. 

MLA '27 held in LA in January; for more information on the conference see https://www.mla.org/Events/2027-MLA-Convention  

Deadline:  March 25, 2026

Special Issue: The Subject and its Estrangements

‘The wounds of the Spirit heal, and leave no scars behind.’ Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit 

The Editorial Board of “Acta Academiae Artium Vilnensis” invites submissions of scholarly articles for the peer-reviewed thematic issue “Faces of Childhood: Representations and Experiences in Art and Society.”

This panel invites scholarship exploring South-Asian diasporic poetics, transnational feminist perspectives, negotiations of identities, and practices of resistance. Please submit a 250-word abstract and a brief bio to subrata-chandra.mozumder1@louisiana.edu.

Deadline for submissions: Monday, March 23, 2026

Subrata Chandra Mozumder, U of Louisiana, Lafayette (subrata-chandra.mozumder1@louisiana.edu )

The ongoing developments in artificial intelligence and machine learning automation announce an imminent technological revolution like nothing we have ever seen. Our relation to traditional labor markets, artistic creation, and modes of education has already been drastically disrupted and will potentially change even more. It seems that we are witnessing the dawn of a new age in which human intellectual and productive capacities are outsourced to machines and human connection is mediated by algorithms in digital spaces.

Rising water levels in oceans and rivers, streams with high flood waves, and torrential rains that turn puddles into lakes: houses that are currently exposed to such increasingly regular water events are becoming a problematic, if not catastrophic, environment. The protective function that the house is supposed to have according to its original idea and design is being compromised. While roofs and walls are supposed to keep out wind and water—and the traditional European gabled roof is primarily designed to divert water from above—in these extreme weather scenarios, basements are flooded, roofs are torn off, entire houses stand like islands in the water or are even swept away.

How do playwrights imagine and stage ways of being, hoping, and memorializing against censorship and erasure? We invite papers that explore alternative historiographies in post-war Sri Lankan theater and performance. Please share a 300-word abstract and bio.

The Eco-esotericism panel invites submissions that examine the intersection of esoteric thought and ecological consciousness as expressed in literature, cultural texts, and critical theory. Eco-esotericism encompasses approaches that unite spiritual or mystical understandings of nature with ecological critique and environmental activism. Engaging with PAMLA’s 2026 theme, “Our Ruling Classes: Culture, Power, Conflict,” this panel asks: How do esoteric ecological imaginaries reinforce, negotiate, or resist ruling ideologies? How have spiritualized visions of nature shaped elite cultural production, countercultural movements, or alternative political communities?

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

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

A Cultural History of the Avant-garde in East Asia

Part of: Cultural Histories of the Avant-Garde: A Companion Series (www.brill.com/CHAG)

The companion series is part of an ongoing, large-scale project launched by De Gruyter Brill (a merger of two international publishing houses) that uncovers the cultural history of the avant-garde in major regions of the world. The series on East Asia consists of four volumes, each dealing with specific decades and topics as follows: 

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).

The journal Korpusgermanistik invites submissions for its June 2026 issue. The journal provides an international platform for research across the full spectrum of German Studies, including linguistics, literary studies, cultural studies, and media studies.

All submissions undergo a double-blind peer-review process.

Important Dates

• Full-text submission deadline: 15 April 2026
• Publication of the issue: June 2026

Submission

Authors are kindly asked to submit their full manuscripts via the journal’s online submission system:

Please ensure that your manuscript follows the author guidelines available on the journal website.

The Pleasures and Problems of Pooh

The 3rd Biennial kidlit@hollins Children’s Literature Symposium 

On Zoom

Friday-Sunday, July 10-12, 2026

Hollins University Graduate Programs in Children’s Literature

Chaired by Lisa Rowe Fraustino

This year’s hundredth anniversary of A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, published in 1926, provides a springboard for reflection on the role of classic children’s literature. This online symposium seeks presentation proposals from authors, illustrators, librarians, publishers, educators, and scholars in any field. Possible topics for exploration include:                                     

Children’s accounts of violence occupy a paradoxical space in public discourse: they are framed as both essential, unquestionable evidence, and, sometimes at the same time, as unreliable and prone to outside influence. Both framings rely on cultural constructions of the child’s “innocence.” This panel invites papers examining narratives of violence told by children, with a particular interest in experiences of institutional or state violence. How do these narratives complicate familiar tropes of children as voiceless victims in need of saving, or of certain topics as exclusively “adult” or “childish”?  How do child narrators themselves exploit, resist, and play with or into these tropes?

Seeking presentations addressing multilingualism and linguistic rights in South Asian literature and culture for a guaranteed panel of the MLA-allied South Asian Literary Association. 300-word abstract and short CV.

Deadline for submissions: Sunday, March 15, 2026

Hans-Georg Erney, Georgia Southern U (herney@georgiasouthern.edu )

Video Game and Memory

Call for Book Chapters

"To live an age, yet remember so little…
 Perhaps I should be thankful?”
 Quirrel, NPC in Hollow Knight (2017)