cultural studies and historical approaches

2027 Imagining Human Worlds Online Symposium, 27–28 January 2027

We invite proposals for 2027 Imagining Human Worlds, an annual online symposium in the Common Ground Imagining Futures Series, taking place 27–28 January 2027, online on CGScholar.

The symposium brings together scholars, researchers, educators, humanities scholars, learning specialists, technologists, practitioners, and community-engaged professionals working across questions of culture, learning, identity, meaning, communication, ethics, and human development. We welcome proposals that explore how human worlds are formed, interpreted, taught, experienced, mediated, and transformed.

2027 Imagining Sustainable Worlds Online Symposium, 12–13 May 2027

We invite proposals for 2027 Imagining Sustainable Worlds, an annual online symposium in the Common Ground Imagining Futures Series, taking place 12–13 May 2027, online on CGScholar.

The symposium brings together scholars, researchers, designers, planners, educators, policy thinkers, practitioners, health and care professionals, environmental researchers, and community-engaged professionals working across questions of sustainability, climate, infrastructure, food systems, mobility, aging, health, wellbeing, and the built environment. We welcome proposals that explore how sustainable worlds are designed, inhabited, maintained, challenged, and transformed.

We invite you to submit an abstract and bio for the panel “Yesteryear: Cultural and Literary Possibilities”. We are seeking papers that address Caro Claire Burke’s breakout debut novel Yesteryear and its implications on literature and current American culture. How does Burke address established literary conventions? How might one conceive of the evocative narrative style of this novel? How does Burke conceptualize the conscription of motherhood, suppressed queerness, and conservative Christianity? How might the work fit into literary genealogies of sanity, purity, racial prejudice, and womanhood? Proposals should include a title, abstract,  your name, and affiliation.

Call for Chapter Proposals for an Edited Book

Digital Precarity and Speculative Narratives in the South Asian Context

Labour is deeply intertwined with caste, gender and class in the socioeconomic fabric of India. However, caste and gender are the two factors that remain ignored in this discourse. In the Hindu social order, the caste system assigns vocations through arbitrary hierarchy, producing pernicious structures of marginalisation. Labour performed by Dalits is often stereotyped through casteist assumptions that naturalise certain kinds of work as “belonging” to these peripheral communities. These stereotypes that are perpetuated historically, culturally and socio-politically, are furthered through mechanisms of caste that operate in the material and affective realms. 

Following Yiyun Li's May 2026 Pulitzer Prize win, this session is a critical reception of her memoir as an emancipatory narrative: a descriptive and agential act that represents the unrepresentable experience of maternal grief/trauma. Welcome papers that are interdisciplinary/inter-textual dealing with themes of maternal loss, grief, growth, birth/death, nature/unnatural, death by suicide. Mail 150-200 word abstracts to Dr. Anhiti Patnaik at apatnaik@cascadia.edu Submission Deadline:Monday, August 17, 2026Type:Just-in-Time Session, Modern Language Association Conference 2027Venue:Los Angeles

While tragedy and horror are often treated as distinct genres, both traditions ask audiences to look steadily at what ordinarily repels them. From unburied corpses and undead monsters to violated kinship and failed agency, these spectacles produce fear, pity, disgust, and sorrow alongside fascination. This session explores what might be understood as a tragedy–horror continuum, examining the aesthetic, affective, and ritual overlaps between tragic and horrific representation across historical periods and media.

This panel proposes a revaluation of boundary-making between early modern and modern generic and affective registers in South Asia. While there is a consensus that genres of composition and cultural sensibilities did not change radically with the coming of print—“print did not so much produce new books as more old books” (Blackburn, 2002)—the precise sites of continuity/rupture differed widely based on the region and language in question.

Masculinity in Crisis: Hegemony, Marginality, and Aesthetics of Failure in the Arts

In recent decades, the paradigm of masculinity has been increasingly problematized and challenged in the fields of social sciences, cultural studies, gender and queer studies (Connell 1995). Far from being stable or universally applicable, the colossal stature of masculinity has emerged as a space traversed by tensions, counter-narratives, fractures, and processes of symbolic delegitimization.

What is the real difference between speaking with nature and speaking for it? Is eco-centric thought a universally shared ideology, or does it develop in reaction to historical, philosophical, and socio-cultural contexts? In what way do the fundamental principles of Indian ecology vary from prevailing Western structures? These essential inquiries delineate the parameters of Ramachandra Guha’s Speaking with Nature: The Origins of Indian Environmentalism (2024), which effectively contests the notion that environmentalism is a unidirectional phenomenon dictated by Western influence. This view posits that the rest of the world, particularly the Global South, lacks eco-conscious awareness because it is ‘too poor to be green’.

The guiding thread of this panel develops around a curious remark by Jacques Rancière that would seem to amend a classically Aristotelian thesis: “man is a political animal because he is a literary animal,” the fundamental condition of which is the “excess of words” constitutive of the human animal’s politicalness. Literature (or poetry) has long been placed in close proximity to politics, as we find in Plato’s Republic, where philosophy and literature—and, more generally, philosophy and politics—turn out to be perennial adversaries.

Media, Press Freedom, and Cultural Production in an Authoritarian Age (Submission Deadline Extended, Now July 19, 2026)

CFP: Media, Press Freedom, and Cultural Production in an Authoritarian Age

 Co-sponsored by the Union for Democratic Communications, Project Censored and the Park Center for Independent Media

Oct. 23-24, 2026

Ithaca College, Ithaca, NY

RISING ASIA JOURNAL is a peer reviewed journal published three times a year in January, May, and September. 

Reviewers are welcome to submit book reviews on any aspect of Asia, covering India's Northeast, Southeast Asia, and East Asia (China, Japan, the Koreas, and Taiwan). 

For details on our book reviews and manuscript preparation guidelines, please go to SUBMIT ARTICLES in our website www.rajraf.org 

Send your reviews to Professor Tuan Hoang at tuan.hoang@pepperdine.edu and to the Editor Dr. Harish Mehta at hmehta76@yahoo.ca

2026 Dress and Body Association Conference

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Dress and Body Association invites submissions for the organization’s seventh annual conference, which will be held on November 7-8, 2026. Consistent with our long-term goals for inclusivity and sustainability, all activities will be 100% online.

Join our Google Group to learn about opportunities and converse with members of the DBA year-round! Email to request membership: dress.body.assoc@gmail.com.

Opening the Archives of Dress and the Body