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FAQ changelog |
Motherhood Unbound: Global Pathways of Motherhood Across Cultures and Disciplines
How do we mark transitions, generate transformational visions, and model alternate ways of being in a world imploding around us? How do we find joy while surrounded by brokenness? How do we heal when systems are structured against us? What rituals or practices can restore us, even speak to our souls? The next issue of Rejoinder explores the theme of ritual, healing, and world-making. Submissions (including essays, commentary, criticism, fiction, poetry, and artwork) should address this theme from feminist, queer, and social justice-inspired perspectives. We particularly welcome contributions at the intersection of scholarship and activism.
The inconclusive debates, the conflict of opinion, that this seminar aims to initiate and proliferate are about how body, culture, and plurality – three expansive and yet profound concepts – constellate, collapse and collide in varying registers that are both founded and unpredictable. The frames of our studies across disciplines are left in motion; the figures of understanding about how culture and the body and the bodies of culture in relation to plurality struggle to stay entrenched, occupy and distract us.
In a provocative article titled Digging Wells While Houses Burn (2006), David Gordon White argues that certain studies of religion actively stoke supremacist ideologies and politics. The only way to avoid this unsavoury collaboration is to rethink the way we do our work — the stories we choose to tell, and the methods we use to tell them. According to White, academics of religion who fail to engage with this responsibility are “digging wells while houses burn”, ignoring devastating realities that urgently demand their attention. In this context, we invite scholars of all religions, across all disciplines, to reflect on the relationship between their academic work, on the one hand, and violence and supremacy, on the other.
CCLA – Fantastical Constellation Working Group Call for Proposals
CCLA Annual Conference / Colloque annuel de l’ACLC
The Fantastical Constellation Working Group invites proposals for a panel or round table topic, “Entangled Futures: Interstitial Fantasies from the Periphery,” as part of the Canadian Comparative Literature Association Annual Conference, 8-10 June 2026, hosted by the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at McGill University in Montréal.
Special Issue for LIT / The Anger Issue: Women’s Writing and Anger in Ireland
Deadline for full essays: July 15, 2026
Conference: Collective Memory in Contemporary Fiction Films
University of Ottawa, June 11-12, 2026
Abstract: Collective memory and remembrance occupy an important place in film: whether through various themes that explore individual and national histories of; through the act of spectating (the act of watching a film), where the audience contributes their interpretation of the film; or where the audience uses their own memories to make sense of the narrative.
CFP for chapter contributions to book edited by the “VR as Empathy Machine: Media, Migration and theHumanitarian Predicament” Research Group at Utrecht University
Book Title: Beyond the Empathy Machine: Critical Perspectives on Virtual Reality
“Childhood in the Meantime: Interrupting Temporalities of Youth”
American Studies Association, Chicago, Oct. 22-25, 2026
The Children and Youth Studies Caucus seek panelists for a session entitled “Childhood in the Meantime: Interrupting Temporalities of Youth” for the American Studies Association 2026 meeting. We seek papers that consider the multiple temporalities that children are expected to inhabit: normative developmental timelines, trajectories oriented toward futures that adhere to the state-sanctioned scripts for proper adult citizenship, and culturally-accepted deviations of “sideways growth” that can ultimately be assimilated into dominant narratives of childhood presents and futures.
We are pleased to announce the CFP for a special 2026 issue of Academic Labor: Research and Artistry (ALRA) on Art & Engagement as Critical Response (300 word proposal deadline: 1/16/26). In the spirit of recognizing the ongoing precarities of higher education–both internal (neoliberalism, systemic institutional inequities) and external (crisis of public confidence in U.S. universities/colleges, threats to academic freedom), we invite proposals for a special issue of ALRA on art and engagement as critical response to the invisibility, illegibility, and silencing faced by much of the academic labor force.
Queer and minor audiovisual practices increasingly challenge the assumption that any form of visibility offers a reliable route to recognition or to political and evidentiary clarity. This panel asks how, rather than treating visibility or audibility as stable states, we might attend to the ways vocal fabulations, relational and spatial practices of telling, and imaginative or speculative interventions unsettle the evidentiary burdens traditionally placed on marginalized histories. In other words, we are interested in forms that make presence felt without fully disclosing it, and in the tensions that emerge when bodies, voices, images, and testimonies exceed the representational frames built to contain them.
CALL FOR PAPERS
The First Transdisciplinary Forum on Art, Culture, History, and Theory
May 2026, Online
The Global Forum on Art, Culture, History, and Theory (ACHT) hosted by Kaarnamaa Institute of Art and Visual Culture invites submissions.
Call for Proposals for Vol. 4, Issue 1–Jackson & Animality [deadline extended: Feb. 1, 2026]
Digital Subjectivities
Digital technologies have become integral to our everyday lives – from work, play, and relationships to political engagement and scholarship – shaping our subjective experiences and the ways we relate to others and ourselves. Their proliferation not only offers new tools for communication and knowledge production but also fundamentally reconfigures how the self is conceptualised and lived. This conference will explore the impact of digital technologies on subjective experience, knowledge production within and beyond academia, culture and politics, and questions of individual and collective agency.
“Curiosity & Care” - Stony Brook University English/WGSS CFP, New York Graduate Conference
Stony Brook University’s English Graduate Department, in collaboration with the Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Department, invites abstracts and proposals from current graduate students and independent scholars for its annual spring conference on Friday, Feb. 27, 2026, at Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, NY.
The Shirley Jackson Society invites scholars at all stages of their careers to submit to our panels for the American Literature Association’s 37th Annual Conference in Chicago, May 20-23, 2026.
For “Shirley Jackson in an Age of Anxiety,” we invite papers that explore how Jackson’s texts speak to, reflect, or anticipate our current age of political instability, social fragmentation, economic uncertainty, and concerted attacks on human rights. Topics of interest include cultural and historical trauma, social conformity and marginalization, surveillance and paranoia, the uncanny in everyday life, prejudice, mob mentality, the dismantling of the American Dream, and mental illness as a cultural phenomenon.
Paper proposals invited for papers of 15-20 minutes. Please note corrected deadline of Friday, December 19, 2025 for submission of abstracts.
African and Caribbean Theatre and Performance Working Group
IFTR 2026 World Congress 6-10 July 2026
The University of Melbourne
Melbourne, Australia
Working Group Theme:
“What Theatre Does” – African and Caribbean Perspectives on Performance, History, and Identity
The 17th Annual Research, Art, Writing Conference
February 21st, 2026, Saturday, University of Texas at DallasCall For Papers: RAW 2026
THE THIRD ANNUAL WOMEN, GENDER, AND SEXUALITY STUDIES GRADUATE SYMPOSIUM
A Century of Black History Commemorations
“The Impact and Meaning of Black History and Life Commemorations in Transforming the Status of
Black Peoples in the Modern World”
Morgan State University, April 2, 2026
Call for proposals for the 35th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf and Sound
24-28 June, 2026
İstanbul Bilgi University
İstanbul,Turkey
“I always think of my books as music before I write them”
Virginia Woolf to Elizabeth Trevelyan, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 6, September 4, 1940.
Plant Lives: Sacred Interdependencies in the Arts of the Americas
A planting event and conference hosted by the Yale Institute of Sacred Music
April 11, 2026
In 1831, the preacher Nat Turner testified that hieroglyphics had appeared to him on leaves and corn stalks in a field. These hieroglyphics, he said, relayed divine messages that inspired him to lead a rebellion of enslaved Virginians. The starting point for this one-day conference is the many capacities of plants to transmit divine insights across time. This event at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music will explore the ways in which plants perform, evoke, and embody sacred relations throughout the Americas.
Call for Publications
Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal (Taylor & Francis)
**Special Issue on
Haunting Revisions: The Female Gothic Across Time and Media**
Guest Editors:
Dr. Cindy Murillo, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
Dr. Jennifer Nader, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
Overview
Call for Abstracts for Special Issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly Maternal Rhetorics: Deconstructing Expectations of Mother/Woman/ParenthoodCo-editors: Anna D'Orazio (University of Cincinnati), Wendy Sharer (East Carolina University), and Jurrita Williams (University of Alabama) In a 2021 interview with Tucker Carlson, then-Senate candidate and now-Vice President JD Vance criticized the Democratic Party “for becoming anti-family and anti-child.” He stated, “It's just a basic fact—you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez]—the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children….How does it make sense that we’ve
Call for Papers
Following the success of the I International Conference on Gender Studies & Intermedial Narratives (UCM, 2024), this new edition seeks to go further, deeper, and bolder. If last year we worked around the idea of intermediality, this year we want to explore its most visceral and material dimension: how gender is inscribed on, through, and as bodies—and how bodies themselves become texts, interfaces, archives, and narrative machines.We begin with a simple premise: every text is a body, and every body is a text.
ATHE 2026
“ACTIVATING IMAGINATION IN/AND COMMUNITY”
July 22–26, 2026 | Baltimore, Maryland
This year’s conference theme, "Activating Imagination in/and Community," asks us to think deeply and courageously about the role of theatre and performance in shaping our shared presents and collective futures. It challenges us to contemplate not just what we do, but how and with whom we do it, while recognizing that, in the face of growing political repression and institutional instability, our collaborations—across disciplines, communities, and identities—are simultaneously more vulnerable and vital than ever.
For Critical Insights volume under contract:
Madness in Literature
DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS: January 9, 2026
Queering food in the 21st Century
Women and the Body: Interdisciplinary PerspectivesInterdisciplinary Studies on Philology – Volume (forthcoming)
The edited volume Women and the Body will appear as part of the peer-reviewed book series Interdisciplinary Studies on Philology, published by Maurer Press (Germany). The series explores cutting-edge research across literary studies, cultural studies, linguistics, philosophy, and related fields, with a strong emphasis on interdisciplinary and theoretically innovative approaches.
“The beyond is not a new horizon, but a sense of the transition that takes place in the interstices” — Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (1994)
Call for Papers to the special issue “Dalit Studies in India: Interrogating Epistemological Injuries and Silences” for Global South Literary Studies
Special issue editors:
Arunima Ray, Lady Shri Ram College for Women, University of Delhi, India
Milind E. Awad, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India