theory

The Forum Section invites scholars to reflect on the different ways that their research and/or pedagogy has intertwined with their lives in relation to the theme of the Volume. It is a more immediate exploration of how one’s research is shaped out of one’s personal experiences and positionalities. This section was introduced in 2023, encouraging contributors to experiment with styles outside academic writing to tease out the intricacies of pedagogy, research, and lived experience. Forum pieces can be more personal and self-reflective, and can include open ended enquiries. There are aspects of research that never make it to the research paper.

5th Annual UC Irvine Global Asias International Conference

February 18–19, 2027
UC Irvine

Keynote Speaker:
Paul Nadal, Princeton University

Early Career Publishing Workshop:
Tina Chen, Penn State

CFP: https://sites.uci.edu/globalasias/ga27/
Proposal Form: https://bit.ly/ga27cfp/

CALL FOR PAPERS

Call for abstracts - Forward Thinking: New Voices for the Future

In an era marked by ecological breakdown, epistemic instability, and widening global precarity, the very notion of “the future” has become a site of intense conceptual struggle. We invite scholars carrying out visionary work across the humanities — philosophy, literary theory, political thought, cultural studies, and related fields — to articulate bold and innovative interventions on what it means to think futurity today. 

2026 Meeting of the Society for Comparative Literature and the Arts

October 29-31, 2026
Embassy Suites Austin Central
Austin, TX

“Justice”

Keynote Speaker: TBA

Workshop at the Renaissaince Society of America's annual meeting (Philadelphia. March 11-13, 2027)

Often, when thinking of academia, the ideas of books, writing, and theory are what make up the idea of the scholar. Many scholars who speak about activism, liberation, mutual aid, living in a collective community, and many other topics of concern for the JOAA team, do not always live the practice they write. This year, we are hoping to disrupt this focus on the blueprints of freedom and look into the way folks are working in the world to build, support, create, and live praxis in their lives.   

Climate change is often discussed as an environmental emergency, but its most profound consequences are social, political, economic, and deeply gendered. The climate crisis does not operate in isolation from existing systems of inequality; rather, it intensifies historically entrenched hierarchies of gender, caste, class, race, labour, sexuality, and power. Women and gender minorities, frequently experience climate change not as a distant ecological abstraction but as everyday reality lived through food insecurity, water scarcity, displacement, unpaid labour, agrarian distress, and precarious working conditions.

The First Global Algorithmacy Conference

Acronym
ALGOCON 2026

Web page
https://algorithmacy.com

Location
La Brea Pitch Lake, Trinidad and Tobago

Submission deadline
15 August 2026

Notification due
Rolling (public review on the PR thread, typically within ~5 business days of submission); final decisions by September 1 2026

Final version due
At acceptance — accepted papers are published with their full review history on the public repository

PAMLA Seattle (2026) - November 12-15, all in-person conference 

2027 is the centenary year of the birth of US American poet and Pulitzer Prize-winner, Galway Kinnell (1927-2014). This session seeks to celebrate his life and legacy while pointing to future thematic and prosodic engagement in Kinnellian studies. Papers offering approaches to any aspect of Kinnell’s work are invited and most welcome.

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The erotic is a point of infinite signification, a navel in humanity’s symbolic circuit. However, despite its resistance to formalization, it is always in the process of not being written. As Octavio Paz insists, the erotic is a metaphor indelible to the human. As such, it is unsurprising that the manifestations of the erotic in subjective embodied experience are variable and correspond to equally plural treatments of it across the academic panorama. This diverse archive is bound by certain distinguishable threads, in terms of the potentiality of the erotic, its singular relation to language, and to the sphere of sexuality.

Chapters for The Handbook of Ecofeminism
deadline for submissions: March 1, 2026
full name / name of organization: Nicole C. Dittmer, PhD
contact email: ncdittmer@gmail.com

In 1974, Françoise d’Eaubonne coined the term ecofeminism in Le féminisme ou la mort, foregrounding the intertwined domination of women and nature and calling for the liberation of both from systems of exploitation. Since its emergence, ecofeminism has inspired scholars and activists across disciplines and global contexts.

This roundtable invites speakers to address any aspect of the so-called Renaissance self. Borrowing from Jan Goldstein, the cultural historian Elwin Hofman describes the self as “individuated mental stuff.” How might this definition inform our understanding of conceptions of the self that developed during the early modern period? What was the relationship between selfhood, self-consciousness, and identity? What kinds of evidence—artistic, confessional, visual, literary, legal, philosophical, textual, or medical—allow us to approach this question? What methodologies offer the most promise? Given the paradoxical nature of the self, both historically and in our own moment, how might it be treated as a proper object of study?

Space and place continuously serve as sources of inspiration in video games and various other interactive media, within which they have a specific way of representing and operationalizing fear and dread. Interactive works can turn fear into a set of narrative and game design sequences that are problems and solutions for the experience of playing and reading. For example, how to structure attention, limit knowledge, choreograph movement, regulate pace, and distribute safety and danger.

1st International Congress on Theory and Historiography of Gender Studies at FES Acatlán

Colloquium Dates: November 9–13, 2026

MODALITY: Hybrid

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Seminar on Theory and Historiography of Gender Studies of the Facultad de Estudios Superiores Acatlán (FES Acatlán-UNAM) proposes a space for reflection and discussion on new perspectives in women’s and gender studies within their diverse historical and social contexts. In this regard, we invite researchers from the social sciences and humanities to submit papers with a gender perspective (faculty members, researchers, and students currently working on their theses).