The Forum on Language Change is accepting proposals on “Language Change: Global (Im-) migration and Linguistic Insecurity” for the 2018 MLA in New York City. With increased immigration to developed countries in recent decades we have seen a proliferation in the number of languages, cultures, ethnicities, religions, nationalities and countries represented by the immigrants.  We seek papers that examine how global migration has an impact on language at the individual and community level contributing to linguistic insecurity and other language-related changes, such as language maintenance, death, choice, lingua franca / ethnolects’ development and other phenomena resulting from migrant contact situations.  How is language policy used to assimilate or margina

Submissions are currently being accepted for a scholarly collection of Appalachian ecocriticism edited by Dr. Laura Wright and Jessica Cory. A university press has shown interest in the volume and we are hoping to submit the manuscript to them by mid-August. We are in immediate need of essays in the range of 6K-7K words that focus on the intersections of queer and/or BIPOC Appalachian writers and ecocriticism/environmental literature. 

Although we have recently seen the implementation of institutional changes that have altered the legal and socioeconomic status of queer people in the United States (i.e. United States v. Windsor in 2013 and Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015), queer individuals continue to encounter discrimination, violence, and death based on their gender and/or sexual orientation. The stark rise in murders of trans people of color and the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting are just a few of the events that have disrupted the misguided sense of utopia instilled by institutional change, and have brought into question whether it is possible for queerness to link to notions of futurity. 

We welcome you to join us in Hiroshima, Japan for the 4th Asian Symposium on the Humanities and Human Rights Education (SHARE 2017), which will coincide with the 72nd Hiroshima Peace Memorial and Remembrance Ceremony.

In addition to the conference, participants will have an opportunity to visit Hiroshima Peace Park and the Shrine Island of Miyajima — both are UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

A.K. Ramanujan in a poem entitled “Small-scale Reflections on a Great House” had mused, “Sometimes I think that nothing/that ever comes into this house/goes out. Things come in every day/to lose themselves among other things/lost long ago among/other things lost long ago”. The description may seem oddly apt for the field of postcolonial studies which continues to search for new shores even as some of the concerns of the past begin to fade with the inevitable processes of history. Even as the field remains committed to a quest for emancipation from violence and discrimination and deprivation, caused by the forces of race, class, gender, sexuality and a number of other factors, the modalities continue to change and the boundaries begin to blur.