CALL FOR PAPERS

Stories from the Margins: Indigenous Connections to the Land

University of Northumbria 29-30 June 2021

Confirmed Keynote Speakers

• Prof. Lill Tove Fredriksen (UiT The Arctic University of Norway)
• Conversation between Prof. David Stirrup (University of Kent, U.K.) and Anishinaabe, Métis and settler-Irish artist Elizabeth LaPensee

Concept Note: The research on men and masculinities traces back to the women’s and gay liberation movements that challenged existing understandings of gender and power. Though the initial formulations of Masculinity Studies had started much early around the 1970s, it was not until the empirical research around 1980s-1990s that it began to develop as a newly formed discipline. As a logical extension of Feminism, Masculinity Studies looks into sex and/or gender as a discursive social construct and tries to understand them through theoretical hermeneutics.

Inspired by the (intended) original location for the 2021 ACLA conference (Montreal), we are soliciting papers on the role of place in Canadian literature and drama for this year's online conference. 

This seminar asks how novels (and the novel form) have absorbed the internet and how (or if) they can reflect it back to us?

Increasingly, our lives—from work to leisure to grocery shopping—run according to the fractured, eternally scrolling, continuously interrupted rhythms of online. While the pandemic has exacerbated this tendency for some (and introduced it to others), platforms like Amazon, Google, and Facebook have long shaped and structured not only our lives, but also our dreams and desires. Alongside this has come the maturation of the “very online” identity, fluent in the memes and vernacular of social media, cynical and ironic, but also performatively vulnerable, constantly joking but not joking.