CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS

CURRENTS NO. 7

GLOBAL – LOCAL – GLOCAL in Anglophone Literature, Culture, and Linguistics

We are pleased to announce the call for contributions for the seventh issue of CURRENTS: A Journal of Young English Philology Thought and Review. CURRENTS is an open access, peer-reviewed, yearly interdisciplinary journal, based in Toruń (Nicolaus Copernicus University), addressed to young researchers in the field of English studies.

The seventh volume of the journal aims to tackle the questions of the global and the local, the ways these two categories intersect and engage in a meaningful exchange in the contemporary world, as well as the tensions that emerge at their crossroads.

In the Anglophone context, the process of colonization constitutes a point of departure to think about the world beyond the local. Both the processes of colonization and decolonization on local and global scale problematize the relationships between communities and cultures. In contemporary multicultural societies, these tensions are difficult to ignore as individuals are constantly confronted with the liminality of their identities: on the one hand being citizens of the globalized world, while on the other expressing desire to belong to their national and local communities. The recent rise of fundamentalisms and mass movements contesting them, such as Black Lives Matter and Idle No More, demonstrate that these trends are still tangible and persistent in contemporary societies.

Postmodern and postcolonial theories provide conceptual frameworks to describe the contemporary human interstice between the local and the global. In the present world, time and space emerge as compressed. We live fast and enjoy the assets of the global village in our own houses through the connection to the internet and the media. The current COVID-19 pandemic further blurs the boundaries between the local and the global. Remote working, e-learning, as well as relegated online social and cultural activities exacerbate people’s alienation from their immediate communities in favor of the virtual globalized realities. At the same time, the coronavirus crisis, quite to the contrary, evokes local responses and actions, providing a sense of community building and solidarity. 

We welcome contributions that respond to the scope outlined above that locate the issues of the global and the local within the context of Anglophone literature, culture, and linguistics. We extend our invitation particularly (but not exclusively) to young academics, doctoral, and graduate students representing different areas within the interdisciplinary field of English studies and beyond. The list of possible topics includes, but is not limited to:

• post-modern tensions between the global and the local, as well as the post-post-modern revisions of the global village;
• global and local interventions presented by posthumanism;
• responses to the Anthropocene and the environmental crisis globally and locally;
• discourses of local and global utopia/dystopia;
• poetics of rebellion, equality, and equity as global and local phenomena;
• women’s experience locally and globally – global feminisms, intersectional feminism, ecofeminism, etc.;
• global and local representations and linguistic constructions of queerness;
• postcolonial approaches in local and global contexts;
• Indigenous studies and the tension between the global and the local;
• English studies and health – literary, cultural, and linguistic reactions towards the mental and physical well-being at the time of the pandemic;
• the relation between social context and language use;
• local and global perspectives in language contact theory.

We also invite submissions to the review section, preferably devoted to publications relevant to the theme of the global, local, and glocal in Anglophone literature, culture and linguistics, especially, though not exclusively, written by Polish specialists in the discipline.

Articles accompanied by abstracts of 200 words and/or reviews should be submitted to currentsjournalumk@gmail.com by 15th November 2021.

Stylesheet: http://www.currents.umk.pl/

Suggested article length: 3,500 – 5,000 words.

Suggested review length: ca. 1,500 words.