The organizing committee of 2024 ELLAK international Conference invites submissions for the special session titled the Enormity of Contemporary Violence. The conference will be held at Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea, on December 12-14, 2024, under the theme of “Rethinking the Global English Studies.”
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As Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “Banality of Evil” already makes abundantly clear, systemic violence in our age is often beyond individual understanding and conceptualization. This new paradigm of violence has been pervasive despite the consistent and numerous critical practices. The enormity of the contemporary violence, coupled with its apparent everydayness, seems to systemically evade our ongoing attempts to capture its political, cultural, and social relevance. Natural disaster as “slow violence” (Rob Nixon), neoliberalization as “structuring violence”, war as “sovereign violence”, and numerous other cultural and systemic violences have become part and parcel of our everyday life.

How do we represent the kind of violence that we experience daily but no longer feel to be violence? How do we understand this globalized violence, the proper political representation of which sometimes seems futile in our highly individualized culture? And how do we conceptualize the globality of violence without losing the local valence of our analysis?

- critique of neoliberal structuring violence
- critique of global violence
- case study of violence in everyday life
- analysis of the scale of cultural, systemic, and structural violence
- analysis of a literary, cinematic, and cultural representation of violence
- identification of posthuman, geological violence
- analysis of a disaster as violence

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Proposals should be submitted to whanew@gmail.com by February 4, 2024.

An individual paper proposal should include:

Title of the paper
An abstract of the paper (up to 150 words)
Following information on the speaker: full name, title, affiliation, email address, and brief bio (up to 100 words)
A limited number of travel awards (covering the registration fee and hotel expenses) are available for international participants in special sessions.