Call for Papers

“Refusal(s) and Kurdish Literature”

21–22 May 2026

Virtual Conference hosted by the University of Connecticut  

Kurdish literature still holds a marginal space within Kurdish studies writ large. After the successful conference “Kî ne em? Kurdish Literature and Its Studies. An Interdisciplinary Conference,” held in April 2025 at Stanford University, we are excited to share this Call for Papers for a second edition of the conference, to be held online and hosted by the University of Connecticut. We look forward to broadening the space of and for Kurdish literature in the U.S.  American academia and beyond.

Kurdish literature and cultural production have long wrestled with the conditions of erasure, marginalization, and state violence. Yet they also open up imaginative and aesthetic spaces where disobedience, opacity, and persistence take shape. The theme of this conference, Refusal(s) and Kurdish Literature, invites us to think about the literary, cultural, and political possibilities that emerge from saying no, from remaining silent, from withholding, from speaking otherwise.

Refusal can be a practice of resistance and survival, but also of creativity and experimentation. Refusal can signal an ethical stance, a method of reading, or an aesthetic gesture. It may appear in the form of silence, opacity, or disruption; in the rejection of imposed borders, genres, or disciplines; or in the insistence on practices and voices that exceed assimilation and legibility, maybe even in the refusal of readerly empathy and identification. In a world where literature—especially that of the perceived ‘margins’—most often is said to have humanizing potential, to render legible a group otherwise hard to access, and to derive a substantial part of its ascribed value from this humanizing quality, refusal gains relevance beyond the realm of literature, for general discourses of representation, perception, and human rights.

We invite scholars, writers, translators, and cultural workers to join us in reflecting on refusal as it shapes Kurdish literature and its studies, and to consider how Kurdish cultural expression enters into (or, at times, opts out of) broader conversations in world literature, politics, and theory.

Possible topics may include but are not limited to:

• Refusals of genre, form, or discipline in Kurdish literature

• Silence, opacity, and representational ethics

• Refusal as aesthetic disobedience and experimentation

• Empathy and its limits: refusal of identification or legibility

• Affect and ethics of refusal in Kurdish writing and art

• Refusing linguistic, geographic, disciplinary, or methodological borders

• Witnessing, non-witnessing, and the politics of refusal

• Archival practices and refusals of erasure

• Refusal as political resistance, insurgency, or endurance

• Writing as refusal within contexts of surveillance, imprisonment, or carceral regimes

• Connections of a literary ethics or aesthetics of refusal to extra-textual domains of history, politics, and human rights

Submission Guidelines:

• Submission deadline: November 30, 2025

• Paper abstracts: no more than 250 words

• Include: title, author name(s), institutional affiliation(s), and email address

• Short bio: max. 100 words

• Presentation languages: English and Kurdish (all varieties thereof)

• Please submit proposals via this form by November 30, 2025

• Notifications of acceptance will be sent out in January 2026

• Select proceedings will be considered for publication through the University of Connecticut’s Digital Commons.

This event is co-sponsored by:

• UConn Humanities Institute (UCHI)

• UConn Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute

• UConn Department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages

• PATH+ Focal Group, Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, Stanford University

Direct any and all questions to the conference main organizer Rojda Idil Arslan (rojda.arslan@uconn.edu), and co-organizers Ali Eren Yanik (ali.yanik@utexas.edu) and Hevin Karakurt (karakurt@stanford.edu).

The Call for Papers is also available in Kurmanji and Sorani.