CLiC Into Place: Literatures of the Local (University of Worcester, 5th May 2026)

“None of these things is happening here. They are all happening far away, elsewhere.
But they may as well be, Iris says. What does here mean anyway, I’d like to know. Everywhere’s a here, isn’t it?”

― Ali Smith, Winter

The Contemporary Literary Cultures Research Group (CLiC) are delighted to announce their third symposium, CLiC Into Place: Literatures of the Local, which will take place online on Tuesday May 5th. In a moment where globalisation, hyper-connectivity, and the planetary scale of phenomena such as the climate crisis and mass extinction events have encouraged the scope of cultural, social and political analysis and discourse to emphasise expansiveness, the symposium seeks to reverse the telescope and looks instead to explore ideas of the ‘local’ as they manifest in contemporary literary and cultural contexts, thinking the ‘local’ not merely as a signifier of a type of geographical space but a methodological approach capable of providing new insights into aesthetic, political, social and cultural trends.

Papers might explore but are not limited to:

-          Manifestations of the local and localism

-          Local vs regional

-          Place and place making

-          Local people (explorations of community and belonging)

-          Hyperlocalism

-          Genius loci

-          Local-isms: dialect, accent, patois and vernacular

-          Parochialism and provincialism

-          Extremely local and incredibly close: localised close reading

-          Space and spatiality

-          Neighbours and neighbourhoods

Abstracts of 250-300 words along with a short professional bio should be submitted to Research Group Lead Dr Lucy Arnold (lucy.arnold@worc.ac.uk) by 1st January 2026.