Reinventing Borderlines in a Transnational World
April 10-11, 2026
Higher Institute of Human Sciences of Tunis- University Tunis El Manar

CALL FOR PAPERS:

Today’s transnational and “digitalized world” (Hayles, 2012) is marked by massive mobility, heavy border crossing, and the incessant negotiation of (and conflict over) frontiers (Appadurai, 1996). The current global shifts and border re-mappings, along with the radical digital transformations, have been strongly echoed in creative, critical, and philosophical productions. Traditional identity “boundaries” are now rethought through groundbreaking poetics, radical aesthetics and original interpretive methods, echoing what Paul Jay detects as a “transnational turn” in current literary and cultural studies (2010). Texts are reread in light of hybrid hermeneutics, multivocal expressions, cultural pluralities, and “non-mainstream” testimonies. The radical alterations that mark our age, along with the ‘maddening’ rise of Artificial Intelligence and digital technologies, have affected the very definition of literature itself. Old ‘truths’ about ‘pure’ literary texts, rigid generic boundaries, the ‘sacred’ canon, literary hierarchies, norms of reception, and conventional readings seem to hold no more (Braidotti, 2013 and Hayles, 2012) in a world whose borderlines are constantly redefined and reshaped. In such a digitalized world, and almost borderless world, our conference seeks to raise a number of questions: how do writers engage with borderlines, trans-nationalism, passage, transfer, migration, relocation, displacement, and other related subject matters? How do these profound changes in our “transnational” world require new literary expressions, narrative and critical paradigms that depart from traditional genre divisions, language hierarchies, regional cataloguing, racial tagging, and other forms of othering?
In cultural studies, transnationality has often been associated with cultural mobility, hence, the free circulation not only of people, but also of their ideas, traditions, and values across nations’ borders. Such a practice is not a modern phenomenon; it is as old as “traditional cultures, [which] are rarely stable or fixed” (Greenblatt, 2009), and even came to be understood as a component of globalization (Klingenberg et al., 2020). Conversely, re-inventing borderlines may invoke, particularly in our contemporary world, the re-mapping and re-arranging of space to assimilate new forms of expansionism and more complex frameworks of colonialism. From
“consensual” agreements through “conflictual” interests and power relationships (Avelino, 2021) to Realpolitik and Machtpolitik or “power politics” (de Wijk, 2016), borderlines might, accidentally or systematically, morph within or across its imagined communities (Anderson, 1986) into more co-operative social organisms; or desperately disintegrate as entities. In this sense, transnational identities, understood as dialogical formations shaping power relations, serve as elements within what Mignolo (1998) describes as the “oppositional process of relocating cultures and identities in a conflictive dialogue with the colonial allocation of cultures.” Recent global migration flows and crises, perhaps more shockingly, in the Mediterranean, and the indifferent, at times, cynical reactions from Global North and even from Global South, may equally re-call, if not rebuke the validity of such many pre-established societal models, as cultural diversity, multiculturalism, and superdiversity (Meissner, Sigona, and Vertovec, 2022). Still, beyond the geo-political sphere, the recent global embrace of A.I. technologies has transformed nations’ borders and borderlines into parallel worlds and multiple X spaces. Academically, one way to approach transnationalism and borderlines in cultural studies is to adopt a universal and transdisciplinary understanding, mitigating therefore borders/borderlines. We should move beyond Anderson’s “imagined communities”, and instead, call for de-westernizing academic production of geopolitical knowledge and reinforcing critical reflexivity (Fornäs, 2020). Practically as well as methodologically, in this conference, we urge participants to re(invent) borderlines by deconstructing, re-appropriating, negotiating, and de-colonizing transnational culture within and outside of academia.
The conference also welcomes contributions that seek to unpack the intricacies of borderlines from the perspective of linguistics and discourse studies. In a world increasingly shaped by mass mobility, digital interconnectedness, and transnational exchange, linguistic borders– between vernaculars, dialects, registers, genres, and communicative modes– are more than ever questioned and redefined. Viewed through this lens, frontiers acquire a dimension that transcends geography and geopolitics, becoming deeply entangled with meaning-making processes. Indeed, boundaries emerge as dynamic constructs, continually shaped by a multiplicity of actors such as policymakers, mainstream and digital media, and the public. As a sociolinguistic experience, bordering may generate what Zappettini (2016) conceptualizes as “transnational identities”, and language practices remap the dynamics of (non)belonging within a constellation of social, cultural, and affective encounters. As discursive constructs, borderlines are cognitively and socially (re)produced through perceptions of identity and power relations (Fairclough, 2015; van Leeuwen, 2021). In today’s digitally saturated environments, narratives circulate with unprecedented speed and dominant discourses play a pivotal role in shaping the continuum between stability and liminality (Sharma, 2023). Traditional notions of territory are increasingly challenged by digitally bounded spaces (Zhang & Morris, 2023), foregrounding the complex digitality–spatiality nexus. These reconfigurations call for renewed linguistic and discursive approaches to understanding identity, authority, legitimacy, and belonging, by foregrounding the shifting communicative repertoires and hybrid discourse practices that characterize digital humanities. In this light, we encourage contributions that examine how the material and the imagined, the local and the transnational, intersect in bordering processes–
opening fertile ground for interdisciplinary dialogue at the crossroads of linguistics, discourse studies, and the broader humanities and social sciences.

The conference aims to explore but is not limited to the following themes:
1. Redefining borders
2. Identities in a globalized world
3. Norms of survival in ‘contact zones’
4. Decolonial encounters
5. Positionalities and normativities
6. Reinventing the canon
7. Representing identities in literature
8. Hybrid narratives
9. Transnationality and (de)coloniality
10. Rethinking knowledge, power and belonging
11. (In)-security in contemporary times
12. Identities in a transnational world
13. Translation as transgression of borders
14. Truth and post-truth
15. Neoliberalism and Resistance
16. Digital narratives
17. The post-anthropocentric
18. The geopolitics of invisibility
19. Migration and borderlines
20. ‘Imaginary homelands’
21. Translingual Practices and Negotiation of Identity
22. Digital Communication and the Reconfiguration of Linguistic Borders
23. Translation, Mediation, and the Politics of Linguistic Crossing
24. Linguistic Mobility, Migration, and Transnationalism
25. Normativity and Variation: Standardization, Marginalization, and Resistance
26. Educational Borderlines and Pedagogical Innovation in Multilingual Contexts
27. Language, Power, and the Construction of Social Boundaries
28. Artificial Intelligence and the Human–Machine Interface
29. AI and the reinvention of identities and communities

Submission Guidelines:

Please send your original contribution (250–300 words) before January 30, 2026 with a short bio (100 words) to reinventingborderlines2026@yahoo.com

All submissions will undergo blind review process, and notification of acceptance shall be sent by February 10, 2026.

A selection of papers will be published in a peer-reviewed edited volume.

Steering Committee:

Scientific Committee
Prof. Rached Khalifa
Dr. Abid Abidi
Dr. Amal Hlioui
Dr. Nadia Marzouki
Dr. Sadok Laadhibi
Dr. Yasser Rhimi

Scientific Committee:

Emeritus Prof. Nejet Mchala

Prof. Sadok Bouhlila

Prof. Mohamed Salah Harzallah
Prof. Lobna Ben Salem
Prof. Lanouar Ben Hafsa
Prof. Mounir Guirat
Prof. Samia Harbaoui
Prof. Fethi Hellal
Prof. Rached Khalifa
Dr. Aida Ben Ahmed Haddad
Dr. Lamia Bach Baouab
Dr. Samira Mechri