HOME

UCI Comparative Literature Graduate Conference 2026 

 Keynote Speakers: Prof. Rizvana Bradley and Prof. Samiha Khalil

The infiltration of chaos into any home is not an abrupt occurrence. A fine dust settles on the cracks of wood, sheet folds, window seams, and curtain pleats, waiting for a wind to find its way into the home and liberate the components of scatteredness from their ambush.

Ghazaleh Alizadeh, The House of Edrisis

For those who dominate and oppress us benefit most when we have nothing to give our own, when they have so taken from us our dignity, our humanness that we have nothing left, no "homeplace" where we can recover ourselves.

bell hooks, “homeplace: a site of resistance”

What makes a home into home? Home is often thought to be the proper container for one’s inherited origins and kinship connections, and thereby to structure the entire trajectory of one’s life. However, amidst ongoing global discussions around migration, displacement, dispossession and colonization, a central point of contention is a person’s or a people’s capacity to be at home in a given space—that is, the rightful location and status of the home. To ask what home means today is to ask who is permitted to dwell,  possess and displace. It is to recognize that the concept of home opens onto urgent questions of power, inequality and care, while also inviting creative reimaginings of community, refuge and coexistence. No matter the case, whatever stability or instability the home seems to provide, it is only capable of doing so because it is mired in the most striking ambivalences: inheritance and lack, beginnings and ends, enclosure and freedom. 

The ambivalences bound to the concept of home make it especially fecund ground for creativity and critical thought. Yet in scholarly work the discourse of the home is often marginalized—its logics deemed too sentimental, its supports too fragile to defend. This may be why the home most often appears in this work indirectly, whether through ontological concepts like Being, psychosocial systems like the Oedipal family, or material relations like the exchange of private property. Such frameworks allow the home to rearticulate itself metonymically through theoretical paradigms that would mediate our relationship to it. But try as we might to distance ourselves from it, the home intrudes upon us in the most solitary moments of doing scholarly work. This is made all the more unsettling by the fact that, while the process of constructing  a house can be documented through sketches and blueprints, the internal process by which a place becomes home is unarchivable, perhaps inarticulable, even as it shapes our ways of knowing and creating. The home invites an uncomfortable intimacy, and a host of questions we find difficult to pose or answer.

We invite scholars and artists to participate in a two-day interdisciplinary conference on April 2-3, during which we attempt to interrogate the concept of home as an ambivalent field. Specifically, we seek to consider how tensions that cohere around home manifest across social, political, theoretical, philosophical, linguistic, literary, aesthetic, poetic, cultural and artistic contexts.We encourage conference papers, creative submissions and artist statements (e.g., poetry, visual art, digital media, short films, etc.).

Potential topics might include: displacement, exile, fugitivity; crafting, homemaking, practicing; extraction, appropriation, extinction; marginalization and racialization; colonialism, decolonization, resistance; war, conflict, genocide; land, terrain, geography; family, kinship, domestic labor; impermanence, emptiness, persistence; Indigenity, nativity, settling; mourning and melancholia; gender and sexuality; nationalism, anarchism, collectivism; “private” and “political” spheres; enclosure, borders, expansion; accessibility and inaccessibility; art, creative writing, film-making; estrangement, failure, acceptance; ruins, temporary shelters, the camp; uprooting and unhoming; apocalypse, eschatology, decreation; blackness and antiblackness; recovery, reconstruction, reconciliation; isolation, solitude, sociality; inheritance, expropriation, lack; refuge and diaspora; freedom, slavery, servitude; political stability and instability; familiarity, foreignness, strangeness; gentrification, tourism; incarceration and surveillance; [Etc.].

Submission Requirements: Proposals for both single papers and panels must:

1. be a maximum of 300 words (per paper for a panel presentation)

2. demonstrate a clear connection to the theme of HOME

3. be able to present in-person at UCI

4. be submitted to uciclconference2026@gmail.com by 11:59 p.m. (PST) February 27, 2026 with “Home Conference Submission” as the subject line

5. include a brief (100 word maximum) biography for each presenter in the body of the email