Literary Representations of Co-Existence 

Conference location: Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Split, Croatia

Keynote speakers: Mark Bould (University of the West of England Bristol) in-person

                               Dinesh Wadiwel (University of Sydney) online

Conference dates: Sept 3-5, 2026

Conference fee: 75 Euros for the fully employed, 50 Euros for students and those not fully employed

Send abstracts of 200 words, and a short biography, to bwillems@ffst.hr by May 1, 2026

Literary Representations of Co-Existence is an in-person conference organized by the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Split, Croatia. The conference aims to collect scholars and artists at all levels of their career, from undergraduate to professors Emeritus, to present and discuss literary representations, taken in the widest sense (including moving images, video games, graphic novels, and similar), of the co-existence of beings, times, spaces, objects, philosophies, and others in order to develop various ways of thinking both the problems of the past and present, and new ways forward in the near and distant future.

Our planet is home to the complex coexistence of a multiplicity of worlds. In recent times the fraught nature of living together with other people, and ecological cohabitation with other species, has begun to approach crisis point. In theoretical discourse, one important aspect of improving ecological, ethical, racial, and gendered relations is the recognition that each life coexists with a multiplicity of other lives, yet increasingly we lose sight of our interconnected worlds. Understanding the way that different worlds exist together is a necessary component for the maximum number of beings to live better, whether this comes from appreciating the differences of others through empathy, political recognition, or species equality. By addressing the need to live with a multiplicity of other worlds, this conference builds upon the work of ecocritical, animal studies, race and feminist studies which foreground the need of learning how different beings with different lives fit together. 

The goal of this conference is to add to the scholarly discourse by showing how literature imagines new spaces and new techniques for living together creatively, productively, peacefully and sustainably. Specifically, this will involve linking literary practice – including literary texts such as novels, poetry, as well as video games, moving images, and critical analysis – to key contemporary issues of inclusivity, openness, transculturality, tolerance and  knowledge and excellence. As Theodor Adorno and Fredric Jameson explore, literary knowledge has always been oriented towards the utopian demand for better organization of life via the expression of how our world could be otherwise, and the otherness that exists beyond the closure of our own world. The aim of Literary Representations of Co-Existence is to delineate literary strategies for using text to represent the multiple intersecting worlds and different lives of different individuals, cultures, and species, and also to begin the hard task of mapping the relation of literary insights and the most urgent contemporary questions. The goal of the research is to locate and understand the diverse range of literary strategies for representing differences within what is familiar, arguing that a greater cultural awareness of what is not-us will lead to better lives for more beings.

The conference aims to be inclusive of a number of mechanisms involved in understanding interconnected worlds, which is described by the fluidity and flow of Astrida Neimanis’s ecofeminism and the concept of relation explored in ÉdouardGlissant’s postcolonial poetics. Separation by contrast is described in a strain of research stressing the strangeness of different worlds, such as Mel Chen's idea of animacy, stresses the queerness of different non-normative worlds, as do Graham Harman's concept of sleeping objects and Levi Bryant's dark objects, both of which focus on the way objects and beings are different, or remain "dark" to each other. One potential danger that this conference aims to address is that commodity frontiers (Jason W. Moore) and cultural immediacy (Anna Kornbluh) seem to flatten or erase the knowledge and possibilities of the coexistence multiple worlds, a constraining and confining of experience within capitalist realism (Mark Fisher), forcing irreducible otherness into normative regimes of recognition.

To develop these concepts, one aim of this conference is that systematic knowledge of other worlds will lead not only to adjustments to standard definitions of joining, separation, and text, but also to the concept of world, since it is the world of literature that is seen as the nesting place for trying out strategies for imagining different worlds together.

Organizing and Scientific Committee:

Boris Škvorc (Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Split)

Brian Willems (Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Split)

Simon Ryle (Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Split)

Victoria Vestić (Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Split)

Gianna Brahović (Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Split)