Call for papers.

Resistance & resilience : envisioning the future

This interdisciplinary graduate conference seeks to investigate how literary, cinematic, and other mediums interrogate, shape, and embody strategies of resistance and resilience and imagine alternative futures in contemporary and historical contexts across the globe. In the midst of a deadly pandemic, among other social, political, economic, and environmental crises on local and global scales, envisioning the future can become an act of resilience and resistance. As Donna Haraway argues, this work of envisioning the future requires “staying with the trouble”—reconfiguring and reimagining our relations to the world around us. Envisaging the future thus requires not only resilience—“bouncing back” or recovering from present or historical difficulties—but also resistance, refusing to accept the status quo, taking action to change one’s situation or the world more broadly. Emerging from positions of precarity, such as the isolation of quarantine or personal or collective trauma, stories of adaptation, translation, dissent, compromise, and solidarity can envision varied potential futures for the individual and for society at large. From travel narratives and utopias to autofiction and speculative fiction, resistance and resilience take many forms. 

Possible topics and approaches may include, but are in no way limited to:

  • World literatures and film
  • Transformation and Transcendence through the Arts
  • Migration, Immigration, Transnationalisms
  • Translation and adaptation 
  • Utopias and dystopias
  • Models of sociability 
  • Narratives of resilience 
  • Speculative fiction and science fiction
  • Travel narratives and parodic/fake travel narratives
  • Graphic narratives and comics studies​
  • Environmental humanities, ecocriticism, and medical humanities
  • Notions of identity
  • LGBTQ and Queer studies
  • Social and political movements 
  • History / Historical revisionism
  • Linguistic changes or resistance to change
  • Gender studies and feminist studies
  • Postcolonial studies
  • The arts and artistic exploration
  • Digital humanities and digital studies
Deadline:
January 15, 2021
Type of submissions:
  • Paper presentations (15-20 min)
  • Collaborative presentations
  • Creative submissions
  • Digital posters (up to 10 min)
  • Multimedia projects
Language:
Submissions should be in English. 
Free. 
The SLLC is pleased to offer free registration for this conference. 
Interested? Follow this quick guide. 

  1. Tell us your name, the name of your co-presenters (optional) and your affiliation. 
  2. Write your email address. 
  3. Indicate the type of your submission (paper presentation, creative submission, digital poster, multimedia project, other...).
  4. Give us the themes of your submission, a title for it, and write a short summary (about 50 words, to be included in the program). 
  5. Attach your abstract (250-300 words) in a pdf file. 
  6. Optional - Attach a 1-2 minute video excerpt to accompany the creative/multimedia submissions

Click on the "Submit here" button just below or send us an email at umd.sllc.colloq@gmail.com.