Autor: GKS

When:  April 13 and 14, 2023

Where:  Zoom video conference

Notification:  April 5, 2023

The Graduate Student Council of the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta invites submissions for its annual Connections conference: Multicultural Connections. After the great success of the two previous online conferences, this year’s conference will also be held virtually on April 13 and 14, 2023. It will feature two days of academic panels and an evening showcase of art and creativity. Since the conference is organized by a Canadian university, we encourage submissions focusing on, but not limited to, multicultural connections within the Canadian context. We will be accepting academic and creative contributions that explore, from a critical perspective, multicultural connections found in communities, disciplines, cultures, languages and artistic works. The goal of the conference is to question, challenge, and interpret their significance. We await submissions from various disciplines across the Social Sciences and Humanities, including but not limited to fields such as Literary Studies, Applied Linguistics, Translation, and Cultural Studies. The Graduate Student Council welcomes everyone working in these fields and strongly encourages submissions from new graduate students.

Areas of interest include, but are not limited to:
Academic Contributions:
● Communication
● Connection through translation
● Literary connections
● Creative nonfiction
● Politicization of aesthetics
● Visual culture
● Digital worlds

Artistic Contributions:
● Poetry reading
● Performance art
● Comics
● Storytelling
● Visual Arts
● Multimedia
● Singer/Songwriting

Academic presentations will be 15 minutes in length, followed by a 5-minute discussion period. Panels will run for 60 minutes. Artistic contributions can be submitted individually or in addition to academic papers, and will be showcased during our Creative Night.

Submissions:
Academic Contributions:
● 250-word abstract ● 150-word bio

Artistic Contributions:
● example of creative work (e.g. a photo or excerpt)  ● 150-word bio

Please submit your proposal via the form on https://forms.gle/k9TEK6kfb5qF6xKcA by April 2, 2023. Notifications will be sent by April 5, 2022. Acceptance will be based on content quality, originality, and academic significance.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact modlang@ualberta.ca or the organizer Dominika Tabor at tabor@ualberta.ca. To learn more about our previous conferences visit https://mlcsconnections.wordpress.com/.

Catherine Bush’s 2019 novel Blaze Island opens with the following epigraph from Elena Ferrante: “Pressing changes are underway. Everything is becoming something else, unpredictably. A completely new outlook is required. The challenge now and for the foreseeable future is to extract ourselves from what men have engineered, a planet long on the edge of catastrophe.” Throughout the novel, Bush underscores the importance of thinking critically about boundaries, specifically those of gender and geography, as she reworks Shakespeare’s The Tempest to particularly Atlantic Canadian purposes. Bush is not alone in this critical and creative approach to exploring the unique intersections, margins, spaces, and borders embodied by and through the experience of life on the Atlantic Ocean; women writers throughout the Atlantic rim use their fiction to disturb boundaries seemingly enmeshed in their local cultural fabric, thereby making space for possibility via “environments of the imagination” (Boon, 2018, 2). This emerging eco-feminist articulation of life at the Atlantic edge recurs in the cultural production of the diverse communities that traverse its fringes. From the Faxaflói to the Costa da Morte to the Gulf of Guinea to the Mata Atlântica, women writers are leading the charge against capitalist extraction, destruction, and contamination of the ocean through innovative (re)imagining of marine cultures. Likewise, women’s writing from the shores of the Atlantic sheds light on a range of experiences which, regardless of their differences, hold the ebb and flow of the ocean as a conceptual tether.

We are inviting submissions for an edited collection titled: (Re)Imagining Feminisms at the Atlantic Edge. The collection will focus on eco-feminist writing from throughout the Atlantic fringes, broadly conceived, which takes an intersectional approach to engaging with notions of gender, place, marginality, ocean, and environment. We conceive of a broad geographic scope as a way to think about how depictions of life at various points along the Atlantic edge can traverse geographic divides and bring eco-feminist, queer, post-colonial, and decolonial approaches into dialogue with contemporary women’s writing from diverse cultural contexts. We seek the work of scholars from a range of disciplinary backgrounds focused on contemporary women’s literary production, and are especially interested in contributions on marginalized and underrepresented literatures and cultures. Key to our approach is a multilingual, decolonial understanding of Atlantic literatures which seeks to acknowledge the diverse and often overlooked voices and communities at the ocean’s edge which engage with the most pressing geopolitical and environmental issues of our time.

Chapters might explore, but are not limited to, how literary iterations of gender at the Atlantic edge intersect with:

• Oceanic cultures and the Blue Humanities
• Environment and climate anxieties
• Queerness and Place
• Decoloniality
• Marginality and Resistance
• Mobility and Migration
• Work and coded infrastructures
• Particular histories of violence
• Sustainability and Renewal

Essays may take a comparative approach, bringing together women’s writing from different contexts to speak to the questions at the heart of the collection; however, comparative analysis is not required. Women’s writing focused on a particular locale within this Atlantic framework that raises questions pertinent to that location, culture, and space, are encouraged. A key goal of the collection is to bring scholars of the writing of women from along the Atlantic edge into conversation with each other.

Deadline for submission of 350-500 word abstract + 150 word bio to Gemma Marr (University of New Brunswick) gemma.marr@unb.ca and Catherine Barbour (Trinity College Dublin) barbourc@tcd.ie : March 31 2023. We have secured an expression of interest from a publisher and envisage that completed chapters of 5000-7000 words in English, including notes and works cited, and following Chicago Style, will be required by November 1, 2023.

Please note: we will gladly accept submissions from scholars at any stage in their career; however, we aim to highlight the research and writing of doctoral students and early career scholars from a variety of disciplines. We especially welcome submissions by scholars from the ‘Global South’, people of color, Black and Indigenous scholars, people with disabilities, and those with underrepresented genders, including trans men, women (both cis and trans), nonbinary, and two-spirit individuals.