Call for panels and papers
Arjun Appadurai (2004) claimed that the right to live is also a right to aspire. And yet, this right, which has been recently emphasized in the strongest terms by the United Nations in their 2023 report on the completion status of the Sustainable Development Goals, clashes against a wall of multiple crises. Since 9/11 2001 â which dumped on humanity multiple terrorist attacks and consequently triggered a quasi-planetary war on terror â we have witnessed financial crises, like the one in 2008 which impoverished people aspiring to a house; the Covid planetary pandemic; political uncertainties, which have shaken various countries in South America as well as in Europe; and wars that are still bloodying our world â such as the war in Ukraine and the war in Gaza, to name only the ones closer to Europe â while the more general environmental and climate crises encompass and accompany them all. What aspirations do we nurture, then? What aspirations do we grant to the next generations? And, with both Appadurai and Nussbaum, we might ask ourselves âwhy culture mattersâ and âwhy the humanities matterâ â a question that, as Sustainable Development Goal on Quality Education testifies, is of vital importance to our future. Within this context, how can reconciliation processes effectively incorporate historical understanding to heal divisions perpetuated by colonial legacies? What insights do post- and decolonial literature provide regarding these challenges?
The ongoing wars in Ukraine (in the heart of Europe) and in the Middle East are leading to questions about the worldâs geopolitical order and risk being more than just regional conflicts. Moreover, flows of migrants, refugees and people try to escape famine, warfare and the consequences of the ecological crises and to cross the borders of the âFirst Worldâ every day, in search of survival or a better future. The so-called âjourneys of hopeâ from Africa across the Mediterranean sea, involving migrants from the Indian subcontinent, the Middle and Far East trying to enter Europe, eco-refugees from the Pacific Islands moving towards Australia, New Zealand and the West Coast of America and walls, such as the one built to stop illegal passages from Mexico to the USA, the one around Palestinian enclaves, or the one dividing the island of Cyprus, are all signs of a constant forced mobility prompted by asymmetrical power relations, political, economic or otherwise, as Klaus Dodds claims in his Border Wars (2021), after the post-1989 wave of optimism, 9/11 brought a renewed focus on multiple forms of borders, especially exploited by autocrats and populist leaders.
As walls are erected and borders patrolled, the beginning of the New Millennium has confirmed the idea of a âliquid modernityâ (Bauman 2000) and a global world in which knowledge, technology, information (Crawford 2021) and capitalist development have no boundaries. In this age of late capitalism (Jameson 1991) or post-capitalism (Drucker 1993), the migration of ideas, technologies and laborers is allowed only if it is functional to the financial and economic powers (Appadurai 2004; Nussbaum 2010). The gap between âNorthâ and âSouthâ of the world is however being undermined by environmental crises, the rise of new forms of capitalisms (India and China) and wars that, for the first time in a century, could turn again into worldwide conflicts which threaten to hinder our longstanding global efforts to reduce inequalities, a goal enshrined in the United Nations 2030 agenda.
Conflicts can take a variety of forms, including those about sectarianism, nationalism, and communalism, when communities within the same spatial context are torn by religious (Leidig 2020), ethnic and social tensions, from the Indian subcontinent to the marginalization of First Nations populations in Canada. In numerous postcolonial countries, the sense of crisis becomes a confrontational scenario, one in which different forces are engaged, often following ideological and nationalistic purposes (Jaffrelot 2007). However, from an etymological perspective, the word âcrisisâ refers to âdecision, judgment, outcome, turning point of a diseaseâ (OED 2024), and in postcolonial contexts such meaning seems to mirror the commitment of writers and artists in their response to human and non-human exploitation. As multiple crises proliferate and attack societies, there are instantiations of postcolonial/decolonial resistance against the totalizing practices of dominance and destruction that haunt many counties in the world, thus fostering inclusive societies (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2015; Akomolafe 2017). Such reactions bring to the fore the imaginative and inspirational power of the arts and the humanities at large to stimulate a rethinking of crises, in the hope to rebalance unfair social dynamics (Said; Barenboim).
Thinking in terms of human imagination can help us appreciate the ways in which narrative shapes the ways crises are told and understood. This is especially relevant when it comes to skepticism about scientific knowledge, which some critics have seen as the sign of a veritable crisis of the role of science in society (Horkheimer 1990). Such knowledge-making crises, meant as the questioning of accepted structures of knowledge within our societies, are manifested in several ways. For instance, recent phenomena like the spread of fake news have shown the potential to undermine trust in experts and institutions, eroding the capacity of individuals to make evidence-based choices as well (Hopf et al. 2019). This erosion of trust is especially relevant when it comes to major issues like climate change denial and environmental crisis. The rise in the number of people holding anti- or pseudo-scientific views about the global impact of anthropic activities has led to a renewed scholarly focus on the intersections between narrative and scientific thought, both with regards to the study of how scientific ideas are communicated via narrative means (Morgan and Wise 2017), and the examination of how scientific developments get represented in narrative (Caracciolo 2019). Ultimately, examining the narrative mechanics in which scientific knowledge is conveyed allows us to make better sense of complex crises such as climate change, offering a powerful tool to take action and mitigate its effects, as mandated by the United Nations with their dedicated Sustainable Development Goal on Climate Action.
Proposals analyzing the above-mentioned themes are welcome. Further topics, developed in Anglophone fiction, non-fiction, linguistics, translation studies, (digital) performative, visual and fine arts may also include:
 | Wars of religion, religions of warWars of the worlds – cultural and military (neo)colonialismWater wars, extractivism, exploitation |
 | The climate crises and eco-refugeesEcocriticism in Anglophone textsEcology and multispecies cooperation |
 | Translations studies in contexts of crisesTranslations and/as the NormTranslation theory and practices |
 | Migration and gender across cultures and/or literaturesMigration, the (new) media and political discourseMigration and the rise of new populism and fascism |
 | Old and new forms of racism and xenophobiaPost-capitalism, labor force and ânewâ forms of slaveryBiopolitics, necropolitics and surveillance |
 | Space partitioning: porous walls and bordersCommunicating crisis and metaphors of conflict in post- or de-colonial textsNaturalising crisis ideologies in the postcolonyThe language of the 21st century crises through post- or decolonial voicesCrises of representations and indigenous thinkingScientific and indigenous ideas and non-human narrativesConflicts between humanities and science |
Deadline for Panel and individual Abstract presentation: 15 September 2025
Acceptance notice: 10 October 2025
General guidelines for panel and abstract presentations
Bibliography
Bayo Akomolafe, These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home, North Atlantic Books, Berkeley CA, 2017.
Jan Assmann, The Price of Monotheism. Stanford UP, Stanford, 2010.
Arjun Appadurai, âThe Capacity to Aspire: Culture and the Terms of Recognitionâ, in Rao, V. and Walton, M., (eds.) Culture and Public Action, Stanford University Press, Palo Alto, California, pp 59-84.
Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity, Polity Press, Cambridge UK, 2000.
Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2003.
Marco Caracciolo, âForm, Science, and Narrative in the Anthropoceneâ, Narrative, 27 (2019), 270â289.
Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI, Yale UP, New Haven CT, 2021.
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Verso, London-New York, 1991.
Peter F. Drucker, Post-capitalist Society, Butterworth Heinemann, Oxford, 1993.
Henning Hopf, et al, âFake Science and the Knowledge Crisis: Ignorance can Be Fatalâ, Royal Society Open Science, 6 (2019), 1â7.
Max Horkheimer, âNotes on Science and Crisisâ, Critical Theory and Society: A Reader, ed. by Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas MacKay Kellner (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 1990).
Christophe Jaffrelot, Hindu Nationalism: A Reader. Princeton, Princeton University Press, NJ and Oxford, 2007.
Eviane Leidig, “Hindutva as a variant of right-wing extremism.” In Patterns of Prejudice. London: Taylor & Francis, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1080/0031322X.2020.1759861
Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony, The University of california Press, Berkeley, 2001.
Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, Duke UP, Durham, 2019.
Mary S. Morgan, and M. Norton Wise, âNarrative Science and Narrative Knowing. Introduction to Special Issue on Narrative Scienceâ, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 62 (2017), 1â5.
Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, “Decoloniality as the Future of Africa.” History Compass, 13, 10. Wiley-Blackwell, New Jersey, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12264
Martha C. Nussbaum, Not for Profit. Why Democracy needs the Humanities, Princeton UP, Princeto n, 2010.
Said, Edward W., Humanism and Democratic Criticism, Columbia UP, New York, 2004.
Guzelimian, Ara ed., Parallels and Paradoxes. Daniel Barenboim & Edward Said, Bloomsbury, London, 2002.