Institute of Literary Studies
Department of Anglophone Literature, Culture and Comparative Studies
Department of English Language and Applied Linguistics
Academic Association for Doctoral Students of English
Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń
are pleased to announce
The International Emerging Scholars Online Conference
GLOBAL – LOCAL – GLOCAL
in Anglophone Literature, Culture, and Linguistics
26th-27th March 2021
This interdisciplinary gathering aims to tackle the questions of the global and the local, the ways these two categories intersect and engage in a meaningful exchange in the contemporary world, as well as the tensions that emerge at their crossroads.
In the Anglophone context, the process of colonization constitutes a point of departure to think about the world beyond the local. Both the processes of colonization and decolonization on local and global scale problematize the relationships between communities and cultures. In contemporary multicultural societies, these tensions are difficult to ignore as individuals are constantly confronted with the liminality of their identities: on the one hand being citizens of the globalized world, while on the other expressing desire to belong to their national and local communities. The recent rise of fundamentalisms and mass movements contesting them, such as Black Lives Matter and Idle No More, demonstrate that these trends are still tangible and persistent in contemporary societies.
Postmodern and postcolonial theories provide conceptual frameworks to describe the contemporary human interstice between the local and the global. In the present world, time and space emerge as compressed. We live fast and enjoy the assets of the global village in our own houses through the connection to the internet and the media. The current COVID-19 pandemic further blurs the boundaries between the local and the global. Remote working, e-learning, as well as relegated online social and cultural activities exacerbate people’s alienation from their immediate communities in favor of the virtual globalized realities. At the same time, the coronavirus crisis, quite to the contrary, evokes local responses and actions, providing a sense of community building and solidarity.
We welcome papers that respond to the scope outlined above that locate the issues of the global and the local within the context of Anglophone literature, culture, and linguistics. We extend our invitation particularly (but not exclusively) to young academics, doctoral, and graduate students representing different areas within the interdisciplinary field of English studies and beyond. The list of possible topics includes, but is not limited to:
- post-modern tensions between the global and the local, as well as the post-post-modern revisions of the global village;
- global and local interventions presented by posthumanism;
- responses to the Anthropocene and the environmental crisis globally and locally;
- discourses of local and global utopia/dystopia;
- poetics of rebellion, equality, and equity as global and local phenomena;
- women’s experience locally and globally – global feminisms, intersectional feminism, ecofeminism, etc.;
- global and local representations and linguistic constructions of queerness;
- postcolonial approaches in local and global contexts;
- Indigenous studies and the tension between the global and the local;
- English studies and health – literary, cultural, and linguistic reactions towards the mental and physical well-being at the time of the pandemic;
- the relation between social context and language use;
- local and global perspectives in language contact theory.
Our keynote speakers are:
Prof. Martin Butler (Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, Germany)
Dr Katarzyna Piątkowska (Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń, Poland)
Please send your paper proposals (max. 250 words) accompanied by a short bio (max. 150 words) to global.local.glocal@gmail.com by 15th February 2021. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by 28th February 2021. The conference will take place online and is free to all participants.
We plan to publish a selection of articles based on conference papers in an edited volume.
Organizing committee
dr hab. Edyta Lorek-Jezińska, prof. UMK
dr Nelly Strehlau
dr Joanna Antoniak
mgr Julia Siepak
mgr Dorota Watkowska
mgr Bernadetta Jankowska
mgr Aleksandra Sieradzka
Katarzyna Stępień
GLOBAL – LOCAL – GLOCAL 