CALL FOR PAPERS
“Lives in Transition: Negotiating the Currents in a Changing World”
The 4th Biennial Conference of the IABA Americas Chapter
Department of Literatures in English
The University of the West Indies, Mona
Kingston, Jamaica
June 13-15, 2019
The conference conveners invite papers that explore the means by which auto/biographical subjects explore lives ‘in transition’ and/or in the process of ‘transitioning.’ How do life narratives explore the kinds of adjustments, challenges, and negotiations made in ‘transitional’ periods? How do we as life narrative scholars, teachers, and practitioners metabolize and incorporate ideas of transitioning in our approaches to our respective disciplines and methodologies?
Possible topics include how these transitions may have been brought on by trauma, natural disasters, wars, referendums and other legislative changes, social policies, scandals, illnesses, medical procedures, body politics, gendered lives, migrations, or the relocations of Indigenous and other communities. We are also interested in papers that explore life, death, kinship, consciousness, and mourning in the ongoing aftermath of violence, which Black cultural studies scholar Christina Sharpe encourages us to imagine, in her work on slavery’s legacies, as living “in the wake.” Consideration can also be given to expressions of personal and political triumphs, accomplishments, and celebration.
Papers addressing all genres of life narratives (written, visual, performed, multimodal, interdisciplinary, digital, etc.) are welcome.
We invite abstracts of 250-300 words accompanied by brief biographies (no more than 100 words) on topics that are not limited to, but may include:
• Citizenship and records
• Refugees, points of entry/departure
• Health, rehabilitation, and recovery
• Rites of passage
• Legislation
• Transitional technologies
• Sexuality and advocacy
• Family and generational conflict
• Transgender lives
• Extradition, detention, and deportation
• Embodied politics
• Teaching as transitional tool: methodology, internship, practicum
• Discursive practices: movement, migration and diaspora
• Constructing and deconstructing gender
Please send abstracts and biographies via email to IABAA876@gmail.com by December 1, 2018.
