Monthly Archives: June 2023

Call for Papers – Precarious Planet: Disability, Rights and Justice

Call for papers for a conference being hosted from 29 November – 1 December 2023 at the University of Wollongong, Sydney Campus, Australia. The conference is being convened by Challenging Precarity: A Global Network (CPGN) and the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (SPACLALS). The organisers invite scholars and experts from disciplines in the humanities, especially in literary, visual and cultural studies, as well as those working in the social sciences, to examine multiple frameworks, methodological approaches, and critical lenses in contextualising the theme “Precarious Planet: Disability, Rights and Justice”, and to provide interventions into the pressing concerns of our present times and future lives. Papers considering the relation between the conference theme and the situation(s) of precarity in the Global South are strongly encouraged. Global and local indigenous Pacific, Aotearoa New Zealand, and First Nations Australian perspectives will be particularly considered. For more details, consult https://southpacificaclals.wixsite.com/website/about-1

Submission of abstracts: 1 July 2023

Acceptance email: 18 August 2023

Tzarina Prater’s Twitter Residency on Victor L. Chang (June 26-July 3, 2023)

Join us from June 26-July 3, 2023 for our next JWIL Twitter residency. Tzarina Prater (@TzarinaTPrater) will explore the life, work and contributions of the late Victor L. Chang, who was Editor in Chief of JWIL and senior lecturer in the Department of Literatures in English at UWI.

In her work, Tzarina Prater (@TzarinaTPrater) has used the term “digital diasporic elegy” to describe a set of contemporary texts, practices and forms of participation circulating among diasporic subjects on social media platforms. These modes of memorial and memorializing take up death, dying, loss, mourning, and lamentation as their subject matter” (Archipelagos). This residency aims to create one such space where a digital, diasporic practice of elegy might be enacted. (https://archipelagosjournal.org/assets/issue05/prater-elegy.pdf)

In imagining this residency as a space of and for memory object collection relating to the late Victor L. Chang, we focus on what remains, on the laughter, love, salty, and sweet, on inherent conditions that make us human. On grace.

If you are interested in contributing in any way to this week of remembering and to what we imagine as a living archive, please contact ude.yeltneb@retarpt.

Tzarina T. Prater is an Associate Professor of English in Bentley University’s English and Media Studies Department. Her book project, Labrish and Mooncakes: Afterlives of Chinese Indenture in Jamaican Literary and Cultural Production, is under contract with SUNY Press.