Call For Abstracts

We welcome proposals for individual or co-authored presentations, colloquia and Blue Sky workshops from all whose work intersects with the ‘city’ as a complex of conceptual, physical, sociolinguistic and cultural spaces that individuals and communities inhabit differently, according to numerous, intersecting sociocultural and political factors. The overarching conference theme, ‘Re-imagining the City: Legacies, Challenges, Possibilities,’ recognises the importance of maintaining and strengthening relationships among communities, and the interdependent relationship of peoples’ wellbeing with their environments.

We ask authors to select one of the following potential focus areas for their submission. Please select the focus area with which you believe your work best aligns:

• To what extent can we conceive of the ‘city’ as ‘civilisation,’ ‘community,’ ‘home’? (e.g. the polis, associationism, sites of cultural capital, homelessness, segregation, marginalised and refugee communities).
• Decolonising the city: its spaces, places and monuments. What are the relationships of Indigenous communities, past and present, their societies and languages, with cities? Tāmaki Makaurau’s histories, heritages, and challenges; reclaiming Indigenous sites of significance. Tensions between perceiving urbanisation as modernisation/development or as westernisation/loss of identity.
• Language communities in multilingual and multicultural environments: sustaining and developing Indigenous and immigrant languages, cultures, and identities; multilingualism in education, healthcare, tourism, the media; rural and urban settings; popular culture, identities, and linguistic and cultural diversity. The roles of translation and interpreting in assisting communities in crises. How can comparative and world literatures foster multiculturalism, interculturalism and global citizenship?
• How can the ‘city’ better interface with the ‘country’? Issues around urbanisation, climate change, sustainability and resilience; rural depopulation; borderlands.
• The relationship of cities and citizens with private corporate interests.
• Representations of global cities, especially those in the Asia-Pacific region, and their significance within economic, political and cultural power networks. International and internal migrations.
• Cities and bodies: physical, social, civic, and political; sociocultural stratifications of the city; transgressive spaces and practices; the city and health, mental, physical, spiritual; gender in the city; how different bodies and social, cultural and diasporic groups claim urban spaces to display their identities; disabled communities in the city.
• How does the media construct the city? How is the city communicatively imaged, imagined and experienced through the visual arts and media representations? How do immersive technologies and digital environments mediate our embodied relationships in and with cities?
• Teaching and learning in the 21st -century academy: Do we still need the physical hub of the city in an age of increasing online teaching and learning? How has digital technology impacted on (im)mobility, higher education and language teaching and learning in the 21st century?
• Personified, symbolic, and transnational cities: the city as hero; villain; site of trauma; spiritual symbol; the Republic of Letters; the Lettered City; the City of Ladies.

Criteria for Review of Abstracts 

1. Soundness/quality of theoretical/conceptual approach
2. Methods used
3. The significance and novelty of your findings and/or practical/educational/policy implications
4. The contribution of your research to the conference theme – Re-imagining the City