CFP: End of the Word as We Know It: Crisis and Language, Indiana University Bloomington (30.11.2022)

Indiana University Department of Germanic Studies

14th Biennial Graduate Student Conference

End of the Word as We Know It: Crisis and Language

February 24-25, 2023 Indiana University Bloomington

For the 14th Biennial Graduate Student Conference, IUB Germanic Studies department offers 16 undergraduate and graduate students the possibility to address the questions of crisis and language. We live in the time of crisis where the sense of an ending is forever more relevant with accelerating climate crisis and economic inequalities across the globe, COVID-19 pandemic, as well as ongoing war in Ukraine. What role does our discipline play during this time? What role should it play? We invite participants interested in making sense of these times by discussing questions of crisis and language, such as:

• What crisis of language do we face today? To whom is it a crisis? Are there parallels in history and literature that help us negotiate/map this current crisis?
• When does an era, a language and/or culture come to an end? What happens after their “death”? What is their afterlife? What do we do if there’s no hope?
• Are there spaces that are associated with crisis? How are they imagined? How does language create this space?
• How do the different modes of language operate within crisis? Ex.: “fake news,” CDC statements, election campaigns? How do these different modes of language compare across cultural divides, such as those in USA, Germany, or Austria?
• How does language reflect a history of crisis? In what way do these crises shape language and their different modes?

Participants will have a chance to discuss and refine their papers through a conversation with panelists and receive feedback from the faculty mentors at IU. All papers will be pre-circulated before the conference. 

Please send an abstract (maximum 300 words), a title for your presentation, and a short bio (maximum 50 words) including your name, email address, degree level and institutional affiliation to: Brian Hensley (bphensle@iu.edu) by November 30th, 2022. Final decisions will be made no later than December 15th, 2022 and full-length paper (8-10 pages) will be due by February 14th, 2023 for pre-circulation among panelists and commentators.

Redaktion: Constanze Baum – Lukas Büsse – Mark-Georg Dehrmann – Nils Gelker – Markus Malo – Alexander Nebrig – Johannes Schmidt

Diese Ankündigung wurde von H-GERMANISTIK [Nils Gelker] betreut – editorial-germanistik@mail.h-net.msu.edu