Call for Paper – additional topics

Topics might include but are not restricted to:

LCS related to European social & cultural challenges

  • What research themes and approaches in LCS research in general and in the four themes in particular you consider as most valuable and/or most promising for addressing societal challenges? Could you provide examples of such research?
  • How should we identify LCS topics of importance for addressing social & cultural challenges?
  • What mechanisms could facilitate communication between humanities scholars and potential users of their research, eg. specific channels of communication (regular conferences, a website, a register of experts, other)?
  • What shall we teach students to prepare them for this type of research?

Cultural memory

  • How do memory studies apply and benefit from LCS approaches and the related notions of textuality, fictionality and rhetoricity of the representations of the past?
  • With the divisive memories of wars, genocide, dictatorships, expulsions and colonialism, is a European memory possible and who could be its agents? Can conflicting memories change into reconciliatory ones?
  • Who owns cultural memory and how does this ownership change (e.g. passing from nation states to transnational and transcultural agents)?
  • What impact does the advent of new technologies have on the regimes of memory, and with what social and political consequences?

Migration & Translation

  • How do increased mobility and growing multilingualism affect the needs for LCS across Europe and beyond it?
  • What practices of linguistic and cultural translation are associated with effective communication in today’s mobile world and how can LCS contribute to their development and widespread application?
  • Who are today’s agents of translation and self-translation? What private and public spaces do they inhabit? And how can they have a greater impact on cultural understanding and social integration?
  • How can LCS contribute to shaping the debate on language and migration both within the education system and, more broadly, at the level of language and cultural politics and policies?

Digital textuality

  • What do Digital Humanities (DH) approaches and perspectives bring to LCS research and impact?
  • How do DH methods engage with the concepts of textuality, fictionality, rhetoricity, and historicity?
  • What forms of rhetorical analysis are called for by digital textuality?
  • In what ways do digital texts disrupt the intimate links between author and work, voice and self, and what impact does this disruption have on contemporary notions of selfhood, individuation and the humanities?

Biopolitics, biosociality and the body

  • In what ways do aesthetic and other forms of creativity construct the body as a textual object of experience or research?
  • Is it possible to separate the ‘factual’ content of such constructions from their fictionality and if it is not, what does this tell us about how we – including doctors and patients – may think and speak of the body?
  • What rhetorical devices are used to write, speak or think of the body and how do these affect our understanding of being or having bodies?
  • If the human body is infinitely changeable, such that concepts like beauty, identity and the ‘natural’ no longer carry any fixed validity, how can we rethink ancient notions like artifice, creativity and the aesthetic?

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