2023 CFP

COEDA 2023 Call for Papers

Theme: Re;fuse

September 15-16, 2023 (Friday & Saturday)

Convocation Room (MB218, Main Building)
The University of Hong Kong

“I would prefer not to”

–Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener”

Language and literature have developed through their constant refusal of accepting the world as it is. This act of questioning and challenging established thoughts, norms, and habits – in the form of civil disobedience, creation of countercultures, new movements – persists to this day. The current ecological crisis where we are faced with an unprecedented amount of human waste – of various refuse – calls for further acts of refusing, as well as undoing former forms of refusals, for a sustainable planet and future.

What does it mean, in a world increasingly characterized by the policing of states, boundaries and resistance, to refuse adherence? At the same time, how might we interrogate and un-do former acts of refusals that enabled as well as limited knowledge production and political agency? How might we rethink or reinvigorate forms of excluded, marginalized, disavowed, and unorthodox knowledge? How might thinking about refusal and reconnection challenge our understandings of our respective fields? What affective climates enable and complicate acts of refusing and states of being refused? Can refusing or re-fusing challenge the status quo? What does it mean to make meaning out of what is seen as literal refuse?

We invite papers that deal with ways in which acts of refusal, as well as ideas of refuse, and the rich field of semantic possibilities they contain, allow us to make sense of both our private and institutional lives. Be it waste, resistance, rejection, change, reconnecting – to refuse and re-fuse holds potential to tip the scales of the critical imagination. Perspectives and approaches across multiple disciplines are welcome.

Possible fields of inquiry may include, but not limited to:

-Histories and counter-histories of exclusion, marginalization and rejection

-Archaeologies of rejected knowledge (superstition, pseudo-sciences, anachronism)

-Global South and Global North

-Diversity and superdiversity

-Sameness and difference in identity navigation

-Gatekeeping discourse in law, healthcare, and education

-Cross-cultural communication

-Community practice and membership

-Inclusion, marginalization and integration

-Gender, sexuality, and normativity

-Authenticity and exoticity

-Globalization and localism

-Borders and boundaries

-Literary canon and postcritique

-Multilingualism and translanguaging

-The Anthropocene, climate change and ecological crisis

COEDA 2023@HKU is now open for submissions. Papers should be 15-20 minutes long in presentation. Please email your title, 250-word abstract and a short bio in a Word document by 11 June 2023 to coeda23@hku.hk

For further inquiries, please contact:

Student Representatives:
Tingcong Lin    lintc@connect.hku.hk
Shameera Nair Lin   snlin@connect.hku.hk

  Faculty Representative:

Dr. Brandon Chua   bchua@hku.hk