[ecrea] Protest and Dissent in Translation and Culture

*Call for Papers*

*Protest and Dissent in Translation and Culture***

*Department of Anglophone Cultures and Literatures*

*SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities *

*11-13 May 2017, Warsaw*

**

Though dissent and protest seem to be strongly linked with politics and 
with political actions, the range of their senses and uses is much 
broader and, as Amit Chaudhuri has noticed, dissent is inscribed in the 
very idea of the literary which, “in its resistance to interpretation, 
is a peculiar species of dissent.” The common ground of protest and 
dissent is, very generally, a disagreement with what is, and an 
expression of the necessity of some change which seems to be standing 
behind the very gestures of dissension or protestation. This expression 
may take various forms and make use of various modalities coming from 
different cultures, states and places. Protest and dissent may sometimes 
be individual gestures, as seems to be the case with   Melville’s 
Bartleby’s famous “I would prefer not to”, though the outdoor reading of 
Bartleby, the Scrivener organized by Occupy Wall Street supporters at 
Zuccotti Park in New York in November 2011 was an event which renarrated 
the story as “resonating quite well with the mission of the OWS protest” 
because it not only questioned the assumed hierarchy and expressed the 
strength of passive resistance, but also because it was set on Wall 
Street. Dominance and resistance seem to be inevitably speaking through 
various narratives and stories we live by, the stories which are 
narrated and renarrated, framed and reframed in different social, 
political and language communities and realities, through different 
media and means, and translated into different contexts and languages. 
The notion of framing, Mona Baker claims in “Reframing Conflict in 
Translation”, allows us “to see translational choices not merely as 
local linguistic challenges but as contributing directly to the 
narratives that shape our social world”. The ways in which we name, 
rename, or label events, groups of people, even places have implications 
in the real world and may help us realize that the world is not made up 
of universally accepted norms, but that we also partake in negotiating 
its construction, its changing meanings and senses. Protest and dissent 
do not necessarily have to be an incentive to a revolutionary change, to 
a shift of the dominant, but may testify to there being what Edward Said 
called simply “something beyond the reach of dominating systems”, 
something which limits power and “hobbles” it also through 
translatological resistance to finality.

We invite papers looking at protest and dissent from different 
theoretical and methodological perspectives (Translation Studies, 
Literary Criticism, Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, Discourse 
Analysis, Feminist and Gender Studies, Queer Theory, Philosophy, 
Sociology, History of Ideas, Colonial and Postcolonial Studies), papers 
not only theorizing  protest and dissent but also papers engaged in 
broadly understood disagreement, disapproval, critique or resistance, 
potentials of conflict management and/or the educational and pedagogical 
dimensions of dissent.  We also invite papers showing how narratives of 
dissent and protest (novels, poems, stories, histories, films, news, 
press articles, protest songs …) are renarrated/translated in different 
social and political contexts and the ways in which translators’ choices 
may be oriented or disoriented. If Jacques Rancière is right saying that 
“the essence of politics is the manifestation of dissensus as the 
presence of two worlds in one”, then translation, as an inevitably 
divided activity, may be a kind of discourse which reveals that oneness 
may be one of those ideas which harbour consensual dominance and the end 
of politics, the end of dissensual plurality and the beginning of the 
police which, in different disguises, finds these days its way to the 
streets of numerous places of the world.

We suggest the following, broad, thematic areas as issues for disputes 
and highly probable clashes of ideas:


Rhetoric(s) of protest and dissent

Narrating/renarrating protest and dissent

Dissent and protest in intercultural contexts

Dissent and protest in the culture of global/local politics

Translating protest

Translating dissent

Translation-power-resistance

Empowerment and translation

Resisting power/power of resistance

Discourses of dissent and protest

Discursive strategies of protest and dissent

Discursive analyses of protest and dissent

Pedagogy/ies of dissent

Manipulating protest and dissent

Protest and persuasion

Conflict/protest/dissent

Translating conflict

Literature(s) of protest

Protest/dissent and media

Protest/attack/defense

Protesters/dissenters as friends

Protester/dissenters as enemies

Good guys and bad guys

Protest and activism

Activating/de-activating protest and dissent

Global dissents and/in translation

Translating collectives/collective translations

Solidarity in translation


*
*

**

*Keynote speakers:
Professor Mona Baker (University of Manchester) *

*Professor Ben Dorfman (Aalborg University) *

*Professor Hanna Komorowska (University of Social Sciences and 
Humanities, Warsaw)*

*Professor Tadeusz Rachwał (University of Social Sciences and 
Humanities, Warsaw) *

Proposals for 20-minute papers (ca 250 words) should be sent to 
(dissent /at/ swps.edu.pl) <mailto:(dissent /at/ swps.edu.pl)> by *20 February 2017*. 
We also encourage panel proposals (comprised of 3 to 4 papers, and an 
additional 100-150 words explaining how they are interlinked in 
addressing the panel theme).

Notification of acceptance will be sent by *28 February 2017*.

The deadline for registration and payment of the conference fee: *31 
March 2017*.

Participants will be invited to submit extended versions of their 
presentations to be published in an edited volume.

The conference fee is *550 PLN | 130 EUR | 140 USD* for all participants.


Conference website:

www.swps.pl/dissent <http://www.swps.pl/dissent>



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