[Commlist] Call for Papers: FILLM 30th Congress - "Talking Country"

2nd Call for Proposals: 'Talking Country'
To present at the 30th Congress of FILLM

Location: Victoria University (Melbourne) in Narrm, Australia
Dates: 8-11 December 2026 Email for queries: (FILLM2026 /at/ vu.edu.au)

This is the 2nd Call for Proposals to present at the 30th Congress of 
the International Federation for Modern Languages and Literatures 
(FILLM). Theme for the Congress is Talking Country: we are looking for 
individual presentations, panel sessions, and academic skills workshops, 
and other proposals that can respond strongly to this theme. This will 
be an expressly "on-country" Congress, where presenters will attend in 
person. Details about how to submit are available via the Congress 
webpage: https://www.vu.edu.au/30th-FILLM-congress.

Supporting this bid are two FILLM members, supported by Victoria 
University as the host venue:
* The Association for Commonwealth Language and Literature Studies, 
South Pacific Chapter.
* The Australasian Universities Languages and Literature Association.

Australia has much to offer the global conversation for languages and 
literatures, as well as much to learn from it. This continent boasts the 
world's oldest continuous discursive traditions, with transmissions of 
culture and law spanning more than 65,000 years. By some measures, it is 
one of the most successfully integrated multicultural societies of late 
modernity. At the same time, though, Australia is a country struggling 
to come to terms with its colonial legacies of violence and 
expropriation-and with ongoing problems of discrimination and prejudice. 
The lack of care for Aboriginal language preservation since 1788 has 
been an especially egregious failure of government and society.


++ Congress Theme and Subthemes ++

'Talking Country' is a theme that speaks against taking country for 
granted. Countries are vessels for languages and literatures, as well as 
fields of conflict in which cultures may confront, avoid, or obliterate 
each other. For many Indigenous epistemologies, country is a term of 
immense importance. It names a locus of profound responsibility that 
present cultures owe to their futures and pasts.
Meanwhile, multicultural praxis often chafes at the norms of country and 
nation that would confine languages, literatures, and cultures to fixed 
points in space and time. This theme is a call to reflect on the 
importance of country, and to debate its entailments for our fields of 
study-including:
o Interplay and interrelation (and conflict and ignorance) of languages 
and literatures, operating between and within countries.
o Intersections between country or nation and other modes of cultural 
identification-examples include gender, race, religion, sexuality, and 
wealth.
o Nation-affirming agendas and their normative consequences for 
languages, literatures, and cultures.
o Various ways that Indigenous and multicultural contributions are 
reconfiguring received understandings about country and culture, as well 
as various forms of resistance to these changes.
o Agendas for decolonisation and for worldwide efforts to preserve 
languages and cultures of expression.
o Ecologies of places and cultures, including ecolinguistics and ecopoetics.
o Ontologies underpinning comparative language and literature studies.
o Interrelations between ancient or lost country, future or imagined 
country, and present or contingent country.
o Countries talking, countries as voices and authors, countries as 
narratives and texts.
o Challenges that ideas about country pose to education about languages 
and literatures.


++ Submitting a Proposal ++

If you wish to present an individual paper (up to 18 minutes content), a 
panel session (85 minutes, including discussion time), or an academic 
skills workshop (85 minutes), please do so via our Congress webpage: 
https://www.vu.edu.au/30th-FILLM-congress. Please note the information 
requested and relevant word limits for proposals, as the submissions 
portal sets these out.

The submission portal will ask you for explicit information about your 
submission's proposed participants, the type of presentation you 
propose, and how it will address the Congress theme-as well as its title 
and abstract.

This 2nd CfP round closes 31 May 2026. Proposals received on or before 
that date will receive an outcome no later than 31 July 2026, affording 
presenters lead-time to plan travel and seek any funding support. If you 
will need a formal invitation letter for visa, funding, or other 
purposes, please indicate this need in the portal when you submit your 
proposal.


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