Bridges and Borders: Material Actualities
A Graduate Student Conference presented by the Department of English in collaboration with the Department of Languages, Cultures, and Applied Linguistics
We are tethered to reality through the material world. Yet competing interpretations, motivations, and claims to truth muddle our ability to (co-)construct and engage in a meaningfully shared sense of reality. The theme of this year’s Bridges and Borders conference is Material Actualities. Material actualities can be understood as narratives, generally accepted facts, or theoretical frameworks that help us to engage with and make sense of expectations, beliefs, and material reality. This year’s theme invites participants to explore how our navigation through physical, interpersonal, and/or intrapersonal networks, as well as the representation of those networks, is complicated by what is intended, expected, or believed as compared to what can be broadly accepted as “true.” We welcome papers, roundtable discussions, creative pieces, workshops, and pre-constituted panels that interrogate the tensions, alignments, and divergences between the realms of the material and cultural and to examine the ways that writing, art, film, speech, and media build toward or curtail social and/or material change in various contexts.
Participants are welcome to consider:
- Materiality, “truth,” and fiction in literary, cultural, and rhetorical contexts
- How political and social realities are changing
- How practitioners make texts relevant to new and multidisciplinary audiences and how the relationships between text and audience shift based on time, medium, and/or sociocultural context
- How practitioners or audiences make texts relevant to new and multidisciplinary realities
- In what ways the process of creation engages with, blurs, troubles, or transcends the concept of authorial “intent” and/or the material constraints or affordances of different physical environments
- How language use and linguistic realities are co-constructed and mediated by a material world
With this call for papers, we are asking, broadly: What is the role of immateriality and/or fiction in relation to material actualities and material realities? How are different disciplines influenced by material actualities, and how are material actualities in turn influenced by those disciplines? How can multidisciplinary approaches productively help us understand material actualities? What is the creation process of material actualities compared to “imagined realities”? How do various simulacra reflect or otherwise alter our engagement with the material reality? How do objects or histories travel across borders into new circumstances or in response to new exigencies?
We welcome proposals from disciplines across the Humanities such as Literary and Cultural Studies, Rhetoric, and Languages, Cultures, and Applied Linguistics, as well as the following fields and disciplinary interests:
- Applied and sociolinguistics
- Archival or Museum studies
- Archives of multilingual communities
- Bi/multilingualism
- Censorship
- Comparative literature
- Creative writing
- Critical race studies
- Curation and preservation
- Drama and performance studies
- Education and pedagogy
- Ethnography
- Film and media studies
- Gender and sexuality studies
- History
- Infrastructure(s)
- Institutional funding and defunding
- Institutional studies
- Language documentation
- Language revitalization
- Language, power, and ideology
- Linguistic landscape
- Linguistics
- Mobilities and spatial formation
- Political theory
- Second Language Acquisition
Submission Types
Research Presentation: Participants present research from coursework, dissertation, or extracurricular projects. Works in progress welcome!
Project Showcase: Participants display, read, or otherwise showcase something they have created (e.g., a poem, a creative work, a website, a document design project).
Preconstituted Panels: Participants submit a preorganized panel, typically made up of 3-4 paper presentations. We welcome panels that grow from graduate seminars with students at the same university or branch out across disciplinary and university boundaries.
Guest Speakers
Carol Brown Lecture: Thursday, March 19, 2026
Keynote Address: Friday, March 20, 2026
