10 Dec Call For Papers: ASAL + IABA Asia-Pacific 2025
conference:
The Story and The Self: Navigating Truth Genres in Literature
1-4 July 2025, Flinders University, Adelaide + Online
Keynote speakers include:
Associate Professor Julieanne Lamond (ANU) (Dorothy Green Lecture)
Dr Eloise Faichney (U Melbourne) (ASAL Early Career Researcher Keynote)
Dr Chloe Green (ANU) (IABA Asia-Pacific, Whitlock Early Career Researcher Keynote)
Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) and the International Auto/Biography Association Conference, Asia-Pacific (IABA A-P) are pleased to collaborate on this conference event.
The Story and The Self: Navigating Truth Genres in Literature
Are we living through two seemingly contradictory cultural moments? We fear the rise of AI, deep fakes, and pervasive media bias. We are deeply suspicious about our investments in the truth, and the stories we accept into our lives. In the same cultural moment, those working in literary studies, the creative arts, media, and performing arts, and especially auto/biography studies, are deeply curious about the increasingly blurred lines between fiction and non-fiction. The rapid rise of literary subgenres such as speculative biography, autofiction, biopics, and other generic hybrid forms have seduced practitioners and scholars alike. We enjoy the playfulness, innovation, and provocation of texts that bend genres.
This conference explores the tension/s arising from our contradictory relationship with truth genres in the public sphere. How do stories make claims to truth and reality? How do stories and media shape ideas of selfhood and identity? What changes–now and historically–have made an impact on shifting interests in truth, stories, and self?
We invite proposals that address the concepts of truth, the story, and the self (broadly conceived) as themes or representations in contemporary or historical literature or media. We also welcome proposals that explore these concepts as they relate to creative methods, problems, or practices and are explored via practice-led approaches.
The conference welcomes critical and creative responses including, but not limited to, the themes outlined below:
- ethics and writing across fiction and non-fiction writings
- Realist genres of literature in the Australian context
- narration, point of view, and the self
- speculative biography; biofiction; the biopic (etcetera)
- autofiction (novels; controversies)
- autobiographical fiction
- non-human and post-human lives
- illness narratives at the nexus of genres
- stories of grief and loss at the interstices of fiction and non-fiction
- the intersections between technology and storytelling
- literary hoaxes
- affect and narrative
- experimental literature and/or graphic narratives
- creative practice and storytelling
- Indigenous knowledges and narratives
- gender and sexuality in narrative and media
- storying bodies and embodiment
- rewriting or subverting canon
The conference will be offered in a combination of face-to-face sessions hosted by Flinders University, Adelaide, South Australia, with some hybrid sessions, and online-only sessions (hosted by Flinders, James Cook University, and Griffith University).
Papers for face-to-face presentations will be 20 minutes in length.
Papers for online presentations will be 20 minutes in length.
Proposals for individual papers or panels of 300 words + bios of no more than 50 words should be sent to [email protected] by 10 Feb 2025.
*In your submission, please specify if you intend to present your paper face-to-face or online. Please specify if you paper is part of a panel.
Conference convenors:
Kylie Cardell (Flinders University)
Kate Douglas (Flinders University)
Emma Maguire (James Cook University)
Shannon Sandford (Griffith University)