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CfP: Mediating Social Challenges: Art, Storytelling & Teaching Practices

Call for papers for DigLit Conference

The call for papers for the final conference of the Erasmus+ Project DigLit: Lit. Up Your Phone – A Digital Toolkit for ESL/EFL Classroom to Combat Social Inequalities in Times of Covid-19 Crises  has just been published. The conference will be held in Graz from May 5-6, 2023.

In the the face of social inequalities, digital divides, hegemonic power relations, capitalist conflicts of interests, asymmetric gender relations and international border and migration regimes, educational and social actions are becoming more and more challenging. Mediating these social challenges demands new methods and approaches to address the complexities of the issues while at the same time valuing the individual dimensions of it. Art, storytelling and critical pedagogical practices may provide the necessary tools to follow what bell hooks’ already in the 1990s demanded: teaching to transgress. Cultural representations and storytelling may offer the possibilities to juxtapose the individual diverse livelihoods with the collective social understandings of our societal challenges and may thus be ideal terrains for educational considerations both in first and second language teaching contexts. In this scenario, digital-based methodologies can play a significant role in engaging today students in developing the necessary skills to understand our complex times.

Thus, this conference aims at reflecting on art, literature, storytelling, and digital methods as means to mediate social challenges in teaching practices and to challenge normative perceptions of identity, while also promoting students’ multiliteracy skills.

Abstracts of 200-350 words for a 20-minute presentation should be submitted to by December 18, 2022. Please, include a biography of 100 words or less. Proposals for presenting poetry, art, film, and other creative work will also be considered. Topics to be addressed at the conference include but are not limited to:

  • Digital storytelling
  • Digital teaching practices
  • Critical/ Engaged pedagogy
  • Critical language pedagogy
  • Multiliteracies
  • Diversity pedagogy
  • Critical feminist pedagogy
  • Contemporary Young Adult Literature
  • Art based methods / research / teaching practices

The conference will feature presentations by keynote speakers and scholars from a wide range of
fields. It will include sessions on special topics, a conference dinner, and a guided tour of the Graz Museum. A selection of presentations from the conference will be published in an edited volume
following the conference.

Click here for a PDF Version of this CfP

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