SAMLA 97: Knowledge (SAMLA)
Atlanta, GA
Organization: South Atlantic Modern Language Association
Event: SAMLA
To submit a call, please use this link https://samla.ballastacademic.com/ to first make an account and then submit your CFP. (You do not have to be a member to submit a Call for Proposals). The final deadline for submissions is June 28.
Please also make sure to visit our new website at southatlanticmla.org!
SAMLA invites scholarly contributions across disciplines related to its timely theme, “Knowledge,” through diverse academic formats: panels, roundtables, workshops, readings, presentations, and posters — all united by an intellectual exploration of knowledge production, transmission, and transformation in contemporary humanistic studies.
SAMLA 97 stands as a pivotal academic gathering that critically examines the intricate relationships between knowledge, collective awareness, and community-building in our increasingly fragmented digital era. The conference emerges as a transformative platform designed to reimagine the traditional conceptualizations of knowledge, emphasizing the profound significance of the present moment (“now”) as a dynamic nexus for generating collective understanding and cultivating resilient, intellectually engaged communities.
By strategically bringing together a diverse cohort of scholars, students, and educators from multidisciplinary backgrounds, the event aims to forge innovative pathways for harnessing intellectual resources as catalysts for meaningful social transformation. The conference will explore how knowledge can transcend mere academic discourse, becoming a powerful instrument for fostering deeper interpersonal connections, advancing social justice, and expanding global consciousness.
At its core, SAMLA 97 confronts the growing dehumanization and systemic marginalization of humanities studies worldwide. It seeks to counteract the pervasive technological paradigms that increasingly mediate human experience by rekindling communitarian affects—emphasizing empathy, shared understanding, and collective agency. The event will critically examine how academic communities can resist alienation, restore meaningful human connections, and reestablish a sense of purposeful engagement with social and intellectual realities. Through rigorous dialogue and collaborative exploration, the conference aspires to demonstrate that knowledge is not a static commodity but a dynamic, collaborative process of mutual understanding and collective empowerment.
Exploring the ways we know now, SAMLA 97’s theme addresses an array of topics, including propaganda, social justice, censorship, uncertainty, knowledge production, interpretive strategies, textual mobility, intellectual genealogies, critical methodologies, and artificial intelligence.
We invite submissions on, but do not limit them to, the following topics:
• Transdisciplinary & intersectional knowledge formations
• Methodologies in archival research, digital humanities, knowledge reconstruction, and hermeneutics
• Decolonial epistemologies
• Performative texts and meaning making
• Embodied knowledge in literary and artistic practices
• Critical theory and interpretive frameworks
• Current attacks on the humanities
• Knowledge through social media
• AI’s influence on learning, pedagogy, assessment, ethics, and bias equity
• Fictional, auto-fictional, and cinematic constructions of knowledge
• Scientific knowledge in the humanities, including scientific method vs. science as written discourse
• Multicultural knowledge across continents and languages
• Errors and lies
• Conspiracy and “fake news”
• Misreading as both a pedagogical and methodological problem
• Representations of authority and expertise
• Benefits of uncertainty and ambiguity
• Forms of evidence and argument
https://www.southatlanticmla.org
SAMLA
