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1st NEOLAiA International Conference on Narrating (Hi)Stories in Decentring Europe

Mar 31, 2025 | Research

We are pleased to announce that the CFP for the 1st NEOLAiA International Conference on Narrating (Hi)Stories in Decentring Europe (1st-3rd October 2025, University of Jaén, Spain) is open. This is an interdisciplinary conference jointly organised by partner universities of the Alliance of European Universities NEOLAiA.  It will count with presentations by the following confirmed keynote speakers: Izabela Dahl (University of Örebro) and Celestino Deleyto (University of Zaragoza). 
 
Our goal is to explore hybrid narratives related to lived experiences and memory, focusing on historical crises and disruptions. We aim to reinterpret Europe through transcultural and counter-factual narratives, addressing themes like hegemony, migration, and decolonization for a more nuanced understanding. This call for papers invites studies on a diverse array of narratives—oral, written, factual, and fictional—found in autobiographies, memoirs, biographies, fiction, collective narratives, and national stories. Topics under examination include:

  • History and life-writing  

  • History and memory narratives 

  • Relations between fiction and document: fact-fiction, ego-document and ego-history, etc. 

  • Hegemonic narratives and subaltern communities’ stories 

  • Oral narratives as a source of knowledge and as a strategy for meaning-making 

  • Narrative identities and traumas, narrative therapy 

  • Facts and their discursive representations: boundaries, borderliners, hybrid entities 

  • Material history and literary history 

  • Post-truth and post-factual societies  

  • Narratives, media, and remediations: written, visual, multimedia, and cross-media narratives  

  • Historicity of narrative paradigms: continuity and discontinuity in narrative models within literary history 

  • The role of memory in shaping multilingual identities in Europe

  • Language, trauma, and memory in literature and in historical narratives

  • Language, translation, and multilingual realities in the European context

  • English in European higher education: pragmatic adaptation and negotiation in multilingual settings 

  • Sociolinguistic perspectives on language use in European societies

The deadline for abstract submissions is April 12, 2025. We invite 200-word abstracts with 4-6 keywords for 20-minute paper presentations (+10 minutes for discussion) in one of the conference languages (English, Spanish, or French). Proposals, together with a short biographical note (60-70 words, including your name, institutional affiliation, and e-mail address), must be sent as an email attachment to narratinghistories.neolaia@gmail.com. Participants will be notified by May 5, 2025.

Please find attached the poster and the CFP in English, French and Spanish so that you can share them with anyone you think may be interested. For more information and updates on the conference, you can check the official website: https://www.narratinghistories-neolaiaconference.com/. 

We are looking forward to seeing you in Jaén!

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