2nd International Conference:
Issues and Discourses around Liberal Arts and Humanities
13-14 November 2022
Organised by
Faculty of Arts, University of Rajshahi, Bangladesh
There is no dearth of debates and discussions around the destiny and destination, scope, and worthiness (read ‘marketability’ or commercial viability) of studies in the Liberal Arts and Humanities. In the face of palpable apprehensions from various corners of academia as well as corporates, the anxious practitioners of liberal arts and humanities have learnt to become rather fiercely interdisciplinary, manifest in the seemingly ever stretching academic cartography that now even includes several areas of science, technology, and business. There are emphases these days on Digital Humanities, Technical and Professional Writing, Computer Literacy and so on– all of which combine the humanities and technology. The ‘soft’ and ‘transferable’ skills– capacity for thinking, reasoning, and imagining alternatives, interpreting, communicating, and understanding of human nature, in short, for a holistic development of human individuals – can be attained through such learning, and that is an important reason why the disciplines in arts and humanities are far from becoming redundant or outdated. Anything that requires writing and reflecting, for example, cannot be adequately done by computers or technologies for that matter – at least not yet. Thus there are some valuable skills that the humanities and liberal arts cultivate, and those are also highly valued in the modern workplace, even in business consulting. As we know, the field, primarily, has been dedicated to studying and understanding human beings, human endeavours, and human nature, so how can it be not one of the ‘ideal paths’ to careers that involve humans? Or how can it be futile or useless in terms of the contemporary human needs and concerns? Rather, are not studies in the liberal arts and humanities increasingly becoming more relevant in a world that is starkly plagued by unjust and discriminatory distributions of dignity, rights, and resources, and also by the rise of diverse forms of extremism, intolerance, and violence?
On this note, the Faculty of Arts, Rajshahi University, is going to arrange its second International Conference on Issues and Discourses around Liberal Arts and Humanities during 13-14 November 2022. This two-day event promises to offer a suitable space for those who are interested in engaging with the debates and discussions hinted above. We invite proposals for individual papers from academics in the diverse disciplines of Liberal Arts and Humanities, and their presentation topics may tentatively traverse:
• History, Stories/Narratives, New Historicism
• Ecology, Ecocriticism
• Health and Wellness, Gerontology
• Issues of Subjectivity
• Language, Literature, Philosophy and the World View
• Migration, Margins, Refugees, and Diaspora
• Race, Racism, Class, Caste, Ethnicity
• Gender, Sexuality, Feminism
• Region, Religion, Politics, and Culture
• Utopia, Dystopia, and the Imagined Future
• War, Violence, and Terror
• Partition, Memory, Trauma
• Film, New Media, Performing Arts and Performativity
• Folk Traditions
• Postmodernism, Postcolonialism
• Posthumanism, Digital Humanities
• Pandemic and Academics, Online Teaching-Learning
• Nation and Narration
• Representation of Bangladesh in Literature, Visual Art, and Performance
• Translation Studies, Comparative Literature, Cultural Studies
Seminar languages: Bangla/English/Arabic/Persian/Urdu
All abstracts should be in English. They should be of maximum 250 words and double-spaced in Times New Roman (12 fonts) in MS Word/PDF format. Full papers should be double-spaced in Times New Roman (12 fonts) in case of English and SutonnyMJ (14 fonts) in case of Bangla in MS Word/PDF format. All submission will be online.
Registration: Registration (online only) will start on the 1st July 2022 and end on the 15th of September 2022.
For abstract submission and further communication: dean.arts@ru.ac.bd