Call for Papers: Symposium at Utrecht University, 10 April 2026

Literature, Care, and the Ethics of Living in Southwest Asia and North Africa

The twenty-first century continues to unfold as an era marked by intersecting crises—climate catastrophes, political and economic instability, public health emergencies, wars, and mass displacement. In the context of Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA), these challenges are deeply felt, not only in material terms but also in the political, emotional, ethical, and relational fabrics of everyday life. We invite contributions to a symposium that approaches the SWANA region not through familiar tropes of crisis but through the quieter, more enduring work of care, vulnerability, and solidarity. Our goal is to ask how different cultural productions, as both reflective and generative forces, might help us reimagine our responsibilities to one another and to the planet we share.

The symposium aims to explore deeper understandings of how care—as a critical, creative, and ethical framework—can mediate our engagements with modern-day challenges, particularly through the complex and embodied histories of the SWANA region. Our focus extends beyond human experiences to encompass more-than-human communities and their environments. The symposium will investigate literature’s response to, and influence on, ethical and political practices while recognising care as a contingent and relational operation.

Rather than accepting care as a naturalised or depoliticised category, we aim to interrogate its use and implications across legal, medical, political, environmental, and economic discourses. In doing so, we explore how care—as practice, as politics, as affect—can open up alternative ways of attending to bodies, communities, and ecologies. We recognise care as both an intimate and collective practice that has the potential to challenge and reshape dominant narratives.

We welcome contributions that approach these questions from a variety of disciplinary and methodological perspectives, including but not limited to environmental humanities, medical humanities, posthumanism, gender and queer studies, postcolonial studies, and migration studies. Proposals may engage a broad range of narrative forms and media—literature, visual and performing arts, film, digital media, and video games—with a particular focus on SWANA’s cultural, historical, and socio-political contexts, including diaspora experiences and narratives.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Care as an everyday practice of interdependence and repair
• Literary representations of caregiving and receiving
• Literature and the reconfiguration of relational ethics
• Care as resistance: feminist, queer, ecological, or decolonial perspectives
• Multispecies care and solidarity
• Utopian and speculative visions of communities of care

The symposium is scheduled for 10 April 2026. We welcome abstracts from scholars at all career stages. Authors of selected abstracts will be invited to contribute to an edited volume. (We are currently in dialogue with several publishing houses for the volume.) Please submit a 250–300 word abstract along with a short bio to swanalit[at]uu.nl by 1 July, 2025.

Organizers:

Dr. Müge Özoğlu, Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, Utrecht University Dr. Merve Tabur, Lecturer in Comparative Literature, Utrecht University