English Exposed: Vulnerability and Hope in Culture and Language

English Exposed: Vulnerability and Hope in Culture and Language

International Symposium October 8–10, 2026 Tallinn University

Call for Papers

In a world marked by overlapping crises—wars, epidemics, climate catastrophe, democratic erosion, technological acceleration, and the growing entanglement of artificial intelligence with everyday communication—vulnerability has emerged as an increasingly recognised condition. English, as a global language of culture, education, governance, and digital mediation, is deeply implicated in these processes: it both exposes subjects to new forms of precarity and offers resources for articulation, resilience, care, and hope.

How to think about vulnerability in today’s world? Is it to be resolved or can we conceive of it as a condition to be accepted and embraced? Is it helplessness and lack of agency or is it a relational, affective and ethical condition? How can it be reconceptualised and recognised for its potential to generate new forms of creativity, solidarity, and critical hope? 

This symposium invites scholars working across literary studies, cultural studies, linguistics, and language education to explore how vulnerability manifests in the world and is represented in and through English and Anglophone cultures today. Drawing on recent theoretical work on fear (Han 2024a), survival societies, pain (2020) hope (Han 2024b), critical attention (Citton 2017, Ganteau 2023, 2024), and narrative engagement beyond the human (Caracciolo 2021, 2024), the symposium asks how cultural and linguistic practices respond to a present marked by anxiety, exhaustion, and exposure. How do literary, artistic, cinematic, and discursive forms register contemporary vulnerabilities? How does English function simultaneously as a site of domination and of shared agency, whether in local, global, or intercultural lingua franca contexts? What kinds of futures—pedagogical, political, aesthetic—can be imagined from within conditions of vulnerability?

We particularly welcome contributions that engage vulnerability not only as a theme but as a method, stance, or practice, including creative-critical and interdisciplinary approaches.

Possible thematic areas include (but are not limited to):

  • Vulnerability, precarity, and exposure in contemporary literature, film, and culture
  • Fear, crisis, and “survival societies” in cultural and linguistic imaginaries
  • Hope as disruption, refusal, and collective practice
  • Reimagined communities, solidarities, and the “we” of hope
  • English as a global language: ownership, inequality, and risk
  • English as a lingua franca and the vulnerabilities of global communication
  • AI, automation, and the transformation of linguistic and cultural attention and agency
  • Narration, storytelling, and art as practices of care, repair, or healing
  • Creativity, innovation, and aesthetic experimentation in vulnerable times
  • Vulnerability, attention and hope

The symposium will combine academic panels with film screening and poetry reading, creating a space for dialogue between scholarly analysis and artistic practice.

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers or (where appropriate) practice-based or creative-critical contributions.

Please send a 300-word proposal and a short bio to: tlu.english.major@gmail.com by 15 June 2026. 

Acceptance notifications will be sent by 25 June. 

Please address your queries to: Prof Julia Kuznetski, julia.kuznetski@tlu.ee

Confirmed keynote speakers:

Keynote Lecture Abstracts

Marco Caracciolo

Marco Caracciolo "Embodiment and Vulnerability in Climate Fiction"

“The planet is sick” is a common metaphor for the environmental crisis: it works by mapping illness onto ecological processes. This metaphor goes hand in hand with how the discourse of vulnerability is mobilized in both environmental discourse and climate fiction: preventing ecological collapse becomes an extension of embodiment (and its breakdowns) to the planetary.

This talk examines how embodied concepts such as vulnerability and care inform the way we think about environmental processes. It draws on discussions in ecofeminism--particularly work by Astrida Neimanis and Maria Puig de la Bellacasa--to reveal how scaling up vulnerability to ecological processes involves significant conceptual and ethical tensions. The talk argues that contemporary fiction offers unique insight into these tensions. Richard Flanagan’s The Living Sea of Waking Dreams (2020) provides the main example. The novel draws an explicit connection between planetary crisis and the terminally ill body of the protagonist’s mother, showing how vulnerability, care, and the planetary are complexly and uneasily intertwined. This discussion will help advance arguments on the need to transform the imaginary of the body to address the challenges of climate change.

***

Marco Caracciolo is Associate Professor of English Literature at Ghent University in Belgium. Drawing inspiration from cognitive science, the philosophy of mind, and the environmental humanities, his work explores the forms of experience afforded by narrative in literary fiction and other media (especially video games). Between 2017 and 2022 he led the ERC-funded NARMESH project at Ghent University, which focused on negotiations of the nonhuman in contemporary narrative. He is the author of several books, including most recently Figures of Complexity in Contemporary Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2026). He received the Barbara and George Perkins Prize of the International Society for the Study of Narrative for his 2022 book Slow Narrative and Nonhuman Materialities (University of Nebraska Press).

Hanna Lowe

Hannah Lowe 

Organising Committee

 

  • Professor Julia Kuznetski
  • Dr Miriam McIlfatrick-Ksenofontov
  • Dr Alpo Honkapohja
  • Dr Ksenia Shmydkaya
  • Iveta Aare
  • Bernadette Merila