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We seek contributions for presentation at an international workshop on the “Politics of the Multilingual: Language, Form, and Cultural Expression,” to be hosted by the Korean Humanities Initiative at UCLA on February 18-19, 2027.

 

While “multilingualism” often describes a way of thinking about the coexistence or circulation of multiple discreet languages, this workshop asks how texts, images, performances, and/or archival work reshape comparative, national, and area-based modes of inquiry through nonmonolingual practices—formal or conceptual operations that challenge the one-language paradigm and unsettle boundaries between languages, nations, media, and fields.

 

We invite scholarship that asks how literary, visual, and cultural practices resist readings constrained by such monolingual or multilingual modes, and how that resistance becomes legible within institutions, archives, canons, and disciplinary frameworks shaped by the one-language paradigm. We are especially interested in approaches that move beyond celebratory accounts of linguistic diversity to examine the political, aesthetic, and institutional conditions through which cultural expression becomes recognizable as such. We welcome comparative and interdisciplinary work across Korean and East Asian literary studies, comparative literature, translation studies, linguistics, art and art history, media studies, photography, performance studies, and other related fields.

 

Selected participants will be asked to submit a paper for circulation prior to the workshop; the event is intended to support sustained discussion and the development of future publication projects. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

 

·    the limits of multilingualism and/or translingualism

·    formalist approaches to multilingual and nonmonolingual texts

·    visual/media arts and the limits of monolingualism

·    representations of dialect, accent, “broken” language, and nonstandard speech

·    translation, transliteration, untranslatability

·    mixed scripts and script politics

·    nationalism, literary history, and the monolingual paradigm

·    colonial, postcolonial, diasporic, and migrant language practices

·    canon formation and linguistic classification

·    literary works that resist national or area-studies containment

·    world literature and lingualism

·    language, race, nation, and the politics of literary legibility

 

Funding is available through the UCLA Korean Humanities Initiative for contributor travel to and participation in the workshop. Brief abstract (350 words or less) and CV (max. 2 pages) may be submitted via email at politicsofthemulti@proton.me by October 11, 2026. Any inquiries may be addressed to co-organizers Jinaeng Choi (jinaeng.choi@georgetown.edu) or Chris Hanscom (hanscom@humnet.ucla.edu).