CONFERENCE OVERVIEW

Each year since 2014, undergraduates from SFU’s World Literature Program have hosted an interdisciplinary academic student conference addressing cultural, social, and aesthetic frames of reference. Our panels range across literature, cinema, & the image, and investigate the socio-political, cultural, & literary fallouts of cross-national encounters.

If waves mediate nature's clashing forces and bring a kind of order to them, what about the cycles of calm and calamity in human affairs? Waves might be born from agitation, but so are cultural changes: in each case, harmony is made from the echoes of disruption, and a new pattern asserted. And as with revolutions, the ramifications of sudden developments in art and literature flow outwards, diverting existing patterns or joining their rhythms with those of others. So, how do these forms and ideas furnish new possibilities of understanding and new frameworks for disturbance? If our interdisciplinary conference asks a single question, it might be how artistic discourses become instigators of change?

In the coming year, the 9th annual World Literature Student Conference will be seeking submissions that explore how disparate ideas flow into new possibilities, unravelling and reharmonizing the flows of the human condition alongside those of literature, art, and culture. The event takes place in the BALLROOM of the Simon Fraser University STUDENT UNION BUILDING on Burnaby Campus from 4-6PM on Thursday, March 28th 2024, and features some 30 speakers from across our campus giving 3-minute presentations on art, literature, and culture.