Pacific Rim Conference on English Studies
Call for Papers
“The poet speaks on the threshold of being”—The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard

Knowing One’s Place: Understanding the Influence of Place in Language
Date: April 1-2, 2016

The Conference and Call for Papers
Place is both the how and where of what we experience. Our memories are shaped by liminal moments, delineating instances in time and space that are particularly dominant. Language too, is influenced by space, evolving to suit our surroundings even as we name those surroundings according to what we value. We use language to inhabit social places even as we navigate physical and metaphysical spaces by using our understanding of the world, an understanding intrinsically shaped by language. It is therefore the personal and universal, exclusive and inclusive, physical and imaginative, political and educational, cultural and ideological aspects of language and place that we at the University of Alaska Anchorage ask you to explore with us in this, our 21st annual Pacific Rim Conference on English Studies.

Organized by the graduate students within the English department, the Pacific Rim Conference on English Studies invites submissions in literature, rhetoric and composition, linguistics, anthropology, history, journalism, gender studies and other related fields. The theme of this year’s conference is “Knowing One’s Place: Understanding the Influence of Place in Language.” For this conference, we ask presenters and speakers to question how place and space might influence the development of language practices, how they impact our interactions with one another as individuals and as members of a community, how physical, socioeconomic, gender, and cultural places impact literature, how a more globalized cultural landscape might be influenced by a convergence of language within digital spaces, and how, historically, the confluence of languages have been viewed within diverse cultural spaces.

We hope to explore how the intersections of place and language are necessarily complicated with the emerging nature of the global community, the influence of digital revolution, and the evolution of modern education systems. At this year’s conference, we hope to investigate some of these questions:
How do we construct space through the use of language, and how do we establish our unique identities through our identification of space?
How is language used to build communities that transcend space and yet are influenced by the geographic backgrounds of participants?
How do people navigate through the digital age using language, place, and the influence of both on their identities?
How do cultural spaces contribute to the development of literature and the emergence of global literacies?
How do physical, socioeconomic, gender, and cultural “places or positions impact literature?

Individual Paper Proposals: Please send a 250 word abstract for a 20-minute presentation, including the title of the paper, your name, institutional affiliation, mailing address, phone and fax number, and email address.

Panel Proposals: In addition to providing detailed contact information for each panel member, please send an abstract of no more than 500 words summarizing the panel and describing each paper.


In addition to the aforementioned requirements, your abstract(s) should connect your topic(s) to this year’s conference theme. Please submit your proposals to uaapacrim@gmail.com no later than January 20th, 2016.

Please direct questions to:

Blanche Sheppard, Conference Director
Jason Collins, Assistant Director
Department of English, ADM 101, University of Alaska Anchorage
3211 Providence Drive, Anchorage, Alaska 99508
uaapacrim@gmail.com