University of Zaragoza, 7–9 June 2027
The research group The Posthuman Wound, from the Department of English and German Philology at the University of Zaragoza, is pleased to announce the Call for Papers for the 20th International Conference on Contemporary Narratives in English, entitled:
The Posthuman Wound: Reimagining Trauma, Vulnerability, and Agency in a More-than-Human World
The conference will take place at the University of Zaragoza (Spain) from 7 to 9 June 2027 and will bring together scholars working across contemporary literature, cultural studies, film and television, digital media, and related fields.
Rethinking trauma and vulnerability in a posthuman world
Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, trauma has become an increasingly important framework for understanding contemporary subjectivity, identity, rupture, violence, and loss. At the same time, the rapid transformation of our world through digital technologies, ecological crisis, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and increasingly interconnected infrastructures has contributed to what has been described as a posthuman turn, challenging traditional assumptions about human autonomy, exceptionalism, and self-sufficiency.
Although trauma studies and critical posthumanism have developed along different trajectories, both fields share a concern with subjectivity, embodiment, agency, vulnerability, relationality, and the boundaries of the human. The concept of the posthuman wound emerges from this convergence.
The conference invites us to think about vulnerability not simply as injury or deficiency, but as a constitutive feature of embodied and relational existence. In an increasingly technological and ecologically entangled world, our memories, identities, bodies, and forms of agency are distributed across biological, technological, social, and environmental assemblages. These transformations generate new forms of exposure and vulnerability, but they may also open up new possibilities for ethical responsibility, collective care, and more-than-human forms of agency.
Against this background, the conference asks how contemporary narratives represent and reimagine trauma, vulnerability, and agency in a world where the human is increasingly understood as relational, embodied, interconnected, and embedded within more-than-human assemblages.
Areas of interest
We welcome contributions examining contemporary literature alongside film, television, digital media, and other cultural forms. We particularly welcome papers engaging with the intersections between trauma studies, critical posthumanism, environmental humanities, new materialisms, critical animal studies, media studies, disability studies, and related fields.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- Dialogues between trauma studies, critical posthumanism, and vulnerability studies.
- Narratives of vulnerability, precarity, and resilience in the posthuman condition.
- Aesthetic, formal, and narratological approaches to trauma and the posthuman, non-human, and more-than-human.
- Digital vulnerability, including artificial intelligence, algorithmic cultures, technoscience, surveillance, automation, and datafication.
- The Anthropocene, climate fiction, and environmental humanities, including ecoanxiety, solastalgia, ecological grief, and planetary precarity.
- Transhumanism, biotechnology, cyborg bodies, and technological transformations of identity.
- New materialist and posthumanist approaches to matter, embodiment, and nonhuman agency.
- Multispecies relations, critical animal studies, and more-than-human forms of kinship.
- Disability studies, crip theory, and posthuman approaches to embodiment, vulnerability, and care.
- Feminist, queer, and decolonial posthumanisms.
- Trauma and the posthuman across genres, including science fiction, speculative fiction, crime fiction, horror, weird fiction, and climate fiction.
- Posthuman narratives across media, including film, television, graphic narratives, videogames, interactive fiction, and digital storytelling.
- Ethics, care, justice, and alternative futures, including death, mourning, extinction, repair, hope, and collective forms of flourishing.
Plenary speakers
The conference will feature three distinguished plenary speakers:
Marco Caracciolo — Ghent University
Ana María Fraile-Marcos — University of Salamanca
Mark Bould — University of the West of England, Bristol
Further information about the plenary speakers and the conference programme can be found on the conference website.
Submit your proposal
Paper presentations will be 20 minutes, followed by 10 minutes for questions and discussion.
Proposals should be no more than 300 words and should include:
- Paper title
- Author’s email address
- Institutional affiliation
- A bionote of no more than 100 words
Key dates
📩 Abstract submission deadline: 15 January 2027
📢 Notification of acceptance: February 2027
📍 Conference: 7–9 June 2027
Proposals should be submitted through the online submission form indicated on the conference website.
Join us in Zaragoza
With The Posthuman Wound, we hope to create a space for interdisciplinary dialogue around some of the most pressing questions facing contemporary culture: What does it mean to be vulnerable in a posthuman world? How are technological and ecological transformations reshaping our understanding of trauma and agency? And how can contemporary narratives help us imagine new forms of relationality, care, responsibility, and collective flourishing?
We look forward to receiving your contributions and to welcoming scholars working across different disciplines, media, genres, and theoretical approaches to Zaragoza in June 2027.
🔗 For the full Call for Papers, submission guidelines, information about the plenary speakers, venue, organizers, and all other conference details, please visit the official conference website:
The Posthuman Wound
Research Group, Department of English and German Philology
University of Zaragoza
