The Tunisian Association for English Language Studies (TAELS)
organizes its 11th International Conference on:
“Home-Making: Reinventing Home
in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures”
November 20-21, 2026
Venue: Sousse, Tunisia
Call for Papers
The TAELS 2026 International Conference invites scholars and researchers to reflect on representations of home in Anglophone literatures and cultures. The conference sets out to examine the ways in which the notion of home is imagined, reconfigured, and reinscribed across disciplinary contexts. It also fosters critical debate on how material dwelling, emotional attachment, and modes of social encounter intersect in constructing home as a plurilocal site of intellectual, ethical, and creative inquiry.
Representations of home in Anglophone literatures extend beyond its basic sheltering function to engage with its symbolic, poetic, and affective dimensions. Home becomes an elusive concept that resists the powerful pull of the myth of rootedness, long imagined as a locus of belonging where identities are shaped and memories anchored. Postcolonial and diasporic writing, in particular, recasts the homeland as a displaced psychic space, constituted through memory, imagination, and desire rather than as a fixed dwelling. Seminal interventions such as Salman Rushdie’s “imaginary homelands,” Bill Ashcroft’s reflections on deterritorialized conceptions of home, and Homi Bhabha’s influential concept of the “unhomely” provide a foundational framework for understanding home as a dynamic and impermanent space.
Scholarship in social and cultural discourse further provides a critical lens for exploring the shifting meanings of home within transnational contexts. In Sanctuary: Ways of Telling, Ways of Dwelling, Marina Warner (2025) observes that “homelands are fashioned over time, and imagination plays a part in making spaces where displaced persons and peoples can feel they belong.” This perspective offers a provocative starting point for examining how cultural narratives shape, interrogate, and reimagine the idea of home beyond fixed borders. The complex entanglements of refugees, migrants, and the xenoi, whose journeys often become emblematic of profound displacement, testify to the tensions between rootedness and mobility, attachment and estrangement, stability and precarity.
The conference also draws on critical spatial theory to examine how home is shaped at the intersection of political economy and cultural-aesthetic processes. Engaging with the work of Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, Edward Soja, and Michel Foucault, the concept of home can be understood not merely as a site of shelter or intimacy, but also as a contested space in which power relations are negotiated, subverted, and produced, a “lived space,” in the Lefebvrian sense. Recent theoretical frameworks have expanded the conceptual vocabulary through which scholars explore the idea of home in relation to questions of belonging and place. Concepts such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s “rhizomatic connections,” Yi-Fu Tuan’s notion of “topophilia,” and “the violence of un-homing” articulated by Adam Elliott-Cooper, Phil Hubbard, and Loretta Lees illuminate the complex emotional and spatial attachments that connect individuals and communities to particular locations. Such perspectives mark a departure from the cohesive nodal role of home towards more fluid trajectories of movement, dispersal, and displacement, as suggested by Nicolas Bourriaud’s reflections on “altermodern mobility.”
By bringing together interdisciplinary perspectives from literary studies, cultural studies, and urban studies, the conference aims to contribute to the critical debate on how Anglophone cultures and literatures continue to reimagine the meanings of home in an era defined by mobility, precarity, and transformation. Within this framework, the conference invites paper proposals that critically engage with the concept of home in its material, symbolic, affective, and imagined dimensions.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- Literary, cultural, and artistic representations of home
- Narratives of migration, exile, and diaspora
- Home, nationhood, and anxieties of belonging
- Hybridity, transnational identities, and the “unhomely”
- Home as discursive formation and ideological construct
- Sanctuary, refuge, and the politics of hospitality
- Cultural memory and the reconstruction of home
- Phenomenology and the embodied experience of home
- “Alternmodern” mobility, digital nomadism, and virtual homes
- Feminist reconfigurations of domestic space and gendered spheres
- Urban space, spatial theory, and contemporary human geography
- Gentrification, housing precarity, and the politics of dwelling
- Multimodal representations of home in visual culture and digital media
- Ecocritical and environmental perspectives on home
Submission Guidelines
We welcome individual abstracts for 20-minute presentations and full panel proposals of four papers treating a similar theme or topic. Priority will be given to panel proposals. The conference is an on-site-only event.
Individual participants and panel convenors are invited to submit 300-word abstracts and short bio notes to the following email address: taelsconference@gmail.com
The deadline for abstract submission is June 30, 2026. Acceptance/rejection decisions will be sent by July 15, 2026.
TAELS editorial board will select a number of papers that will be published after peer review in a collective volume of conference proceedings.
Registration & Fees
Presenters of accepted papers will be required to deposit a registration fee of 300 TND (300 Euros for international participants) before August 31, 2026.
The registration fees will cover:
- Full-board accommodation at the conference venue (one night for Tunisian participants and two nights for international participants)
- Coffee breaks
- Conference materials
- A certificate of participation or attendance
- Access to all conference sessions and workshops
- Submission of the paper for peer review
- Two hard copies of the conference proceedings after publication
* Master’s students currently enrolled at Tunisian universities and presenting papers are eligible for a reduced registration fee of 200 TND.
For attendance only, the registration fees are as follows:
- One-day pass: 100 TND (100 Euros for international participants).
- Two-day pass: 150 TND (150 Euros for international participants)
- Two-day pass + accommodation: 300 TND (300 Euros for international participants.
For advice and more details about the conference, please send your requests to jawhar.dhouib@flshs.usf.tn or saidi@univgb.tn
