July 4-7, RMIT University and Deakin University, Melbourne

A partnership between ASAL (Association for the Study of Australian Literature) and ASLEC-ANZ (Association for the Study of Literature, Environment and Culture (Australia and New Zealand)), the 2023 ‘Recentring the Region’ conference turns attention to ‘the region’ in Australian literary studies and environmentally-oriented critical and creative practice.

Regions pre-date colonisation in Australia, bringing them into tension with the nation and its structures. They encompass geographies, hydrologies, ecologies, networks and alliances. They are structural and affective, relational and fluid. They can bring entities together and move them apart. Regions are a way of thinking, narrating, and making, and they are continually being constituted by practices that encompass the literary and the artistic in all their forms.

‘Recentring the Region’ will be face to face (based at RMIT University in Melbourne’s CBD) with some fully online sessions to accommodate interstate and overseas participants.

We invite broad and inclusive approaches to ‘the region’ in Australian literary and other creative practices and scholarship from Australia, Aotearoa and beyond, and call for 20 minute paper/presentation proposals (diverse formats also welcome) that trouble the nation state as the primary regional frame. These might consider, but are not limited to:

·         First Nations literature, creative practice and regions

·         Regional literary history and cultures

·         Critical regionalism and bioregionalism 

·         Environmental, oceanic and atmospheric regions

·         Trans-Tasman and Pacific writing and literary culture

·         Place-making and literary practice

·         Biographies from the regions

·         Genres as literary regions

·         Ecocritical regions

·         More-than-human regions

·         Artforms as artistic regions

·         Critical discourses, theories and disciplines as scholarly regions

·         Periods as temporal regions

Please send 200 word abstract/proposal and 50 word bio by 28 February 2023 to RegionsConference2023@gmail.com

Please indicate on your submission whether you are submitting as a member of ASAL, ASLEC-ANZ or both and if you are planning to present online or face to face (hybrid is unavailable). For more information about ASAL and ASLEC-ANZ see