Day 1. Thursday 15 May 2025
| 9:00 – 9:30 | Registration open |
| 9:30 – 9:45 | Welcome |
| 9:45 – 10:45 | Keynote: Accented Thinking in Migration Studies prof. Shahram Khosravi |
| 10:45 – 11:15 | Coffee break |
| 11:15 – 11:45 | Poetry performance: I CAN SPEAK Marina Kazakova and Sara Maino |
| 11:45 – 1:15 | Panel 1 Linguistic resistance Chair: Alexandra Sanchez 1. Ai Ke “Camouflage as Truth: Polyphony and Silence in Tactical Identity Among Taiwanese Migrants in China” 2. Annie Webster “Collaborative Languages of Displacement: Bridge Translations of Arabic-Scottish Poetry” 3. Calum MacLean Esler “‘Nothing means anything in English’: (Non-)Translation as Resistance in Harry Josephine Giles and KNEECAP” 4. Linh S. Nguyen “The night my parents went to check out grave plots” |
| 1:15 – 2:00 | Lunch break |
| 2:00 – 4:00 | Panel 2 Politics of voice Chair: Jonas Vanderschueren 5. Brigitte Herremans and Helge Daniëls “Presencing harm: How Palestinian Literature Counters Erasure and Invisibilisation” 6. Olha Haidamachuk “Polyphony of Ukrainians’ memories of life before the war” 7. Anita Karimi “From Monologism to Polyphony: Afghan Female Writers in the Diaspora and the Reimagining of Self” 8. Tem Mirkazemiyan, “Accumulative Voices, Plenitude of Meanings: Migration, Home, and Hope in Iranian Adaptations and Translations of Sławomir Mrożek’s The Emigrants” 9. Jad Khairallah “Lebanese Queer Voices: A Revolution for Political Correctness?” 10. Sahar Mousa “Writing in Gaza, writing in exile” |
| 4:00 – 4:30 | Coffee break |
| 4:30 – 6:15 | Panel 3 Tactics of silence Chair: Anna Sofia Churchill 11. Simone Toji and Puo-an Francisca Wu Fu, “From Silence to Polyphony: Exploring Multilingualism and Untranslatability in Migrant Experiences” 12. Deniz Aktaş “I Speak, Therefore I Think?: On Talkability, Criticizability, and the Counters of Belonging” 13. Letizia Sassi “Aphasia as Metatextual Reflection: Exploring Identity and Trauma in Postmigrant Italian Rap” 14. Alice Königstetter “The Reluctant Refugee: Exploring Silence as Resistance in Layla AlAmmar’s Silence is a Sense (2021)” 15. Shuangyi Li “Multilingual ‘Silence’ and Painterly Mediation: Sino-African Encounters in Yvonne Owuor’s The Dragonfly Sea (2019)” |
| 6:15 – 7:30 | Optional workshop with the Klankvangers |
Day 2. Friday 16th May 2025
| 9:00 – 10:45 | Panel 4 Polyphonic practices Chair: Joana Roqué Pesquer 16. Ciara Barrick and Lena Grimm, “Composing Polyphonic Belonging: Reconfiguring Centers and Peripheries in Swiss and Cypriot Multilingual Projects” 17. Daniel Schmidt, Ramona Pellegrino, and David Pappalardo: “Polyphony and Silence in Action: Rethinking Language Ideologies through Artistic and Academic Dialogues” 18. Eugenia Kelbert, Marianna Deganutti, and Lazar Kovačević, “Multilingual Cognates and Modelling Reading Polyphony” 19. Raf Van Rooy, “Greek migrants in Renaissance Europe (1397–1536): Classical bilingual literature between co-creation and self-fashioning” 20. Siobhan P. McShane, “Polyphony and Silence in literature by writers in exile: how do writers in exile negotiate multiple language spaces and the spaces between languages” |
| 10:45 – 11:15 | Coffee break |
| 11:15 – 1:00 | Panel 5: Collaboration and collective narratives Chair: April Wanjing Jiang 21. Santiago Gutiérrez Echeverría, “Postpoetry: an online poetry writing collective” 22. Francesca Morra and Arinas Usoro, “The poison in the cake. A fragmented, collaborative writing about truths, lies, and silences” 23. Maria Loftus and Fiona Murphy, “Stories in the Making: Co-Designing Anti-Racist Narratives in Graphic Forms” 24. Katherine Mackinnon, “Experiments in collective narratives: refugee history in Glasgow” 25. Gerlov van Engelenhoven “Listening to silence: tactical, affective and therapeutic silences in Dutch decolonial practice” |
| 1:00 – 2:00 | Lunch break |
| 2:00 – 3:30 | Roundtable: Co-creative writing alliances Exiled Writers Ink (Jennifer Langer), En Palabras (María Ríos), The Post Collective (Elli Vassalou & Mirra Markhaëva), The Poetry Project (Anna Höllmüller & Theresa Rüger) |
| 3:30 – 3:45 | Closing |
| 3:45 – 4:15 | Coffee break |
| 4:15 – 6:00 | Optional workshop with The Post Collective |
– Venue: Auditorium STUK House for Dance, Image and Sound (breaks: STUK café) Naamsestraat 96, 3000 Leuven
– Lunch: vegetarian buffet available in the STUK Café. Price for non-presenters: 16€.
– Photos and/or videos may be taken during the symposium and shared via the COLLAB team’s website, newsletter, and social media. We will ask for your consent before taking photos or videos.
COLLAB 