Call for Proposals

Imagination, Creation, Critique

The 2025 Society for Linguistic Anthropology Conference

May 29–31, 2025 | Ida Noyes Hall, The University of Chicago, Hyde Park, Chicago

What does it mean to imagine today?

The 2025 Society for Linguistic Anthropology Conference invites participants to explore the many ways that imagination critically shapes, reproduces, and transforms social worlds across times, spaces, and scales through discursive and non-discursive processes and practices.

Starting with the idea of imagination as movement toward a thing, state of affairs, and/or set of ideas that does not (yet) exist, we prompt participants to ask: Who imagines? What gets imagined? Toward what ends and with what effects? How do particular imaginaries resist or engage practices and technologies of mediation? What happens when imagination is not just linked to, but is also untethered from temporal terms and logics? What is the relationship between imagination and forms of individual and collective action, including narrative, claims-making, and other rhetorical modes? How can we understand the myriad instantiations of imagination, creation, and critique—from innovation, construction, or invention to destruction, violence, or the reinforcement of the status quo?

Signs of imagination are never singular, and like all signs, they are always implicated in what they are not. Accordingly, conference participants will engage together with what gets constructed as other in particular imaginings while also attending to the horizons of the otherwise that variously emerge in discourse, embodied habits, and other forms of social and institutional life.

We welcome proposals that make use of varied methods and frameworks to engage with the role of language, communication, and discourse. We also encourage work on imagination, creation, and critique that is not narrowly or overtly linguistic. The conference will convene linguistic anthropologists, anthropologists across sub-fields, and linguists; we additionally look forward to the participation of colleagues working within Area Studies, Black Studies, Comparative Racial and Ethnic Studies, English Language and Literature, Gender and Sexuality Studies, History, Performance Studies, Postcolonial/Decolonial Studies, and other fields in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

The CFP Closed on December 20, 2024

Session types

Individual Submissions

Poster Plenary Presentation

Showcase your research both asynchronously by displaying a poster throughout the meeting and synchronously during the Poster Plenary, a highlighted, marquee event of the conference, which will include refreshments for attendees.

  • Posters can make use of writing, diagrams, and photographs, both in the poster design and in linked media; presenters are also welcomed (and encouraged) to include raised images, braille, captioned audio-visual material, and other options for accessible engagement beyond the visual. Posters can embed multimedia and other interactive elements using URLs and QR codes created and hosted by the submitter.

    Posters can be up to 94 inches wide by 46 inches high (8 feet x 3.8 feet, 238 cm x 116 cm).

    Submission components:

    • Poster presentation title

    • Long abstract (maximum of 250 words)

    • Short abstract (maximum of 50 words)

    • Keywords (maximum of 5)

    • Accessibility accommodations

    • A 1–2-sentence description of each author’s institutional affiliation

Lightning Talk/Project Incubator

(Maximum 5 minutes) Give a rapid-round talk about your research or an idea still in development.

  • Participants will receive constructive feedback on research questions, methods, preliminary data, or theoretical gaps in their ongoing work. Please do not propose a concrete analysis in your abstract.

    Sessions will be grouped by the Program Committee, and each session will be chaired by an invited scholar for additional opportunities to incubate ideas, receive feedback, and engage with others through both audience Q&A and chairs’ comments.

    Individual work-in-progress lightning talks are a maximum of 5 minutes long. Talks will be grouped into 90-minute sessions, including Q&A.

    Submission components:

    • Talk, presentation, or project title

    • Long abstract (maximum of 250 words)

    • Short abstract (maximum of 50 words)

    • Keywords (maximum of 5)

    • Accessibility accommodations

    • A 1–2-sentence description of your institutional affiliation

Individual Paper Presentation

Showcase your research in a 15-minute talk as part of a panel assembled by the Program Committee.

  • Selected papers will be grouped thematically into 90-minute sessions, including Q&A. While we will do our best to create panels to include as many individually-submitted papers as possible in the final program, we must prioritize papers submitted as part of a complete panel. Alternatively, please consider submitting your paper to the Poster Plenary.

    Submission components:

    • Paper title

    • Long abstract (maximum of 250 words)

    • Short abstract (maximum of 50 words)

    • Keywords (maximum of 5)

    • Accessibility accommodations

    • A 1–2-sentence description of each author’s institutional affiliation

Group Submissions

Panels

Showcase your research in a 15-minute talk as part of an organized panel. Panels can include 4–5 papers plus a discussant, or up to 6 papers if there is no discussant.

  • We will prioritize papers submitted as part of a complete panel. Panels with fewer than 4 papers cannot be accepted.

    All panels are 90 minutes long, including Q&A. Individual papers/presentations and discussant remarks are a maximum of 15 minutes each. Please note that due to time and space constraints, double panels will not be possible.

    Submission components:

    • Session title

    • Long abstract (maximum of 250 words)

    • Short abstract (maximum of 50 words)

    • Session keywords (maximum of 5)

    • Accessibility accommodations

    • Individual paper or presentation titles from each session participant

    • Paper abstracts from each session participant

    • Long abstracts (maximum of 250 words per abstract)

    • Short abstracts (maximum of 50 words)

    • A 1–2-sentence description of each participant’s institutional affiliation

    Need help organizing a panel? We have created a platform—the Panel Matchmaker Forum—to support potential session organizers in locating panelists beyond their current networks. You can check it out here! If you plan to circulate your panel ideas on our Panel Matchmaker Forum or other platforms (like the Linganth Listserv), we encourage you to complete your session descriptions by early November 2024 to allow adequate time to identify panelists and discussants.

Community-Engaged Skills Lab

Facilitate a session to share resources, methods, and/or tools among participants.

  • Community-engaged skills labs are intended as a dialogue between institutionally affiliated scholars and practitioners working on issues related to the study of language beyond the academy. Community-engaged skills labs should be held as stand-alone sessions led by no fewer than 3 participants. Labs might focus on involving folks in community-driven initiatives, teaching applied methods with a community focus, or strategizing around a collective cause related to issues of language and social justice, to name a few.

    Community-engaged skills lab sessions can be 45, 75, or 90 minutes in length, including Q&A, if applicable.

    Submission components:

    • Session title

    • Long abstract (maximum of 250 words)

    • Short abstract (maximum of 50 words)

    • Session keywords (maximum of 5)

    • Accessibility accommodations

    • Explanation of the nature of the community partnership (maximum 250 words)

    • Description of intended audience(s) and planned format (maximum 250 words)

    • Estimate of anticipated attendance or maximum number of participants

    • List of participants and a 1–2-sentence description of each participant’s institutional affiliation; please indicate who will lead/facilitate the session

Pedagogy or Professional Development Workshop

Facilitate a learning experience that shares knowledge, skills, and strategies related to teaching, training, or professionalization.

  • Proposers should indicate who will be involved in leading the workshop and who the intended audience is. Pedagogy or professional development workshops should be held as stand-alone workshops led by no fewer than 3 participants.

    Pedagogy or professional development workshops can be 45, 75, or 90 minutes in length.

    Submission components:

    • Workshop title

    • Long abstract (maximum of 250 words)

    • Short abstract (maximum of 50 words)

    • Session keywords (maximum of 5)

    • Accessibility accommodations

    • Description of intended audience(s) and planned format (maximum 250 words)

    • Estimate of anticipated attendance or maximum number of participants

    • List of participants and a 1–2-sentence description of each participant’s institutional affiliation; please indicate who will lead/facilitate the workshop

Making and Doing Session

Design a hands-on activity that results in a tangible product, physical or otherwise.

  • These organized sessions are a space for experimental activities, exploratory practices, and real-time, interactive engagement with materials that are best worked with outside of a research panel or formal presentation format. We welcome contributions that take up speculative, participatory, and/or reflexive approaches to linguistic anthropology and the critical study of language, broadly, and that experiment with modes of knowledge production, expression, and travel. Examples might include a convening where participants come together to collectively build or contribute to a database or digital platform, make zines, create physical or digital collages, and perform, to name a few. Making and Doing Sessions should be held as stand-alone sessions led by no fewer than 3 participants.

    Making and Doing Sessions can be 45, 75, or 90 minutes in length.

    Submission components:

    • Session title

    • Long abstract (maximum of 250 words)

    • Short abstract (maximum of 50 words)

    • Session keywords (maximum of 5)

    • Accessibility accommodations

    • Description of intended audience(s) and planned format (maximum 250 words)

    • Description of the session’s intended outcomes and afterlives (maximum 250 words)

    • Estimate of anticipated attendance or maximum number of participants

    • List of participants and a 1–2-sentence description of each participant’s institutional affiliation; please indicate who will lead/facilitate the session

Submissions are now closed

A Note on Hybrid and Virtual Participation

We are unable to offer a hybrid or virtual participation option except in cases where presenters cannot attend the in-person conference because of disability, medical conditions, incarceration, or other unavoidable circumstances (e.g., prohibition on international travel). In such cases, the session chair(s) or organizer(s) must attend in person and are responsible for arranging a device to connect virtual participants via Zoom.

Remember, due to SLA’s new initiatives, the biennial conference is only one way to connect to and share work with the broader SLA community. In addition to the SLA Blog and social media platforms, our 2025 SLA Virtual Programming Coordinators, Andy Graan and Fadi Hakim, are working to develop a robust suite of digital-first and digital-only programs that will take place throughout the year. Beyond their existing plans to advance professionalization and mentoring workshops; workshops on methodology; and public discussions of social justice issues and contemporary political problems, Andy and Fadi are open to collaboration! You can reach them by email at andrew.graan@helsinki.fi and hakimf@uchicago.edu.