37.1994, Confs: Plasticity Across Genres and Disciplines(Tunisia)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-1994. Fri Jun 05 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.1994, Confs: Plasticity Across Genres and Disciplines(Tunisia)

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Date: 03-Jun-2026
From: Asma Dhouioui [asma.dhouioui at islt.ucar.tn]
Subject: Plasticity Across Genres and Disciplines


Plasticity Across Genres and Disciplines
Theme: Plastic Forms

Date: 29-Oct-2026 - 31-Oct-2026
Location: Tunis, Tunisia
Contact: Asma Dhouioui
Contact Email: asma.dhouioui at islt.ucar.tn

Linguistic Field(s): Ling & Literature; Psycholinguistics; Translation
Subject Language(s): English (eng)

Submission Deadline: 01-Jul-2026

Language and texts have an astounding capacity to generate different
meanings with every interpretation. As such, Catherine Malabou frames
this regenerative capacity as “something like a scar, tugging the skin
of a text to distribute its meaning differently, to reveal within it a
new organization, to make possibly in the very text different
movements and different effects of truth.” She defines plasticity as
“this regenerative force of reading” (29). Form, whether textual,
oral, pictorial, artefactual, documented or digitized, can thus be
defined as a plastic entity constructed through the incorporation and
reworking of multiple elements into a new configuration.
As it permeates all domains of communication, plasticity entails
generativity as well as explosiveness: the moment an entity is
received into a new form, it may be transformed to the point of
rupture or partial erasure. A form is, therefore, an entity that is
open to ongoing reshaping, giving and receiving (Malabou 32-33).
Plastic forms, in this sense, are unstable, endowed with a capacity to
shift, absorb, reconfigure, and become continuous sites of possibility
rather than limitation. Within this configuration, subjectivities are
constituted as mutable and relational, while narratives circulate,
adapt, and reconfigure across media and languages. Consequently,
genres and disciplines can be deemed “plastic” for their capacity to
form, transform and destroy, emerging as spaces of transformation,
displacement, and/or rupture.
Drawing on Derrida’s notion of différance and instability of meaning,
and informed by developments in neuroscience and brain plasticity,
Malabou revisits form as inherently capable of becoming. Her account
resonates with Gilles Deleuze’s concept of “Body without Organs”,
whereby the “body”, or any physical composition, is understood as a
field of intensities and flows that exist in a fluid and
non-stratified state, enabling continuous production of new relations
and modes of becoming. This configuration embraces the Hegelian
dialectic of transformation (Aufhebung) according to which form not
only receives and gives shape but may explode and become an entirely
different form. In Malabou’s framework, whether textual, medial, or
neural, the material and embodied potential of form takes precedence
over signification and textual play. Plasticity, in this sense, marks
an epistemological and ontological shift from previous models of
interpretation of form, re-materializing what post-structuralism has
dematerialized and situating itself within a broader inquiry into
transformation, mutation, and the generative potential of form itself,
hence its transdisciplinary nature and potential.
Literature has been a site for the negotiation of form and content.
The classical genres’ tight rules of unity and fixed structures
already contained seeds of instability, whether through conflict or
reversal. These internal “deformations” come to the surface with the
rise of the novel and the subsequent modern and postmodern
developments that gave rise to new voices, temporalities and modes of
expression. Today, from hypertext fiction and digital narratives to
autofiction, graphic novels, and hybrid or multimedia storytelling,
literature is continuously pushed beyond established limits,
reflecting its inherently plastic logic.
 As to postmodern cultural manifestations, arts, cinema and comics
have contributed to the creation of a post-cinematic age in which
special effects and animation have transformed traditional and
classical realistic representations of life towards a more
transgressive show of possible digital worlds and temporalities. The
all-encompassing presence of the liminal digital space today, its
fluidity and manipulative nature give rise to all sorts of extremisms
that feed on fake news and distorted realities giving rise to a
post-truth age. Political and democratic debates adhere to plasticity
in the way capitalist and neo-liberal structures form, transform and
even destroy our world. The new subject that is produced by
plasticity, in this sense, is thus worthy of examination in this
conference.
Plasticity in linguistics is not merely related to the “flexibility”
and “adaptability” of language. It goes beyond speakers’ ability to
change their language use according to context, audience, or
communication situations that give rise to variation within a given
system. Rather, plasticity is the inherent ability of language to
transform itself as an open-ended generative system (Deacon 269).
Plasticity explores languages’ potential for renewing, remoulding,
creating, erasing and exploding meaning and structures across time,
cognition, and social and power dynamics. Indeed, the very symbolic
and self-referential nature of language constitutes languages’ most
plastic, liberating and generative force. Sense is derived as a
function of the way the symbolic units of the lexicon operate within
the system by combining meaning and form, both governed by “a
computational system of abstract rules that operate on top of the
symbolic units” (Chomsky 15-18).
The conference seeks to explore the different modes through which
plastic forms are created across genres and disciplines. It examines
reconfigurations in literary genres and narrative forms,
transformations in media representations, the dynamics of language,
multilingualism and linguistic hybridity, as well as emerging
practices of translation. We welcome abstracts addressing
interdisciplinary approaches to literary, translation, media, and film
studies as well as to language, philosophy and cultural studies. We
invite individual papers, panels, roundtables, and workshops that
study (but are not limited to) the following axes:
1.      Plasticity of Literature:
 - Hybridity in genre (essay-novel, autofiction, speculative memoir,
docufiction)
 - Experimental writing: seriality, fragmentation, etc.
 - Blurred boundaries between fiction / non-fiction
 - Mutable, fragmented, posthuman subjects
 - Trauma, memory, narrative reconstruction
 - Migration, exile, reconfigured identities
2.      Plasticity in Culture, Media and Politics:
 - Manifestations of plasticity in politics and foreign policy
 - Visual and acoustic reconfigurations of narrative
 - Comics and the age of post-cinema
 - Formation, transformation and destruction of identities and spaces
 - Intermediality/transmediality in Cultural Studies
 - Platform storytelling and digital/algorithmic plasticity
3.      Translation as Plastic Practice:
 - Translation: transfer or transformation?
 - Translating form, voice, genre: gains and losses
 - Creative transformation/deformation
 - Untranslatability and destructive plasticity: the limits of
translation
 - Ethical challenges in translating testimony (trauma, violence, war)
 - AI and machine translation
4.      Plasticity in Linguistics
 - Neuro- and psycholinguistic plasticity: language acquisition, brain
plasticity, the Critical Period Hypothesis (CPH), bilingualism, and
aphasia as sites of cognitive adaptability.
 - Discursive, stylistic and usage-based sociolinguistic plasticity:
code-switching, style shifting, language/register/dialectal variation,
evolution of informal forms and slang development
 - Phonological plasticity: cross-linguistic influence, phonological
drift, acoustic re mapping
 - Morphological plasticity: morphogenesis, morphemic fusion, lexical
hybridization, neologism
 - Syntactic plasticity: structural logic and diachronic transitions,
syntactic re- wiring
 - The ubiquity of pragmatic plasticity: under/ and overspecification
in language use
 - Semantic plasticity: ambiguity and vagueness
 - Plasticity vs. flexibility, ontological re-shaping, language
ownership, global English(es), professional identity, subjectivity
Submission, Participation, and Formatting Guidelines:
 - Abstracts of no more than 250 words, along with a short
biographical note (100 words), should be submitted to
plasticity.islt at gmail.com
 - Deadline for abstract submission: July 1, 2026
 - Notification of acceptance: August 1, 2026
Authors of accepted proposals will be invited to deliver presentations
of 20 minutes. Submissions should follow the appropriate citation
style according to their disciplinary orientation:
 - MLA (9th edition) for contributions in Literature and Cultural
Studies.
 - APA (7th edition) for contributions in Linguistics.
Authors are responsible for ensuring consistency and accuracy in
formatting, citations, and references. Authors of accepted proposals
are expected to submit full papers by January 31, 2027. All
submissions will undergo blind peer review, and final acceptance will
be based on the reviewers’ evaluations.



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LINGUIST List: Vol-37-1994
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