Appropriation, Usurpation, Recognition? Literature and Communities of Experience

The Student Scientific Circle of the History of 20th-Century Polish Literature at Jagiellonian University invites participation in a nationwide student and doctoral conference devoted to the question of the right to literary representation of experiences, which will take place in Kraków on 20–21 May 2026.

Throughout its long history, literature has repeatedly shown that it is founded on transcending the boundaries of individual experience. It has enabled, among other things, the processing of social or cultural problems by shaping emotions, fates, and identities. As a result, broadly understood cultural texts became a space for encounters with the unfamiliar, served as a tool for understanding the cultural nature of reality, and constituted a space for articulating tensions arising from various inequalities.

In recent decades, at the center of humanities debates — conducted, among others, within feminist, queer, postcolonial, class, and disability studies — the topic of seizing voice, authorship, or experience has been raised repeatedly. These studies increasingly ask, for example, who and under what conditions may tell other people's stories. Biopolitics (Robert Esposito), semiology (Umberto Eco), postcritique (Rita Felski), vernacularism (Henry Louis Gates Jr.), and gender studies are only a fraction of the discourses in the humanities and social sciences that address this issue.

Analyses track, among other things, the consequences that a narrative “seizure of voice” carries for the represented subjects. These include recognition of the legitimacy of a given group through, among other things, increased visibility (Judith Axel Honneth); however, they can also be various kinds of abuses (as discussed, for example, in the debate around Emilia Kledzik's book 'Perspektywa poety. Cyganologia Jerzego Ficowskiego') and attempts to appropriate experience (this problem has been discussed, among others, in the context of the relationship between Jadwiga Stańczakowa and Miron Białoszewski).

The aim of the conference is to create a space for critical, polyvocal reflection on these issues. We are interested both in appropriation in the context of creation and expression as an ethical problem, and in literary strategies that problematize, negotiate, or undermine the possibility of speaking on behalf of others. We want to look at literature as a field where communal and individual experiences intersect, creative imagination, and social and cultural conditions of representation.

Example topics:

• Experience and the category of ownership — theoretical approaches.
• Literature and law — what are the limits of textual ownership?
• Representing others' experiences — economic aspects.
• Ethics of different literary genres (reportage, biography, novel, poetry…).
• Literary narratives about non-heteronormative identities.
• Translation as a form of appropriation, mediation, or reinterpretation of experience.
• Dialects, sociolects, minority languages in fictional literature.
• Strategies of “giving voice” and the literary fiction of authenticity.
• Autobiography and autofiction in the writing of people with disabilities.
• Literature confronting others' national history and collective memory.
• Appropriations of narratives in colonial and postcolonial contexts.
• Exoticization, folklorization, and orientalization as narrative strategies.
• Literature in relation to others' religious and spiritual experiences.

We invite proposals for papers in the form of abstracts (up to 200 words) using the form: https://forms.office.com/e/5hxXZxiH6i. Deadline for submissions: 15 March 2026.

Participation in the conference is free of charge. A post-conference publication is planned.

Organizing committee: Gabriela Guła, Anastasiia Sukhova, Daria Malinowska, Weronika Chruślak, Natalia Góra.

Academic supervision: Dr Karina Jarzyńska, Dr Michał Koza, Dr Magdalena Amroziewicz.