2026 SALA Annual Conference: Collective Currents in South Asian Collaborations
In light of global ethno-national tensions, the challenges of climate change, increasing disconnection after the Covid-19 pandemic, and other divisive moments, the aim of our 2026 SALA conference is to explore potential ideas and methods of “collaboration.”
What does it mean to collaborate in and through South Asia and its diasporas? In a region marked by colonial legacies, linguistic multiplicity, migratory flows, and political contestations, collaboration has always been both necessity and provocation. Whether forged across borders or within them, in multiple languages or through translation, between artistic forms or scholarly disciplines, collaborations in South Asian literatures and cultures resist containment and ask us to rethink the very frameworks through which texts, identities, and communities are produced.
Our conference invites critical and creative engagements with the theme of “collaborations” in the expansive context of South Asian literatures and cultures. We welcome papers that interrogate collaboration as a subject, but also as a method. How do co-authored texts, bilingual experiments, and transmedia projects unsettle notions of singular authorship or national canon? How do literary and cultural collaborations resist commodification or reconfigure power dynamics—between writer and translator, author and archive, North and South? What new solidarities across caste, class, gender, and religious difference can collaborations generate—or do they risk reinscribing old hierarchies?
We are especially interested in contributions that consider unconventional or emergent forms of collaboration: AI-generated fiction with human intervention; diasporic collectives; digital storytelling and platform cultures; or climate justice narratives shaped by interdisciplinary teams. How might pedagogical collaborations—between students and communities, artists and activists, universities and the public—reimagine the role of South Asian literatures and cultures today?
Possible topics include (but are not limited to):
- Translingual and translated literatures
- Author-translator dynamics
- Collaborative storytelling and oral traditions
- Literary magazines and collective publishing practices
- Interdisciplinary or multimedia art forms
- Collaborative activism and public humanities
- Postcolonial and decolonial alliances
- South-South solidarities and transregional networks
- Diasporic collectives
- Queer/ing collaborations
- AI, co-creation, and the future of authorship
- Collaborative cross/inter-disciplinary scholarship including grants/projects
Let’s think together: how might collaboration become a method of resistance, revision, and renewal in the study of South Asian literatures and cultures?
Please submit a 250-300-word abstract along with a 150-word bio-note by November 15, 2025, via the portal on the South Asian Literary Association’s webpage:
If you have any conference-related questions, please email the conference co-chairs at aniruddha.mukhopadhyay@tamuk.edu and jana.fedtke@nyu.edu. Please do not email your abstracts to the conference chairs. Instead, please use the web portal to submit your abstracts.
If you would like to read your creative work during the Open Mic Hamara Mushaira on Friday (Mar. 27) evening at the conference, please email Dr. Moumin Quazi at quazi@tarleton.edu by Nov. 15, 2025.
For membership and other details, please visit the SALA website. Please note that those who submit abstracts for consideration to the SALA conference must become members at the time of acceptance of the proposed submission.
Conference participants will receive further information about conference hotel and registration after acceptance.
Conference Co-Chairs:
Aniruddha Mukhopadhyay is Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University-Kingsville. His research interests include Digital Humanities and animal representations in postcolonial literatures. He serves as Secretary/Treasurer of the Conference of College Teachers of English (Texas) and Vice President and Web Manager of the South Asian Literary Association.
Jana Fedtke, Ph.D., is a Clinical Associate Professor at NYU Shanghai. Her research and teaching interests include algorithmic authorship, data justice, science and technology, gender studies, and transnational literatures with a focus on South Asia and Africa. Professor Fedtke’s work has been published in numerous peer-reviewed journals and edited collections.
Exciting note: In 2026, SALA will hold its conference in collaboration with the College English Association in Charlotte, North Carolina. The CEA conference, to be held from March 26-28, 2026, will have concurrent sessions with SALA at the same conference hotel. We are really excited to offer you the opportunity to attend both conferences with one registration. If you wish to present at both conferences, you will need to become members of both organizations. Please visit the CEA website through the link below for their CFP: