CFP: Society for French Studies Postgraduate Conference 2025

CONDITIONS
Society for French Studies
Postgraduate Conference 2025
Friday 30th May 2025
King’s College London
Keynote: Dr Sophie Marie Niang (University of Cambridge)
Call for Papers

This year’s Society for French Studies Postgraduate Conference invites Master’s and doctoral
students to reflect on the theme of ‘conditions’. Held annually, this conference offers
postgraduates the opportunity to share and discuss research-in-progress with a supportive
and collaborative audience. Contributions are invited from across the full (and
ever-expanding) range of fields, disciplines, cultures, historical time periods and geographies
that make up French and Francophone Studies today.

Papers will consider what it means to navigate ‘conditions’ and the diverse senses conveyed
by that term. Conditions might be understood as requirements, restrictions or contingencies:
for example, as stipulations on which certain concepts or communities depend; or,
alternatively, as factors that regulate futurity, historical understanding or political action. In
the French and francophone context, therefore, conditions might recall the limits and
exclusions of nation-building and Republican universalism; or, past and present debates
around topics including citizenship, community, revolutionary change, (non-)violence,
(de)colonisation and historiography. Conditions could also evoke the hypothetical or
counterfactual; questions of information, communication and pedagogy; or, if understood in
purely philosophical terms, the conditions of possibility. Contributions may wish to
re-evaluate questions of epistemology, and particularly those regarding the production and
mediation of knowledge by experience and/or reason.

Perhaps paradoxically, then, the immediate connotations of ‘conditions’ also stand for
potential, and recall the generative value of cultural and linguistic study in French and
Francophone Studies and beyond. Accordingly, contributions might direct their attention
towards methodological or self-reflexive concerns. The ambivalence of conditions, explored

above, could be examined as a symptom of tensions between theory and praxis; or, as a
clarion call to rethink the structures, functions and responsibilities associated with academic
inquiry.

Stretching across textual, visual, sonic and material cultures, the conference theme also
invites papers interested in materiality, media and genre, as well as those wishing to address
theinterplaybetweenconditionsandtechnology,bethishistoricalorcontemporary.
Linguistic approaches to the conference theme are also encouraged, including, for example,
considerations of contact zones and the linguistic expression of power dynamics.

Further lines of enquiry may include:
●Conditions and the law
●Physical states and modes of being
●Creation, production and degeneration
●Conditions, discourse and linguistics
●Architectural conditions and the built environment
●Conditions and sociology
●Race and movement
●Conditions to community, belonging, freedom and liberation
●Discrimination and selective solidarity
●Medical humanities
●Disciplinarity
●Necessity versus contingency
●Moral conditions
●Bioethics and biopolitics

Presentations should be no more than 15 minutes in length and may be given in French or
English.

The conference will be held in-person at King's College London. The venue has step-free
access. Registration and catering are free of charge. Students who are members of the
Society for French Studies are eligible to apply for funding to help with transport costs.
Speakers who are non-members are kindly asked to seekfinancial help from their own
institutions to cover travel costs. Information about joining the Society (at a discount rate for
postgraduates) can be found on our website.

To apply, please send an abstract (300 words max.) along with your name, institution (if
applicable),andlevelofstudytosfspg2025@gmail.comby3March2025.Afterthe
conference, there will be the opportunity to publish papers in a special issue ofFrench
Studies Bulletin.

If you have any questions, including questions about accessibility, please do not hesitate to
contact the organisers at the above address.
Tobias Barnett and Airelle Amédro