Category: Uncategorized

Call for Papers

Symposium for Faculty and Students
Location: Stephen C. Hall Building, Room 102, Georgia Tech
Event Date: 15 September 2023
Deadline for Submissions: 15 July 2023
Submit at:  worldenglishessymposium@gmail.com

While language is a powerful apparatus that has been used as a tool to perpetuate dominant ideologies and to subjugate people, it can also create a path of emancipation when marginalized people use it to voice their unheard stories. And yet, multicultural, and multilingual experiences are often lost in translation during the normalizing process of the so-called standards of academic writing and communication. To counter this erasure, we propose that multilingual communities are multimodal in nature and that it is imperative to articulate the world as it is encountered to create resilient learning communities (Ainsworth et al., 2023). Through the lens of multimodality, this symposium seeks to put into conversation multicultural and multilingual experiences from a range of stakeholders. We thus seek to discuss multilingualism as a system of thought, articulation of personhood, and a pedagogical practice by creating a space in which we can listen to the oftentimes unheard voices in academia. To this effect, we ask for submissions on the significance of multilingualism inside and outside of the classroom that address the current conversations on multilingualism in today’s globalized world with specific attention on creating a dialogue between students and instructors.

Topics can include but are not limited to

1. 1. • Multilingual voices in Anglophone literature
      • Multilingualism and Identity
      • The multilingual classroom
      • Multilingualism and pedagogical practices
      • Multilingualism and social media
      • Multilingualism and multimodal communication
      • Multilingual students/ multilingual instructors
      • Translation

Please submit a 250-300 words description or abstract for one of the formats below:

Panel
This panel calls for abstracts on multilingualism in literature, media and communication. We invite research and reflection on the complex relationship between language and identity in contemporary literature, media, and communication.

Student Showcase 
This showcase seeks to highlight outstanding student contributions to multimodal work that emphasizes multilingualism and identity. Though these readings and presentations will reflect the kinds of pedagogical and theoretical conversations framing the symposium, this event acts as a celebration of students’ voices and the multilingual knowledge they bring to our classrooms. We invite students to share multimodal work from Georgia Tech classes on the themes of language, culture, and identity. This interactive showcase will involve a mixture of student readings and poster presentations.

Roundtable
This roundtable discussion calls for papers and presentations from instructors on their pedagogical practices and classroom strategies while multilingual and diverse student body and topics related to multilingualism and linguistic diversity. The roundtable will also serve as a supplement for participants to engage and discuss student work presented during the showcase.

Please submit by 15 July 2023

Questions and Submissions should be sent to 

worldenglishessymposium@gmail.com

Title: Made in Bangladesh

Director: Rubaiyat Hossain

Released: 2020

Country: Bangladesh

Language: Bengali

English Subtitles: Y

Closed Captioning: Y

Streaming/Available on: Amazon Prime and YouTube

Made in Bangladesh is a Bangladeshi drama that continues director Rubaiyat Hossain’s focus on social realism in her filmography. The film incorporates strong emphasis on setting and composition to present a realistic overview of the struggles and injustices faced by female workers in Bangladesh’s garment industry. By revealing the status quo for Bangladeshi garment factory workers, Hossain critiques unfettered capitalism and demonstrates its impact on the urban working class. Furthermore, the film’s focus on the perspective of impoverished female characters fighting for their rights challenges the male-centric narratives prevalent in Bangladeshi society and exposes how capitalism and patriarchy amplify each other in modern Bangladesh.

            The film focuses on Shimu (Rikita Nandini Shimu), a young woman employed in Dhaka’s garment industry and her fight to establish a union at her factory. After narrowly escaping death in a factory fire, Shimu is interviewed by Nasima (Shahana Goswami), a social worker who introduces her to workers’ rights and unions. Through careful planning with Nasima and conversations with fellow workers, Shimu discreetly builds enough support to present a petition to form a union at her factory to the Ministry of Labor. Along the way, Shimu and her comrades face many threats and injustices at the hands of their bosses. Furthermore, her campaign engenders conflict with her husband, who urges Shimu to leave her job. As tensions at her factory and home reach a breaking point, Shimu must choose between acquiescing to her bosses’ demands to cease organizing the union or giving up her old life to follow her principles.

            Hossain’s powerful cinematographic choices highlight the topics she desires to bring to the audience’s attention. Serious issues in Bangladeshi society are presented to the audience through an emphasis on social realism, which manifests as an aesthetic focus on poverty throughout the film. From the opening scene, viewers are confronted with the harsh reality of life in Dhaka’s urban slums. Hossain communicates the squalor of the slum where Shimu lives through long tracking shots of her walking along dirty streets or through fumigation clouds. Similarly, through extended shots of mundane occurrences like sewing garments at the factory, the film communicates the ennui and hopelessness of poverty. Mise-en-scène is utilized heavily to this effect, as can be seen later in the film when Shimu visits the Ministry of Labor to submit paperwork for the union. The office is filled with mountains of yellowing documents that Shimu faces as she asks how long the process will take, providing tangible evidence of the obstacles the fledgling union is facing. Thus, Hossain’s stylistic focus on setting and composition provides specific visual motifs that the audience can associate with the film’s major themes.

The association of Shimu’s fight for the union with her struggle for personal freedom continues Hossain’s interest in realistic movies that center female perspectives. An example of this is her award-winning film Under Construction (Bangladesh, 2015), a narrative about a middle-class woman struggling to discover herself amid the bustle of urban Bangladesh. In the film, the protagonist encounters liberation through writing a play, much like Shimu finds her voice by creating a union. Another similarity is that the play in Under Construction is set in a garment factory, providing further evidence of Hossain’s focus on the intersection of labor exploitation and womanhood. Hossain’s treatment of the latter topic centers around the idea of marriage as a hindrance to women’s freedom. This is seen when Shimu’s husband forces her to wear a hijab and locks her in to prevent her from working, and explicitly stated when Shimu tells Nasima, “we are women. We’re screwed if we’re married and screwed if we aren’t.”

Made in Bangladesh also exposes the impact of unregulated capitalism on the working class. The limitless control Shimu’s male bosses have over the female workers shows how Bangladesh’s entrenched patriarchy augments the working poor’s struggle; in the words of Shimu’s friend, “there’s no law for the poor.” Two major settings in the film, the factory and Shimu’s home, are artfully interwoven to imply that capitalism and patriarchy are inextricably intertwined. The film’s response to this predicament is to underscore the power of the collective. Indeed, the first semblance of change in the factory occurs when all the women demand to keep the fans on while they sleep there. However, in keeping with her emphasis on social realism, Hossain refuses to oversimplify the film’s narrative into a victory of good over evil, leaving the union’s fate unknown as the movie ends.

            Hossain’s Made in Bangladesh is a compelling story from the often-overlooked perspective of working women in one of the world’s poorest countries. In keeping with her oeuvre’s emphasis on social realism, the film employs setting and composition to present its viewers with a sobering look into garment factory workers’ lives and explore how this demographic is affected by the intertwined issues of worker exploitation and patriarchal oppression.

Figure 1: Shimu (Rikita Nandini Shimu) walks through a cloud of fumigant on the way home from work.

Figure 2: Shimu sits opposite a pile of aging paperwork as she submits her union application.

Title: Travelers and Magicians

Director: Khyentse Norbu

Released: 2004

Country: Bhutan

Language: Dzonghka

English Subtitles: Y

Closed Captioning: Y

Streaming/Available on: Apple TV

A story where the journey is far more important than the destination, Travelers and Magicians (Bhutan, Khyentse Norbu, 2003) questions whether the grass really is greener on the other side of the fence through a scenic and thought-provoking road film. As the narrative progresses, it both warns of the dangers of a dreamland while also demonstrating the aspects of Bhutan that make the country so unique.

The film opens with Dondup (Tshewang Dendup), a government official in a small Bhutanese village. His dissatisfaction with his life in Bhutan has driven him to travel to America, and he restlessly awaits a letter that will contain his accommodations to leave. After receiving it he leaves his village, impatiently quitting his job for what he believes will be a better opportunity in a new country. Along the way he is stopped and presented with a going away gift, and in the next shot throws it off a bridge – symbolizing his desire to completely rid himself of his old life. Delayed, he misses the bus and resigns himself to hitchhiking. When waiting for someone to pick him up, he is joined by an apple seller and a monk. The monk (Sonam Kinga) is told of Dondup’s desire to go “the land of [his] dreams” in America, and in hearing this quickly warns him of dreamlands. The monk then begins a story that lasts throughout the movie about Tashi (Lhakpa Dorji), a young man who hallucinates a magical land where he encounters an old man (Gomchen Penjore) and his much younger wife Deki (Deki Yangzom). This parallel story continues on throughout the movie, even as Dondup begins to meet more people through his travels, including a beautiful 19-year-old girl, Sonam (Sonam Lhamo).

The embedded narrative Norbu employs throughout the film skillfully ties together the two plots in an inventive and engaging way. Some of the shots between the two narratives correspond; the film focuses on the old man’s eyes right before it transitions to the eyes of a picture in a cave where Dondrop and his acquaintances are staying.

Figure 1: The old man in the monk’s story

Figure 2: The art on the wall of the cave

Like the parallel shots, the stories also show many similarities. Both narratives tell of a journey that has a strong impact on the main subject, and the clever transitions that reflect the parallels between the two stories make the overall plot far more compelling and captivating.

While the dual narrative helps capture and hold the viewer’s attention, the film also comes with a strong message of appreciating what you have and taking caution with the idea of a dreamland – particularly one you’ve never been to. In the shot where Dondrop is first introduced, everything from his T-shirt to his music points to his obsession with America. In the story the monk tells, Tashi also finds himself dissatisfied with his current life and desiring something more than the situation he finds himself in. Both characters must grapple with the question of whether or not life is truly better in their dreamland, or if this dreamland even exists outside of their own head. The film explores this question in a way that leaves the viewer pondering the same poignant questions as the characters from both stories.

Bhutan has stood out internationally because of its relatively untouched beauty and traditional values, both of which are reflected in the film. Long shots of natural Bhutanese landscapes are interposed throughout; the viewer is able to enjoy the enticing scenery. Travelers and Magicians was shot entirely in Bhutan, and is highly unique in that regard, so the audience gets a window into authentic and striking views of the country. Along with the scenery, both of the women in the film reflect on the traditional values of Bhutan, allowing a more complete study into not only what the country looks like, but also what values they hold in high regard. The young girl travels with her father, taking care of him. Deki is hidden away from the world and only interacts with her husband before connecting with Tashi. The young girl displays the values Bhutanese people consider important – such as a sense of community and care for those in your family. Deki represents the isolationism Bhutan has encouraged for many years. Norbu is also able to use the monk in the story to showcase his unique knowledge and perspective as a Buddhist monk. From the characters to the scenery, the film acquaints the viewer with Bhutan in an innovative way.

Travelers and Magicians is an intriguing and enchanting movie that combines a captivating embedded narrative technique with picturesque shots that not only inspires a moral lesson in the audience but also instructs about Bhutan. Viewers are left with deep unanswered questions that inspire reflection, and newfound knowledge about the distinctive and isolated country of Bhutan.

You might not think of yourself as a creative person, but we are all creative in different ways. Here at RAMBLE we offer a chance for our creative Georgia Tech students from around the globe to submit and publish their poems, their memoirs, their photos, and all sorts of other creative artifacts. If you meet our eligibility criteria for submitting (see below), then this might be the publishing opportunity that you have been waiting for!

RAMBLE seeks to publish original, unpublished creative work (poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and much more) produced by multilingual and international undergraduate and graduate students at Georgia Tech who meet one or more of the following eligibility criteria:

• • you are learning English as a second or other language
  • your first language is a postcolonial variety of English (as an example, if you come from Singapore and spoke a variety of Singapore-English growing up)
  • you come from a bilingual/multilingual home situation

If you believe you meet our criteria for eligibility, but are not certain, just email us and we can let you know. If you would like to submit to RAMBLE, please feel free to submit work for review by sending it to Jeff Howard at GTworldenglishescommittee@gmail.com.

Before submitting, please read our Submissions and FAQ pages for more information on what we are looking to publish. We also invite you to read an issue of the magazine so you can get a sense of the kinds of pieces we publish. We are not a paying market, but we are always excited to review and potentially publish new and interesting work by our students.

Introduction

These postings originally appeared on the University of Pennsylvania website for CFPs.

Conversation Hour is hosted by the Naugle Communication Center (“CommLab”) and World Englishes committee members with the aim of providing a friendly, informal space for English Language Learner students to practice their oral English skills and to meet other students. On Thursday 9/30, students and CommLab consultants gathered online for the first event of the Fall 2021 semester.

Participants discussed their experiences of the semester so far; their weekend plans; and recent movie and TV show recommendations. The highlight of the event, however, was a drawing activity. Inspired by their own experiences of using art as a de-stressing tool, CommLab consultants invited participants to spend five minutes drawing a representation of either their favorite place, or a place they’d like to go to. Then, everyone shared their drawings and explained why that place was appealing to them—their past experiences with the place, if any, and what you can do and see there. Locations included the Smoky Mountains; Key West; the beach; Yellowstone National Park; the Vickery Creek Falls hiking trail in Roswell; and Athens, Greece. A common theme for us all was enjoying nature and appreciating the beauty of the world, as well as appreciating time with friends and family while traveling. Perhaps none of us are the next Van Gogh, but we enjoyed seeing everyone’s drawings and hearing about places that are special to them. 

To join our Conversation Hour info list and receive announcements about future events, you can fill out this short registration form. October Conversation Hour (date TBD) will be in person in the Naugle Communication Center (Clough 447). We are also planning to host an in-person Conversation Hour on Monday, 11/15, from 5:00pm-6:00pm as part of International Education Week. We hope you’ll join us! 

In addition to English Conversation Hour, the CommLab can help Georgia Tech students who identify as English Language Learners in a variety of ways. To book a free one-on-one consultation, click here. The CommLab is offering a variety of appointment modes this semester, including in person, BlueJeans, and asynchronous appointments, and is open Monday-Friday 9:00am-5:00pm in person, with additional online-only times from 5:00pm-8:00pm. See below for more information!

We are reposting this announcement we just received from Travis Denton, the Associate Director of Poetry@Tech and editor of Terminus Magazine, regarding a poetry workshop being offered by award-winning poet Chen Chen. It sounds like an amazing opportunity, and it just so happens to be free and open to the public.

Hi Everyone—

Registration is now open for a FREE virtual generative poetry workshop with CHEN CHEN on Saturday, October 2, 2021 from 2-5pm from Poetry@Tech. We’re excited to offer this unique opportunity to spend an afternoon writing with CHEN CHEN. Thanks to the generous support of the Poetry Foundation for making this event possible.

Here’s more about the workshop:

REPETITION, VARIATION, MIGRATION:

In this generative workshop we’ll discuss how contemporary immigrant and refugee poets use various kinds of repetition and variation to articulate their lived experiences. Between talking about model poems by Tarfia Faizullah, Li-Young Lee, Aracelis Girmay, and others, we’ll try to use repetition and variation in our own ways. We’ll play and fail and try again. We’ll leap.

For more information about the workshop or to register via our quick online registration form, click on

https://poetry.gatech.edu/events/fall-2021-workshop-chen-chen.

The workshop is free, and open to the public. Register soon, as space may be limited. If you have any questions or just want to be in touch, I’d love to hear from you. See you in workshop on October 2.

Only Good Things Always,

Travis Denton

Poetry@Tech

Editor, Terminus Magazine

You might not think of yourself as a creative person, but we are all creative in different ways. Here at RAMBLE we offer a chance for our creative Georgia Tech students from around the globe to submit and publish their poems, their memoirs, their photos, and all sorts of other creative artifacts. If you meet our eligibility criteria for submitting (see below), then this might be the publishing opportunity that you have been waiting for!

RAMBLE seeks to publish original, unpublished creative work (poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and much more) produced by multilingual and international undergraduate and graduate students at Georgia Tech who meet one or more of the following eligibility criteria:

• • you are learning English as a second or other language
  • your first language is a postcolonial variety of English (as an example, if you come from Singapore and spoke a variety of Singapore-English growing up)
  • you come from a bilingual/multilingual home situation

If you believe you meet our criteria for eligibility, but are not certain, just email us and we can let you know. If you would like to submit to RAMBLE, please feel free to submit work for review by sending it to Jeff Howard at GTworldenglishescommittee@gmail.com.

Before submitting, please read our Submissions and FAQ pages for more information on what we are looking to publish. We also invite you to read an issue of the magazine so you can get a sense of the kinds of pieces we publish. We are not a paying market, but we are always excited to review and potentially publish new and interesting work by our students.

It’s a new semester, and the World Englishes Committee is back in full swing. We are excited to get back to our usual business with projects and events and more!

To kick off this academic year, I wanted to share one of the ways I spent my summer. Since I was not blogging for this site, I must have been doing something else that was productive, right? Well, for some people, watching a lot of international films may not exactly be perceived as productive, but for me, stuck at home much of the time, folding a lot of laundry during the evening and so on, it made my summer pass in ways that were enlightening and satisfying in ways that writing articles (I did that too, all right?) is not. Over and over, I was finding cinematic treasures that presented beautiful cinematography and compelling story-telling that made me laugh, cry, and wonder and ultimately left me in awe and admiration. [Note: By the way, one of the goals I made at the beginning of summer was to not watch a single movie in English, and I did pretty well as the only English-speaking films I ended up watching were The French Connection (1971) and Sharknado (2013).]

So, here is what I am going to do: I am going to share an alphabetical list of international films I have watched since the Spring 2021 Semester ended. I will link to reviews and articles about each one, but I won’t offer any commentary of my own since the list is quite long. Not every film left the same enduring impression on me, but taken overall the experience of spending my summer watching these films was memorable and valuable. I feel that I was indeed very productive.

• 24 Days (French, 2014, dir. Alexandre Arcady)
• Ashes and Diamonds (Polish, 1958, dir. Andrzej Wajda)
• Baazigar (Hindi, 1993, dir. Abbas–Mustan)
• The Beauty Inside (Korean, 2015, dir. Baek Jong-yul)
• Chocolate (Thai, 2008, dir. Prachya Pinkaew)
• Diabolique (French, 1955, dir. Henri-Georges Clouzot)
• Diary of a Chambermaid (French, 1964, dir. Luis Buñuel)
• The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (French, 1972, dir. Luis Buñuel)
• Don (Hindi, 2006, dir. Farhan Akhtar)
• Don 2 (Hindi, 2011, dir. Farhan Akhtar)
• Early Summer (Japanese, 1951, dir. Yasujirō Ozu)
• The Golden Age (French, 1930, dir. Luis Buñuel)
• Hiroshima, Mon Amour (French, 1959, dir. Alain Resnais)
• The Housemaid (Korean, 1960, dir. Kim Ki-young)
• Late Spring (Japanese, 1949, dir. Yasujirō Ozu)
• Mardaani (Hindi, 2014, dir. Pradeep Sarkar)
• Monsieur Lazhar (French, 2011, dir. Philippe Falardeau)
• My Name Is Khan (Hindi, 2010, dir. Karan Johar)
• PK (Hindi, 2014, dir. Rajkumar Hirani)
• The Protector (Thai, 2005, dir. Prachya Pinkaew)
• Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi (Hindi, 2008, dir. Aditya Chopra)
• Raging Phoenix (Thai, 2009, dir. Rashane Limtrakul)
• Ran (Japanese, 1985, dir. Akira Kurosawa)
• Rang de Basanti (Hindi, 2006, dir. Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra)
• Ringu (Japanese, 1998, dir. Hideo Nakata)
• Spring in a Small Town (Chinese, 1948, dir. Fei Mu)
• Swades (Hindi, 2004, dir. Ashutosh Gowariker)
• Tokyo Story (Japanese, 1953, dir. Yasujirō Ozu)
• Ugetsu (Japanese, 1953, dir. Kenji Mizoguchi) 
• Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Thai, 2010, dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul)

To cap this post off, I would like to add that BBC Culture conducted a project in which they asked 209 critics from 43 countries about what they considered the greatest examples of international cinema. As a result, BBC Culture eventually generated a top-100 list, which I am using and will continue to use to guide my own forays into international film-watching. I would encourage you to do the same. Enjoy!

~Jeff Howard

Work Cited

“L’Age d’Or.” IMDb, n.d. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1187043/. Image.

For the World Englishes Committee, this academic year has been a strange one, as it has been for pretty much everyone we know. Yet, in spite of the circumstances of a time in which it is easy to feel like we are hunkering down and waiting for a storm to pass, our committee has continued to be as active as ever in its mission of serving and advocating for the interests of multilingual and international students and supporting their instructors. As a result of the work accomplished by our committee chair, Kendra Slayton, as well as committee members Alok Amatya, Anu Thapa, Eric Lewis, and me (Jeff Howard), the World Englishes Committee has managed to advance multiple projects, both online and on the Georgia Tech campus. The following is a summary of what we have accomplished this year:

a) The World Englishes Committee has helped to organize and sponsor six virtual Conversation Hour events in partnership with the Naugle CommLab and the Georgia Tech International Ambassador program (GTIA). Intended for students who want to practice their conversational English in a friendly and supportive environment, these events were attended by numerous undergraduate and graduate students currently enrolled at Georgia Tech.

b) Members of the committee have also published interviews with scholars and specialists whose research and teaching relate closely to what this site is all about. These interviews include Dr. Robert Griffin (interviewed by Kendra Slayton) and Dr. Ahmar Mahboob (interviewed by me). 

c) Multiple members of our committee–Alok Amatya, Kendra Slayton, and me–helped compose the Writing and Communication Program’s application for the 2020 Georgia Tech Unit Diversity Champion Award, which the program received in Fall 2020.

d) In the Spring 2021 Semester, the committee began a recurring segment on our blog called World Cinema Spotlights. This segment was inspired by film scholar Anu Thapa, and we have published spotlights of the Bollywood film 3 Idiots (written by Alok Amatya and me) and the animated Japanese film The Tale of Princess Kaguya (written by Eric Lewis and Kendra Slayton). We plan to continue publishing such spotlights for the foreseeable future.

e) Finally, our capstone of the year was the publication of the second issue of RAMBLE, our committee’s literary magazine. In this year’s issue, we were honored to publish multimodal creative work composed by a number of multilingual and international graduate and undergraduate Georgia Tech students. The magazine was even more robust than last year’s issue, and we are excited to witness and facilitate this growth. RAMBLE, issue 1, was also featured in the Academic Program Review self-study of Georgia Tech’s School of Literature, Media, and Communication as evidence of the quality of work our students are doing, while also demonstrating one of the multiple ways in which our school is seeking to support the work of diversity on our campus.

After what has been an extraordinarily productive and unique academic year, I must announce that our committee will be taking a break from the blog for the summer, but we will return in September, probably with some new faces and of course new ideas. We would also like you to know (if you don’t already) that our committee has begun developing our social media presence, so please feel free to follow us on Twitter. Our handle is @GTworldengs. Thank you for reading and have a great summer!