For the 14th ALCS Biennial Conference at the University of Edinburgh we would like to home in on home in a Low Countries context.

Our world is constructed around the reality and the concept of home. After a pandemic in which home gained new prominence, we would like to home in on understanding, remembering, (re)creating, searching for, (re)finding, (re)discovering, challenging, celebrating, home as an idea(l) and as a physical place.

Home is the story of who we are and such a deeply familiar place that it is almost impossible to see it with the eyes of an outsider. We are steeped into home as an idea, a concept, an ideal expressed through objects and representations.

Home connects us to previous generations, history and communities. Home can confer and establish identity and belonging; it can be a refuge or a site of confinement.

For the 14th ALCS International Conference we interpret home and homing in in its broadest sense: from the language of home and the status of ‘the native speaker’, to cultural representations of home, the architecture of home, or performances of home and belonging.

Possible themes and topics are:

• Meanings of home through identity and belonging, generation, place and community
• Home languages and hegemonic (standard) language ideologies
• What does it mean to feel ‘at home’ in a language?

• (Home) language and identity in hyperdiverse urban settings
• Dutch as a pluricentric language
• youth literature’s representation of safety, care and violence in the family home
• representation of home and migration in literature of the Netherlands, Flanders and independent Indonesia, West-Indies, Congo and South Africa
• Homing in on translation: creative practices between source and target languages
• Alienation and identification in constructions of nationalism and national identity
• ‘Home is where the heart is’: histories of the home and citizenship
• Home and gender roles
• Displacement, rupture, loss and recreation of home
• Moving homes; homes on the move, mobility and change
• The home and domestic interior views in literature and visual arts
• Vernacular architecture, home and cityscapes
• Local monuments and memory culture in the Low Countries
• Constructing local history
• The nation/region as home

The deadline for submission of proposals (max 250 words) is 1 February 2022. We encourage a variety of questions, delivered either as an individual contributions (20-minute presentations, followed by 10 minutes of discussion) or proposals for fully constituted panels. Panel conveners are invited to suggest a 90-minutes themed panel of three speakers. We specifically invite postgraduate students and a number of bursaries are available.

Selected papers will be published in the ALCS Journal: Dutch Crossing: Journal of Low Countries Studies.

Please submit your proposal here (by 1 February 2022).