The International Federation for Modern Languages and Literatures (FILLM) proudly invites scholars, educators, and practitioners from around the world to the 30th FILLM Congress, hosted at Victoria University (Melbourne) in Narrm, Australia.

The conference theme is Talking Country.

Talking Country is a theme that speaks against taking country for granted. Countries are vessels for languages and literatures, as well as fields of conflict in which cultures may confront, avoid, or obliterate each other. For many Indigenous epistemologies, country is a term of immense importance. It names a locus of profound responsibility that present cultures owe to their futures and pasts. Meanwhile, multicultural praxis often chafes at the norms of country and nation that would confine languages, literatures, and cultures to fixed points in space and time. This theme is a call to reflect on the importance of country, and to debate its entailments for our fields of study—including:

• Interplay and interrelation (and conflict and ignorance) of languages and literatures, operating between and within countries.
  
• Intersections between country or nation and other modes of cultural identification—examples include gender, race, religion, sexuality, and wealth.
  
• Nation–affirming agendas and their normative consequences for languages, literatures, and cultures.
  
• Various ways that Indigenous and multicultural contributions are reconfiguring received understandings about country and culture, as well as various forms of resistance to these changes.
  
• Agendas for decolonisation and for worldwide efforts to preserve languages and cultures of expression.

• Ecologies of places and cultures, including ecolinguistics and ecopoetics.
  
• Ontologies underpinning comparative language and literature studies.
  
• Interrelations between ancient or lost country, future or imagined country, and present or contingent country.
  
• Countries talking, countries as voices and authors, countries as narratives and texts.
  
• Challenges that ideas about country pose to education about languages and literatures.

About the call

We are looking for proposals for individual presentations, for curated panel sessions, for practice-focused workshops, and for organizational business meetings.

If you would be interested to submit a proposal, please follow the links on the Congress webpage: https://www.vu.edu.au/30th-FILLM-Congress. 

The deadline of this 1^st CfP is 30 September 2025.

If you wish to present an individual paper (up to 18 minutes content), a panel session (85 minutes, including discussion time), or an academic skills workshop (85 minutes), please do so via our conference submissions portal. Please note the information requested and relevant word limits for proposals, as the portal sets these out.

The portal will ask you for explicit information about your submission’s proposed participants, the type of presentation you propose, and how it will address the Congress theme—as well as its title and abstract.

About the conference

Congress webpage: https://www.vu.edu.au/30th-FILLM-Congress

Registration, travel, and accommodation information will be available on that same webpage in the coming months.

This 1^st CfP has been scheduled early, particularly to enable participation from international colleagues and presenters who will be seeking funding support and/or visa approval to attend. Any proposal received by the 1^st deadline, and which is approved by the scholarly peer review, is guaranteed to receive formal notice of approval no later than November 2025—allowing more than 12 months to make arrangements.