International Students’ Conference
on
Digital Turns: Technology, Culture, and the Humanities in the 21st Century

Organized by

The Centre for Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature
School of Liberal Studies
Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology- Deemed to be University

 on
September 15-16, 2025

Recent developments in digital technologies have marked a turning point in the ways we approach, study, and engage with literary and cultural texts. The digital turn in the humanities and social sciences, emergent since the 1970s with the rise of digital humanities as a distinct research area, has become more pronounced with the proliferation of cyberspace, digital media, and creative digital tools that generate narratives, art forms, videos, and cultural expressions.

Today, the advent of immersive digital spaces such as the metaverse has further expanded the boundaries of cultural production, enabling new forms of sociality, artistic experimentation, and virtual community formations. Simultaneously, the use of generative AI to simulate painting styles, compose poetry, generate fiction, and mimic artistic expressions has introduced pressing questions regarding the ethical use of technology while redefining the medium and meaning of art itself.

These developments challenge conventional ideas of personhood and humanness, compelling us to revisit long-standing notions of creativity, authorship, originality, embodiment, and the human experience within increasingly digitized environments.

This students’ conference invites papers exploring how digital technologies, immersive spaces like the metaverse, and AI are transforming cultural and literary practices, impacting the modes of creation, dissemination, and interpretation in the 21st century.

Possible Themes:

• The digital turn in literary and cultural studies
• Metaverse, virtual worlds, and immersive digital cultures
• Digital media, narrative forms, and storytelling practices
• Archives, databases, and digital preservation in cultural studies
• Gaming, gamification, and interactive narratives
• Digital art forms and their socio-cultural implications
• Platform cultures, online communities, and virtual sociality
• Generative AI and the redefinition of creativity
• Ethical, philosophical, and legal questions in digital cultural production
• The politics of access, inclusion, and exclusion in the digital humanities
• Digital activism and online cultural movements
• Datafication and the cultural imaginary
• Remix culture, memes, and digital poetics
• Cyberfeminism, technofeminism, and intersectional digital studies

Submission Guidelines:

Send your abstract within 250-300 words, including the title of the paper and five keywords, along with your name and institutional affiliation, and email to conference.ksll@kiit.ac.in by August 20, 2025.

Important Dates:

• Deadline for Submission: August 20, 2025
• Notification of Acceptance: August 26, 2025
• Last date of Registration: September 10, 2025

Registration Details:

Independent Scholars: Rs. 2000
PhD Students: Rs. 1500
Graduate Students: Rs. 1000
Undergraduate Students: Rs. 800
International Student/ Scholar: $25

Bank Account Details:

We encourage submissions from graduate students and research scholars across disciplines, including literature, cultural studies, media studies, visual arts, philosophy, and digital humanities. Selected papers will have the opportunity for publication in the post-conference proceedings. For queries,
please contact: Dr. Debanjali Roy (debanjali.royksol@kiit.ac.in),
Dr. Gourab Chatterjee (gourab.chatterjeesol@kiit.ac.in, 9830422375)