Cross – Disciplinary Conference
The Department of English Language & Literature held their annual Students’ Conference last Wednesday the 22nd of April. The conference was supervised by Dr. Mohammad Ali, and had Sarah Al-Adwani as organizing host. It was divided into three categories: Literature, Current Affairs, and Linguistics. With the presence of many professors and a crowd of students that filled the whole seminar, the presenters succeeded in delivering both empirical and theoretical studies bringing them one step closer to meeting the standards of international conferences.
The conference dealt with a variety of topics that were critically presented by the students. In the Literature category, for example, the topics ranged from internal and external misogyny to the necessity of the representation of innate female evil in different forms of literature. In fact, this demand for forward-moving literature tied into the third presentation that critically analyzed the role of literature in Kuwaiti society. In it, the presenter argued that, though literature can be used to bring nations to their feet, the current literary scene in Kuwait demands no such thing from its readers but further entrenches them in passivity.
The Current Affairs category also dealt with the idea of portrayal. One of the topics pertained to the importance of respectful depictions of those that go against heteronormativity in Hollywood movies. The lecture that followed dealt with the current representation of Islam and how Muslims could change the way their religion was perceived by effectively severing the ties between culture and religion. The final presentation dealt with the power of images, specifically the power of social media as venues for economic success.
Both religion and issues of the difference between sexes were brought up in the Linguistics category. The first presentation dealt with the effects of how positive religious words make us process language faster. The second presentation looked at how the mind differentiates between sounds when it comes to bilingual speakers, with females making more distinctions than males.The final presentation tackled the importance of language in creating a Kuwaiti identity and how it can be used by a few in order to exclude groups that do not fit their perception of Kuwaiti.
The presenters of the Conference were Abdullah Al-Shammari, Noor Al-Mutairi, Sarah Sayer, Fatima Al-Shimmeri, Sarah Al-Adwani, Hadeel Dalloul, Shayma Al-Enizi, Eman Al-Einawi, Fatima Yusef, Nouf Al-Enizi, and Shahad Samra. This initiate came as a venue to showcase students’ abilities in researching and critically analyzing topics in the aforementioned categories.
-Abdullah Al-Shammari and Shayma Al-Enizi
