An event organized through CUSO (Conférence universitaire de Suisse occidentale), the Department of English at the University of Lausanne, the Centre de traduction littéraire de Lausanne (UNIL), and the Canadian Embassy of Switzerland.
This 2-day CUSO workshop will give doctoral students across Switzerland the opportunity to discuss and reflect on modes of solidarity and collaboration within the context of literary studies. We will consider Indigenous Studies and Black Studies as particularly generative foundations for these conversations due to the ethical weight they give to solidarity and collaboration, but such topics appeal to a wide variety of other fields and subfields important to Swiss doctoral students working in Anglophone literary studies, including American Literary Studies, Decolonial Theory, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Translation Studies, to name a few fields for which collaboration is itself an ethos. Our invited speakers, Professors David Chariandy, Sophie McCall, and Kai Minosh Pyle, combine academic and literary expertise and experience, so they will be an excellent set of interlocutors for these discussions. This event also aims to address practical considerations, such as how to collaborate ethically and effectively in a variety of contexts. We will also include a literary translator to offer further insight on the collaborative nature of translation (for the workshop on translation). The event concludes on Friday with a film screening of Sugarcane and apéro sponsored by the Canadian Embassy (details to be confirmed). Throughout the workshop, we will be especially attentive to modes of solidarity with and through differences (following the work of Audre Lorde and others), rather than forms of being and working together that risk erasing difference into sameness.
Locations TBD
Thursday, 21 May 2026:
- 12h30-14h00: Roundtable on Solidarity & Pedagogy
- 14h-15h00: Workshop with Invited Speakers
- 15h-15h30: Coffee & Tea
- 15h30-17h: Doctoral Workshop I
- 17h-18h: Apéro
- 18h-19h30: Literary Reading and Discussion
- Dinner
Friday, 22 May 2026:
- 9h-9h30: Coffee & Tea
- 9h30h-10h30: Doctoral Workshop II
- 10h30-11h30: Roundtable on Translation & Collaboration
- 12h-14h: Lunch & Closing Discussion
- 16h-18h: Film Screening of Sugarcane, sponsored by the Canadian Embassy
- 18h-19h: Roundtable
- 19h-20h: Apéro