Population Mobility, Literary Production, and Mutual Learning of Civilizations:
The Third Symposium on Travel and Diaspora Literature

On the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the founding of Northeast Normal University and the 30th anniversary of the founding of the School of Foreign Languages, the School of Foreign Languages of Northeast Normal University has decided to host the Third Symposium on Travel and Diaspora Literature: “Population Mobility, Literary Production, and Mutual Learning of Civilizations” from May 23 to 24, 2026. Having long admired your outstanding achievements and profound expertise in the field of foreign literary studies, we sincerely invite you to grace the conference with your presence and deliver a keynote speech.

As vehicles that document population mobility and cultural dissemination, travel and diaspora literature continuously expand and reconfigure the material and spiritual boundaries of humanity. The Third Symposium on Travel and Diaspora Literature, organized by the School of Foreign Languages of Northeast Normal University, aims to examine the intrinsic logical relationships among global population mobility, literary creation, and civilizational dialogue from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Travel and diaspora writing transcends the single-dimensional narrative framework of the nation-state, constructing a hybrid and cross-border space of literary imagination between rupture and integration, memory and forgetting. The conference focuses on the following: First, how travel writing has evolved from the gaze of early colonial explorers to a contemporary two-way, decentered process of mutual observation; second, how diaspora writers, through creative work in their native or foreign languages, transform the alienation of displacement into a creative literary resource, elevating diasporic experience into an imagined community that transcends geographical boundaries; third, how the study of travel and diaspora literature, through interdisciplinary approaches, interprets fluid concepts of “region,” diverse states of “being,” and substantive “historical” narratives, thereby infusing area and regional studies with a humanistic core.

I. Conference Themes and Topics
Conference Theme: “Population Mobility, Literary Production, and Mutual Learning of Civilizations.” Core topics include, but are not limited to:

1.      Visual Politics and Power Topologies in Travel Writing

2.      Spatial Narratives and Historical Reconstruction from a Fluid Perspective

3.      Emotional Writing and Geopolitics in Travel and Diaspora

4.      Contemporary Transformations of Travel and Diaspora Literature

II. Conference Date and Venue
Conference Dates: May 23 (Saturday) to May 24 (Sunday), 2026
Registration: Full day on May 22 (Friday), 2026
Venue: Northeast Normal University (Renmin Street Campus), Changchun, China

III. Conference Format
The symposium will be conducted in the form of keynote speeches by invited experts, without being confined to the above-listed topics.

School of Foreign Languages
Northeast Normal University
March 24, 2026

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