Speaking Otherwise: ReVoicing the Baltic

Focusing on marginalised and minoritised voices in the Baltic Sea Region, the conference examines how these forms of expression acquire rhetorical force and how speaking and acting otherwise can challenge established power relations and reshape the conditions of public participation.

Voice is often understood as the capacity to express oneself through speech. Here, we approach voice more broadly, as something that takes shape through speech, gesture, bodily action, performance, and other forms of practice. Silence, refusal, and participation can likewise become forms of voicing. Voice takes shape within a rhetorical situation, where an act becomes meaningful in relation to others and acquires the capacity to make a claim.
This understanding of voice draws attention to the conditions under which rhetorical agency becomes possible. To have a voice is not simply to possess the capacity to speak. It also depends on whether an act can be recognised, addressed to an audience, and taken up as meaningful. Rhetorical agency thus emerges through relations between bodies, situations and audiences rather than belonging entirely to an individual speaker.
Speaking otherwise can therefore mean speaking in another way, but it can also mean acting otherwise. A gesture may challenge an established order without being accompanied by words. A repeated practice may make a claim about how a space should be used. A refusal to participate may acquire rhetorical force. Such acts invite us to ask what counts as a voice in the first place and under what conditions a bodily or material practice becomes legible as rhetoric.
The conference is particularly interested in voices that have been marginalised, displaced, translated, or rendered difficult to hear. Rather than treating these voices as a fixed category, we ask how their rhetorical force is shaped by the situations in which they appear. What happens when a voice is heard but not recognised as authoritative? What happens when a gesture or practice becomes meaningful only when interpreted by others? And what happens when a voice moves between languages, places, media, or audiences?
The Baltic Sea Region offers a productive setting for exploring these questions. Shaped by shifting borders, multilingual encounters, and unequal relations between centres and peripheries, the region brings different histories of belonging, exclusion, and public expression into view. ReVoicing the Baltic asks what becomes possible when established ways of speaking, acting, and listening are challenged, and how alternative forms of voicing can reshape rhetorical agency and public life across the region.
We welcome contributions that:
• examine how minorized voices take shape under changing political, social, and linguistic conditions in the Baltic Sea Region, and how rhetorical agency be-comes possible, constrained, or difficult to recognise;
• investigate how multilingualism, minority languages, translation, and relations between centres and peripheries shape whose voices are heard, recognised, or rendered unintelligible;
• explore how voice takes form beyond speech through gesture, silence, bodily acts, performance, craft, movement, and material environments, and how gen-der shapes the conditions under which different forms of voicing acquire rhetor-ical force and public recognition;
• analyse how revoicing transforms voices, gestures, practices, and claims across languages, places, audiences, and historical contexts, and how alterna-tive forms of voicing challenge established ways of speaking, acting, and listen-ing in historical and contemporary Baltic contexts.

We welcome submissions from across disciplines. Contributions that approach voice as a rhetorical practice and attend to the conditions under which expression can become consequential are especially encouraged.
Proposals
Contributions to the conference are welcome in the form of oral presentations (20 min. + 15 min. discussion). Proposals should be prepared in a Word document and include the following information:
• Full name(s) of presenter(s) with affiliation(s) and contact email(s)
• A title (max 10 words)
• Five keywords
• An abstract (max 300 words)
• Selected bibliography with academic sources (max. 5 references) (APA 7th Edn.) – these are not included in the word count.
• A bio sketch of 100 words
Your submission should be sent by email to lisa.kallstrom@sh.se, with the subject line: Submission Speaking Otherwise

Key information
▪ Conference 7-9 October 2027, Södertörn University, Stockholm.
▪ Abstract submission is 15 April 2027
▪ Notification of acceptance: 15 May 2027
▪ All submissions are blind reviewed

Organiser: Lisa Källström in collaboration with Maria Dahlin (Södertörn University) This event is co-funded by the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES), Södertörn University.

Selected conference papers that primarily employ rhetorical theories, concepts, or analytical methods, and thus fall within the thematic scope of *Res Rhetorica (https://resrhetorica.com/index.php/RR/about)), may be considered for publication in the journal following a double-blind peer-review process. Journal Editor, Res Rhetorica: Ewa Modrzejewska, University of Warsaw. Guest Editors: Lisa Källström and Kristine Marie Berg (University of Copenhagen).