In an increasingly interconnected world, English functions as a global lingua franca whose ownership, legitimacy, and normative authority remain deeply contested. Contemporary sociolinguistic and postcolonial scholarship challenges the assumption that so-called “native speakers” or Inner Circle nations are the language’s sole custodians, instead conceptualizing English as a pluricentric and dynamically negotiated resource shaped by its global users.

Yet a central paradox persists within mainstream World Englishes scholarship. Although it seeks to decenter native-speaker authority and legitimize localized varieties, it often continues to rely on Kachru’s (1985) Three Circles model, Inner Circle (L1), Outer Circle (L2), and Expanding Circle (EFL), which has been criticized for reproducing the very hierarchies it aims to dismantle by implicitly privileging Inner Circle norms as the benchmark of linguistic legitimacy.

Drawing on decolonial, translingual, literary, and cultural perspectives, TATE 2026 seeks to open interdisciplinary conversations around English as a site of negotiation, resistance, creativity, and transformation.

The conference particularly foregrounds the intersections between ELT, applied linguistics, literary studies, and cultural studies, emphasizing how language, literature, and culture reproduce and challenge structures of power, inequality, identity formation, and epistemic exclusion.

The conference welcomes contributions that rethink ELT through more inclusive, socially just, and culturally responsive pedagogies while also exploring how literary and cultural texts engage questions of memory, migration, hybridity, representation, identity, media, globalization, and resistance.

Participants are encouraged to examine English not merely as a linguistic system, but as a dynamic cultural, ideological, and political space shaped by multiple voices, histories, and communities.

Over three days, TATE 2026 will bring together researchers, educators, literary scholars, cultural critics, and practitioners to exchange ideas, share innovative practices, and explore emerging theoretical directions toward what the conference conceptualizes as an emancipatory TRANS paradigm; one that moves beyond standardization, monolingualism, and native-speaker norms toward plurality, multilingualism, hybridity, equity, and social transformation.