Abstract Deadline: July 15, 2017

Meeting Description:

We are pleased to invite scholars interested in the history of linguistic
ideas developed alongside with different ideologies in different times. The
first conference on this theme was organized in 2015.

2017 year will be the 100th anniversary of the Great October Socialist
Revolution, which changed the development of peoples of Former Russian Empire.
The new linguistic politics of Soviet Union and so called ”New Linguistic
Theory” were the consequence of this revolution. Due to this reason some
sessions of the conference will be dedicated to the problems of the history of
Soviet Linguistics and the Soviet Linguistic Politics.

The Conference is organized by the Giorgi Akhvlediani Society for the History
of Linguistics and Ivané Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University.

The conference will be held on 6-9 October, 2017 at Ivane Javakhishvili
Tbilisi State University (Tbilisi, Georgia).

Call for Papers:

Papers relating to any aspect of the history of linguistic ideas developed
alongside with ideologies are invited, focusing on diverse topic areas from
individual case studies to methodological considerations.

Proposals for papers should be submitted in the form of abstracts of 400 words
as Word.doc, accompanied by the affiliation, email address and short bio of
the participant and mailed to: gashol.ge@gmail.com

The official languages of the conference are Georgian and English.

The deadline for submission of abstracts is July 15, 2017. The conference
editorial board will select the papers to be presented at the conference.
Final selection will be made by July 25, 2017; notification of acceptance will
be sent before July 30, 2017.

For further information please contact the local members of the executive
board by using gashol.ge@gmail.com

Continue reading “CFP: Ideology and Linguistic Ideas – History of Linguistic Ideas (Tbilisi State University)”

Deadline for Submissions: February 28, 2017

CfP Conference “Privacy Outside Its ‘Comfort Zone’: Late Socialist Eastern and East-Central Europe between the Private and the Public”

“Privacy” is a well-researched yet highly disputed concept in Western scholarship. While most privacy research comes from and concentrates on Western liberal societies, great potential of privacy studies beyond this traditional framework still remains largely unexplored. The framework of Western liberal societies may therefore be seen not only as a “comfort zone” of privacy studies, but also as a barrier that often limits the potential of the research. This conference aims at elucidating the problems and the perspectives of privacy studies beyond the traditional liberal framework by bringing together scholars and PhD students who work on the concept of “privacy” in the context of Late Socialist Eastern and East-Central Europe.
A common challenge to privacy researchers of non-Western societies, especially if they come from such a society, is to refute the erroneous misconception of the absence of “privacy” in non-liberal societies, and to embrace the constructions of “privacy” that these local societies offer. This conference endeavors to create a dialogue between scholars and PhD students from all fields of humanities and social and political sciences to discuss the challenges of transgressing the borders of liberal frameworks, the strategies to cope with these challenges, and the perspectives for privacy research that such transgressions offer.
The use of this concept in the context of Late Socialist Eastern and East-Central Europe leads to a range of questions that challenge liberal dichotomies and pave the way for alternative visions of “privacy”. These questions are particularly resonant now, in the centennial year of the October Revolution, when its consequences are debated anew. While the liberal concept of “privacy” usually fails in the framework of authoritarian regimes of post-war Europe, the region offers a diversity of other impulses similar to the liberal idea of “privacy”. In the post-war years, Socialist Eastern and East-Central Europe witnessed the expansion of the material as well as immaterial private sphere, which did not only come as a result of the changed world order and subsequent transformations of Socialist societies, but can also be seen as a process that was meticulously planned, carried out, and controlled by the authorities of respective countries in an attempt to stabilize their regimes in the process of de-Stalinization. However, we should also consider whether the private sphere, so benevolently tolerated by Socialist states, continuously developed into an enfant terrible that nurtured not only stability, but also the disruptive forces of dissidence and civil rights movements, which ultimately undermined the Socialist bloc from within. These stabilizing and simultaneously disruptive currents of “privacy” within non-liberal societies are of particular interest, as they elucidate the multifaceted nature of this concept.
Participants are therefore asked to revisit and question the concept of “privacy” in liberal contexts as well as within the frameworks of Late Socialist Eastern and East-Central Europe by renegotiating the underlying categories within a certain society. The conference will specifically examine ways of addressing the concepts of “privacy” and “publicity” in said contexts by debating the applicable frameworks and by challenging existing approaches. It will further explore the potential of “reverse applicability” by discussing how privacy research in liberal contexts can benefit from other frameworks of privacy—the transfer that is of particular interest now, in the “post-privacy age”, when Snowden’s revelations elucidated the approximations of Western liberal states to the authoritarian models of the past and the present. In the light of such developments, the examination of Late Socialist authoritarian societies becomes advantageous for our understanding of contemporary privacy paradigms.

Continue reading “CFP: Conference “Privacy Outside Its ‘Comfort Zone’: Late Socialist Eastern and East-Central Europe between the Private and the Public” (Univ. of Passau)”

Deadline for Abstract: January 14, 2017

SALSA XXV:
Language Contact and Multilingualism
April 14-15, 2017 at University of Texas at Austin

The Symposium About Language and Society (SALSA) is an annual symposium promoting linguistic, linguistic anthropological and communication research at the University of Texas at Austin. Originally created through the joint efforts of students from the Linguistic, Anthropology and Communication Studies Departments at the University of Texas, SALSA has developed into an interdisciplinary conference with contributions from various fields, including foreign language education, educational psychology, media studies, and numerous language departments. Our annual proceedings appear in special editions of Texas Linguistic Forum.

This year’s theme is Language Contact and Multilingualism. We look at contact broadly as the point where different languages and cultures come together and influence one another. We want to examine language contact throughout history and how it has shaped the present day languages in a variety of contexts and outcomes. Through this perspective we examine questions such as how doeslanguage contact impact bilingual and multilingual societies? How does contact affect methods of communication? How do intersecting cultures influence language use? What types of language ideologies influence and arise out of this contact situation? How has contact impacted the relationship between identity and language? In a world where contact is seemingly everywhere, how do we understand the particularities of different contact situations? How is contact encoded in the features of the languages in contact? How do social media and other forms of mass media impact contact? What role does contact play in projects of revitalization and documentation of languages? SALSA XXV seeks to explore these questions and more in order to contribute to literature in linguistics, anthropology, communication sciences, and interdisciplinary fields such as media, queer, critical race, area, and women’s and gender studies. Continue reading “CFP: Symposium About Language and Society (UT-Austin)”