6th INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM LANGUAGE FOR INTERNATIONAL COMMUNICATION (LINCS)

Organized by the University of Latvia (Latvia) in association with Le Mans University (France) 

TRANS-CULTURAL ECOSYSTEMS: LANGUAGE, CULTURE, AND LITERATURE

Riga, 9-10 May 2024

Call for Papers

https://conferences.lu.lv/event/393/

We are pleased to invite you to the Sixth International Symposium Language for International Communication (LINCS) titled “Trans-cultural ecosystems: language, culture, and literature” to be held in Riga on May 9-10, 2024.

The International Symposium Language for International Communication has been an integral part of the research ecosystem of the Department of English Studies, the Centre for Applied Linguistics, and the Department of Romance Studies at the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Latvia since 2009. At the conference “Transcultural Perspectives in Language, Literature and Culture in the 21st century” at Le Mans University (France) organized in association with the University of Latvia on May 19-20, 2022, the topic of transculturality opened broad perspectives on the study of discourses. 

Through discourses, people generate and transmit knowledge on a variety of issues, including climate change, environmental sustainability, conservation, endangered species, and eco-inequality. Moreover, it has been recognized that language as part of ecosystems may not only influence our thoughts, ideas, ideologies, and worldview but also affect our behaviour. In this regard, language, culture, and literature play a prominent role in encouraging the protection of environment and promoting more eco-friendly living, so eco-transculturality can appear valuable in environmental humanities and central to transcultural ecocriticism. This symposium aims at a close examination of these trans-cultural ecosystems. 

We invite papers that explore language use and meaning creation in fiction or non-fiction marked by a transcultural worldview and a particular sensibility to eco-issues. Since environmental and nomadic thought is also marked by an accrued sensibility to the nonhuman, special attention could also be given to how eco-transcultural imagination highlights the nonhuman.

We invite submissions on but not limited to the following topics:

• Metaphor and its fundamental usefulness: ecology of language
• Meaning creation in interaction
• Linguistic and cultural diversity in specific socio-political settings
• Education and classroom practices: ecology of language 
• Diversities in new technology use in language, culture and literature
• Multilingual language policies in sociopolitical, economic, and cultural environments
• Environmental discourse: narrative of climate change
• Eco-transcultural theory
• Transcultural eco-poetics; ecology and transcultural life-writing; transcultural eco-art
• Eco-transculturality in philosophical nomadism
• Lexicology, lexicography, terminology

Keynote speakers 

Piotr Cap, Professor and Chair of Pragmatics, University of Lodz, Poland

Hubert Zapf, Professor of American Literature and Co-Director of Environmental Humanities at the University of Augsburg, Germany

Working languages

English, French, and Spanish 

Format of the symposium

At the moment, we are planning for the symposium to take place as an in-person event. 

Abstract submission

Abstracts of 250 to 300 words should be submitted by February 12, 2024

(For further information regarding abstract submission and format, please visit the symposium website starting September 25, 2023]

All abstracts will be blind peer reviewed. The accepted abstracts will be available on the Symposium website in a Book of Abstracts before the symposium.

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