March 2017 – Center for Intercultural Dialogue

CFP Borders & Crises in European Past & Present (Greece)

The Tensions of Europe Early Career Scholars’ Group organises the summer school “Borders and Crises in European Past and Present – angles from the history of technology” in connection with the 8th Tensions of Europe Conference (Athens, 7-10 September 2017).

The summer school aims at introducing PhD’s and early career scholars to the Tensions of Europe network as well as to facilitate and encourage network between young scholars across borders, while building their academic skills. The summer school further relates to the overall conference theme, problematizing how history of technology contributes to the study of border related phenomena. It also aims at revisiting the close connections between borders and technology by focusing at another keyword, which is related to the on-going discussion of Tensions of Europe future research agenda: crises. Following the main objective of the Tensions of Europe Early Career Scholars’ Group, the event focuses on network building through workshops, discussions and informal events.

One of the main themes we will discuss is the concept of crisis and how it has been co-produced with narratives about technology and borders in a historic perspective. How is a crisis formulated and perceived in relation to technology? How have different politics of crises looked over time? What links or separates definitions of crises over time? And what role does the memory of past crises play in the definition of and coming to terms with later crises? We also invite you to relate these issues to the conference theme of borders, and discuss themes such as migration, security and violence, political regimes and identities, human rights, economic infrastructure and more. We hope for a fruitful discussion that can inspire and help all participants in their future research.

Schedule and structure
In order to promote network building, the summer school is organized to a large extend around workshops and group discussion. The expected schedule of the summer school will include one lecture, one session for introductions, one workshop on writing and publication, one session on funding, one session co-organised with the ‘Borders, Technology, Peace’ Pre-Conference Meeting (to be confirmed), one workshop on the topic of crises, and two sessions connecting these activities and discussions to the Tensions network and its research agenda (see link above).

How to apply
In order to participate, we invite applicants to submit a short bio (no more than one page) and a short text (300-500 words)explaining their interest in the topics of the summer school and how their work would benefit from these discussions.

Proposals should be sent until 30th April 2017 to Elena Kochetkova.

In the beginning of the summer, participants will be asked to read texts and write short contributions for the workshops. The deadline for submitting these contributions will also be communicated to the participants at that time.

Location and other practicalities
The summer school will take place in Athens, on the 5th and the 7th September, in the seminar room in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, and on the 6th September it is expected to take place in Delphi, as part of the ‘Borders, Technology, Peace’ Pre-Conference Meeting (to be confirmed).

The participants of the summer school are expected to be on-site, but in some of the sessions, we might also be able to include a few on-line participants. Those who apply for that option should include that in their application.

As usual, the Tensions of Europe network will have travel grants to which the conference participants can apply to. To apply for these travel grants, the summer school participants will also have to attend the conference.

CFP Media & Information Literacy & Intercultural Dialogue

The Media and Information Literacy and Intercultural Dialogue (MILID) Yearbook 2017 is currently seeking proposals of articles. The MILID Yearbook is a peer-reviewed academic publication and a joint initiative of the UNESCO-UNAOC University Cooperation Programme on Media and Information Literacy and Intercultural Dialogue. The cooperation programme was launched in 2011 within the framework of the UNESCO University Twinning Programme (UNITWIN). The MILID University Network now consists of 19 universities from all regions of the world. The MILID Yearbooks 2013, 2014 and 2015 have been published in cooperation with the Nordic Information Centre for Media and Communication Research (NORDICOM) and since 2016 directly by UNESCO.

The year 2017 comes with lots of challenges and major alterations taking place worldwide in the realms of politics, economy and social life. It has become more challenging than ever before to make sense of the abundance of information charged with agendas, hidden messages, fake news and leading frames. This does not concern only media but all forms of information including research findings on which important policy and decisions are based. Thus, understanding the media and making meaning of the information environments become an essential constituent of the learning process.Perceived as a fundamental citizenship competency in the 21st century, MIL contributes to helping people understand how they come to know or learn, transforming information into acquired knowledge based on which decisions can be made. Today, MIL is believed to be transforming, reforming and reinventing the dynamics of learning in many countries and contexts. Intending to delve deeper and explore the main aspects of this change, “Media and Information Literacy in Critical Times: Re-imagining Ways of Learning” has been selected as the main theme for the MILID Yearbook 2017.

Submissions
All submissions must be in English following the format stated bellow:

Title
Author
Abstract (200-300 words) with the essential aspects of the work.
Keywords (between 4 and 6)

Abstracts should be sent to the following email addresses: cg.comunicacion.educacion@uab.cat; a.grizzle@unesco.org.

Important Dates

Deadline for submitting abstracts: April 22nd, 2017
Notification of acceptance: April 30th, 2017
Deadline for submitting full articles: June 1st, 2017

For further information and guidelines, please click here

CFP ECREA Communication History: Our Group First!

CFP European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA) Communication History Section
Budapest, Hungary, 7-9 September 2017

Our Group First! – Historical perspectives on Minorities/ Majorities, Inclusion/Exclusion, Centre/Periphery in Media and Communication History

“Our group first!” A familiar chant, which echoes past times in contemporary voices has recently gained momentum in the political discourse in Europe and the United States with resonance all over the globe. The claim and focus of such demands is however not new, but rather restorative with illustrious historical predecessors. Throughout history, communication has always been used to disseminate stereotypes, narratives and social myths aimed to the end of creating clear distinctions between a superior “us” and the “other”. Drawing lines between “us” and “them” is functional in negotiating senses of community and belonging and goes way beyond its political use. However, inclusion always harbors exclusion as well and the identity of groups also demarks
their boundaries. For this workshop the ECREA Communication History Section invites scholarly presentations to shed light on questions of inclusion/ exclusion, minorities/ majorities and centre/ periphery in communication.

The goal is to understand such practices throughout a variety of historical and cultural settings and to learn from the past for contemporary challenges. The workshop allows for a scope ranging from the macro level of national or supranational societies, to very peculiar particularities of social groups and issue communities. The workshop is also interested in work that helps to deconstruct or re-evaluate assumptions about minorities/majorities, exclusion/ inclusion, centre/periphery in a variety of contexts and as they are constructed or stabilized in academic work. Submissions dealing with the topics below are specially welcomed, even though the workshop will be opened to papers dealing with other aspects of the relation between media, minorities and majorities.

Minorities through the eyes of the Majorities and vice versa
In different historical locations the media have claimed to reflect societies in which they operate, disseminating cultural and social values that are accepted by the social structure in place, contributing to the imagination of community. In many cases this has led the media to focus their attention on majorities, while minorities are mostly ignored or represented in a negative fashion. Many authoritarian regimes, for example, have used all sorts of communication technologies, from posters and literature to broadcasting and newspapers, to promote fear and hate against minorities while exalting the qualities of those who are said to be the true patriots.

The concern about how minority groups are represented in public communication and how they engage in media production has deserved academic attention with the publication of books and journal issues dealing mostly with how mainstream media treat disabled citizens and gender, ethnic and religious minorities, migrants or refugees. We are interested in submissions addressing the logics, motives and uses of communicative constructions of normality and deviance, homogenization of cultural norms, dealing with heterogeneous concepts of life, alteration and hybrid identities. The workshop will focus on the creation of different types of minority groups as in-groups and out-groups, the alteration of their positions, identities and histories.

Different by choice
Differentiation and distinction are important ingredients for identity work. We are interested in communication phenomena and styles, which aimed at differentiating perspectives and creating alternative communities (e.g. hackers, tech-nerds) or establish alternative cultural scenes (e.g religious groups such as the Amish). This ranges from subcultures to the doing identity of political, LGBT, or activist groups and the conflicts and struggles they engaged in. Research is invited, which analyses special media formats produced by or addressing specific niches in the “small life-worlds of modern man” or highlight specific (protest) campaigns or identity management practices of such groups. Also representations of such minorities by choice through the lens of majorities, the mainstream media or popular culture are welcomed.

Inclusion and exclusion.
Minorities are often excluded from possibilities
of communication that are taken for granted and offered to majorities. Policy makers and commercial driven companies often consider as unprofitable bringing communications in unpopulated areas which leads to the exclusion of specific groups of people or specific region. Moreover, people tend to self-exclude themselves from too difficult, too expensive, and too complicated forms of communication. The workshop welcomes contributions on the history of communication divides (analogue and digital), and histories of political or business practices aiming to exclude groups of potential users.

Minority Media, Majority Practices
With the decline of mass communication and the slow disappearance of large audiences the lines between minorities and majorities get blurred when it comes to reception practices and habits. The discussion on how majorities and minorities use communication (technologies) and how they are represented on the media should also take into account the role of alternative media that, in many different historical contexts, have been created and operated by minorities. While cases like the Jewish press comes immediately to mind, feminist magazines and community radio stations are also examples of how different groups have used the media to promote their ideas and ideologies among fragmented audiences and compartmentalized collective identities. Many of these media played a role in in-group identity construction, frequently transcending borders and linking transnational audiences. The use of technologies that has widely disappeared or retracted to small niches or the nostalgic rediscovery of past media devices that are considered minoritarian will also be discussed.

Centre and periphery
Majorities are often at the centre and minorities at the periphery of infrastructures and networks. While at the centre the flow of communication is more intense and the speed of connections is higher, at the peripheries connections can be unstable and less reliable. Nevertheless, peripheries are also places where unexpected and minoritaran uses of media and communication emerge. In different historical periods, cities such as Athens, Rome, Venice, London, and New York have been at the centre of communication flows while places distant from the centre have to deal with their peripheral status. Case studies and papers dealing with the consequences of being central or peripheral in communication will be welcomed.

“Us and them” through the history of communication studies
Another field of inquiry the workshop is interested in is the role of academic research in observing and thus preserving logics of inclusion and exclusion through academic work. How do and did media and communication scholars normalize some media practices and pathologize others? What was the role of media and communication scholarship in stabilizing social in-groups while alienating outsiders (e.g. through links to political propaganda, psychological warfare and similar manipulation strategies or corporate advertising)? Which myths and narratives are cultivated by media research and how do prevalent concepts, eligible methods and accessible sources shape and foster certain understandings of media history, highlighting specific groups while sidelining others, thus creating an implicit invisible mainstream? Is thus a biased
understanding of majority and minority groups at a given created in communication history? Which strategies could be used to deconstruct and re-evaluate existing assumptions in the light of gender, postcolonial or non-Western perspectives? How can subgroups hidden in the alleged communication mainstream be made visible? How are in-groups and out-groups (mainstream
and outsider perspectives) constructed within the academic field of (historical) communication research?

Abstracts of 500 words (maximum) proposing empirical case studies as well as theoretical or methodological contributions should be submitted no later than 29 April 2017. Proposals for full panels (comprising 4 or 5 papers) are also welcome: these should include a 250-word abstract for each individual presentation, and a 300-word rationale for the panel. Send abstracts to: Dr. Sipos Balázs (sipos.balazs AT btk.elte.hu). Authors will be informed regarding acceptance/rejection for the conference no later than 15 May 2017. Early career scholars and graduate students are highly encouraged to submit their work. Please indicate if the research submitted is part of your thesis or dissertation project. The organizers will aim to arrange for discussants to provide an intensive response for graduate students projects.

Key Concept 43: Uchi-Soto Translated into French

Continuing translations of Key Concepts in Intercultural Dialogue, today I am posting KC41: Uchi-Soto, which Eric Cattelain wrote in English in 2014 and which he has now translated into French.

As always, all Key Concepts are available as free PDFs; just click on the thumbnail to download. Lists of Key Concepts organized chronologically by publication date and number, alphabetically by concept, and by languages into which they have been translated, are available, as is a page of acknowledgments with the names of all authors, translators, and reviewers.

Cattelain, E. (2017). Uchi Soto. Key Concepts in Intercultural Dialogue, 43. Available from:
https://centerforinterculturaldialogue.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/kc43-uchi-soto_french.pdf

If you are interested in translating one of the Key Concepts, please contact me for approval first because dozens are currently in process. As always, if there is a concept you think should be written up as one of the Key Concepts, whether in English or any other language, propose it. If you are new to CID, please provide a brief resume. This opportunity is open to masters students and above, on the assumption that some familiarity with academic conventions generally, and discussion of intercultural dialogue specifically, are useful.

Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz, Director
Center for Intercultural Dialogue

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Literature for Intercultural Awareness: A “Key to Perception”?

Literature for Intercultural Awareness: A “Key to Perception”?
Guest Post by Michael Steppat

It has been said that literary works can benefit and advance intercultural understanding. For instance, Mazi-Leskovar maintains that “literature should alert readers to all those who are in one way or another different from the readers themselves. Literature thus encourages inter- and intracultural awareness” (2010, p. 10); “multicultural literature remains one of the sources through which issues related to intercultural communicative competence can be successfully addressed” (2006, p. 278). Wasikiewicz-Firlej (2012) explains that “works of literature enable the reader to observe the world from multifarious perspectives and cherish the diversity of individual perception. The power of literature lies in its unique ability to deeply involve the reader both at a cognitive, as well as emotional level.” Taking Japanese writer Haruki Murakami as an example, Kuryleva and Boeva have found: “The overwhelming majority of the writer’s literary heroes, placed into alien cultural environments, become the participants of intercultural communication” (2010, p. 171). This is not only a feature of recent literature, however. In the very beginning of western literary culture, Homer’s Iliad culminates in a Book 24 which poignantly depicts the furtive (and rather desperate) visit of Trojan ruler Priam in the quarters of the Greek enemy, at risk of his life.

Of course it is more recent developments that are especially relevant for us today. We owe to Edward T. Hall an insight into sources of knowledge that bring to light the concealed snags of what we like to take for granted, what culture “hides” from its own members. In The Hidden Dimension, Hall illustrates this with the desirability of using literary artifacts as “a key to perception”: from fictional works of different cultural origins one may gain data on the experience and perception of spatial distance as “a significant cultural factor” (1966/1982, pp. 94ff.). Some time after this, communication scholar John C. Condon suggested: “The potential of literature and film for our understanding of intercultural relations is considerable, and can be explored both through the analysis of cultural patterns expressed in the works, and in the analysis of intercultural themes, of conflicts and resolutions by the characters in novels, biographies and films” (1986, p. 153). It is hence not surprising that Patrice Buzzanell, studying intercultural adaptation, should develop an argument about career design processes partly by calling attention to narrative fiction, viz. Lionel Shriver’s novel The Post-Birthday World (2012, pp. 85, 91-92): by bricolage, the same set of skills and abilities “can be channeled into different career paths.”

Download the entire post as a PDF.

Michael Steppat Profile

Michael Steppat has been Chair of Literature in English at the University of Bayreuth, Germany, where he also served as Academic Dean of the Faculty of Linguistics and Literary Studies for many years until he achieved Emeritus status in 2015.

He also holds a Professorial position of honor in Moscow from the Russian Federation’s Ministry of Higher Education and Science, having been coordinator of a cooperation network of five universities and becoming moderator of a research seminar at Moscow City University. In recent years he has been appointed regular visiting professor and external advising faculty member at Shanghai International Studies University, as well as visiting professor at Fu Jen Catholic University, Taipei (Taiwan); in earlier years he was invited as visiting professor at institutions in the UK and the USA. After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Münster (Germany) and later his ‘Habilitation’ both from there and from the Free University of Berlin, he was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Texas at Austin, then research professor at Arizona State University. He has repeatedly been awarded the Myra and Charlton Hinman Fellowship of Amherst College and the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC. To move in a new direction, he developed an internationally cooperative graduate program of Intercultural Anglophone Studies.

His book publications include Americanisms: Discourses of Exception, Exclusion, Exchange (2009); editions of several Renaissance Latin dramas (1991); Chances of Mischief: Variations of Fortune in Spenser (1990); co-editorship of the New Variorum edition of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (1990); The Critical Reception of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (1980); and a monograph on the early work of St. Augustine of Hippo (1980). Thus one research interest has been in the constructions of Orientalism in early modern literature. A collaborative volume on Writing Identity: The Construction of National Identity in American Literature (Moscow Region University Press, 2016) extends the research focus to identity discourses in American culture. As appointed member of the Modern Language Association of America’s editorial team for the International New Variorum Shakespeare, he continues to edit assigned plays. Spurred by an invitation from the London School of Economics and Social Science in 2011 to organize a workshop, based on the cooperative graduate program, Steppat has increasingly devoted attention to intercultural studies in connection with literature. The chief research interest in this regard is extending intercultural scrutiny of literature as well as film beyond historical comparison, and toward a processual or interactive notion of culture as practice and meeting ground. Imaginative representation of migrant situations and cultural minorities is especially pertinent in exploring the fertile terrain where literary and intercultural study discover each other.

In 2012 Steppat became Primary Investigator in a Bavarian government-sponsored Sino-German cooperative program on “Identity and Intercultural Communication: Perspectives on America”, which has enabled a symposium, the delivering of papers, and the conducting of workshops on intercultural literary study at various international institutions and conferences. The program has widened to considering Intercultural Communication as a resource for literary research. Connections between the range of research interests keep emerging, sometimes in unanticipated ways. Steppat has produced three volumes on Literature and Interculturality in the Intercultural Research book series, of which he is a co-editor (Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press, 2019). He has been appointed a member of the national Cluster of Excellence “Africa Multiple”. Apart from theoretical and conceptual orientations, major focal areas in this context are diasporic discourses, representations of cross-cultural identities, as well as variations of cross-cultural transfer. A key concern is to understand difficult meanings in the artifacts we study not as a mental act but rather as a social practice and a communicative achievement.

Work for CID:

Michael Steppat wrote the guest post, Literature for Intercultural Awareness: A “Key to Perception”? He has also served as a reviewer for translations into German.

KC81: Dialogue as a Space of Relationship by Maria Flora Mangano

The next issue of Key Concepts in intercultural Dialogue is now available. The goal is to expand the concepts available to discussions of intercultural dialogue. Click on the thumbnail to download the PDF. Lists organized chronologically by publication date and number, alphabetically by concept in English, and by languages into which they have been translated, are available, as is a page of acknowledgments with the names of all authors, translators, and reviewers.

Mangano, M. F. (2017). Dialogue as a space of relationship. Key Concepts in Intercultural Dialogue, 81. Available from:
https://centerforinterculturaldialogue.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/kc81-dialogue-as-space-of-relationship.pdf

The Center for Intercultural Dialogue publishes a series of short briefs describing Key Concepts in Intercultural Dialogue. Different people, working in different countries and disciplines, use different vocabulary to describe their interests, yet these terms overlap. Our goal is to provide some of the assumptions and history attached to each concept for those unfamiliar with it. As there are other concepts you would like to see included, send an email to the series editor, Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz. If there are concepts you would like to prepare, provide a brief explanation of why you think the concept is central to the study of intercultural dialogue, and why you are the obvious person to write up that concept.

Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz, Director
Center for Intercultural Dialogue

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

CFP Argumentation & Language (Switzerland)

The second edition of the conference “Argumentation & Language” will take place from 7 to 9 of February 2018 at USI – Università della Svizzera italiana in Lugano, Switzerland.

Building on the success of the first ARGAGE conference, held at the University of Lausanne in 2015, the goal of the conference is to further explore the intersections of argumentative and language practices. Scholars are therefore invited to submit proposals dealing with the interrelations between language (its units, its levels, its functions and modes of processing) and the way argumentation functions. Contributions must be related to at least one of the following five research axes:

1. Argumentation in spoken interaction
2. Semantics and argumentation
3. Argumentative indicators
4. Corpora annotation and argumentation
5. Rhetorical devices

Priority will be given to proposals that make their methods and analytical categories explicit and that privilege the description of empirical data collected in corpora or empirically. Submissions will be evaluated on the basis of anonymized abstracts.

Types of contributions

Individual presentation
The deadline for submission is 30 June 2017.

Panel
Panel proposals can be submitted until 30 April 2017.

Stockholm U PhD Studentship: Bilingualism (Sweden)

PHD Student in Bilingualism at the Department of Swedish Language and Multilingualism, Stockholm University
Closing date: 18 April 2017

The Centre for Research on Bilingualism provides a broad base of theoretical and practical research with the aim of increasing understanding and awareness of bilingualism. The Centre is a cross-linguistic and interdisciplinary unit within the Faculty of Humanities Language Sciences Section at Stockholm University. Research at the Centre forms a significant part of Stockholm University’s leading research area “Bilingualism and Second Language Acquisition”.

Research areas include bilingualism and second language acquisition, multilingualism and diversity, bilingualism in the family, bilingual education, Swedish as a second language for children and adults, young people’s languages and language use in multilingual contexts, second and foreign language teaching, L1 attrition and reactivation in bilinguals, language maintenance and language shift, language ideology, language policy, and multilingualism and education in developing countries. In sum, the Centre’s research covers the sociolinguistic, pragmatic, structural, psycholinguistic, cognitive and neurolinguistic aspects of bilingualism. For more information, see: www.biling.su.se/english.

As a PhD student at the Faculty of Humanities you have the opportunity to participate in the Faculty’s Doctoral School, which offers themes and courses characterised by interdisciplinarity and cooperation across subjects. The Doctoral School also gives you the chance to improve the quality of your education thanks to the interchange provided by the community of PhD students from other subjects and departments.

Project description
The Centre for Research on Bilingualism announces 1–2 places in the PhD program in Bilingualism. The Centre encourages applications in the areas of the Sociolinguistics of multilingualism and diversity and Psycho-/Neurolinguistics (including EEG or Eye-tracking).

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