Call for papers: Family Language Policy Conference: Reimagining the Field, University of Galway, Galway, Ireland, 22-23 October 2024. Deadline: 31 July 2024.
In their 2008 paper, King et al. laid the foundation for the emergence of the field that came to be recognised as Family Language Policy (FLP). Since then, this field of inquiry has received an increasing amount of scholarly attention and has evolved into a burgeoning field over the last decade. In this short time span, the core interests of FLP have shifted: While it initially attempted “to draw direct causal links across ideologies, practices, and outcomes”, it moved on to examining “how families are constructed through multilingual language practices, and how language functions as a resource for this process of family making and meaning making” (King 2016: 728). Recent FLP scholarship has pointed to the necessity of putting under scrutiny the central concepts of family, language, and language policy and not departing from taken-for-granted notions in order to produce situated accounts of FLP (Lanza & Lomeu Gomes 2020). A recent proposal even suggests reimagining the field “under the more all-encompassing label of family multilingualism” (Léglise 2023: 288), arguing that the institutionalisation of FLP as a field has marginalised different kinds of knowledges pertinent to family multilingualism.
Encouraged by the impetus of these and other reflections on the foundations of research on family language policy and family multilingualism, this Hybrid International Conference on Family Language Policy is being organised under the theme of Reimagining the Field. The aim is to provide a forum for discussing epistemological, theoretical and methodological considerations around FLP and family multilingualism (FM), for setting future research agendas and for exploring possibilities for establishing regular venues for such exchange.
Contributions in the form of papers and symposia are welcomed on the following issues:
• Epistemological foundations of FLP/FM
• Key theoretical concepts in FLP/FM
• Nexus of FLP/FM and the wider community
• Interaction between FLP/FM and educational institutions
• Children’s agency
• Digital and multimodal interaction in the family
• Affect and emotion in FLP/FM
• FLP/FM and political economy
• Participatory approaches in FLP/FM
Center for Intercultural Dialogue 