Author: Center for Intercultural Dialogue

Call for papers: IALIC: Rethinking intercultural communication beyond verbal language: affect, materiality and embodiment in times of ‘crises,’ European University Cyprus, 1-3 December, 2023. Deadline: 10 June 2023.

The International Association for Languages and Intercultural Communication (IALIC) is calling for papers on the topic of Rethinking intercultural communication beyond verbal language: Affect, materiality and embodiment in times of ‘crises.’ Western epistemologies have traditionally valued rationality and the verbal above other aspects of discourse and communication. Verbal language has been primarily seen as the key instrument for developing rationality and the cornerstone of human thought. As a result, these ideas have dominated the field of intercultural communication, often silencing alternative visions of intercultural encounters and their semiotic entanglements, beyond the European male sensorium and a human-centred worldview.

However, recent social and political developments call for new ways of understanding social and political phenomena, including intercultural communication. Indeed, in the last few years, public and academic arenas have been inundated by discourses of ‘crises’ and threats forcing us to rethink both the notion of interculturality, as well as communication itself. Energy crises, ongoing wars and the (so-called) refugee crisis, climate change and ecological crises, financial crises, and of course, health crises, such as the covid19 pandemic – to name just a few – bring to the foreground notions such as precarity, marginality, transition and liminality and raise questions such as:

• • What other ways of communicating (or failing to) do discourses and experiences of threat bring about?
  • How are discourses of crisis and threat semiotically constructed and circulated?
  • What is the role of affect/emotions in times of crises and threats, and what new openings do they create in the study of intercultural communication? (e.g. how are they enregistered as part of crises-discourses and what are their communicative dynamics across and beyond languages and cultures?)
  • What kind of subjectivities do crises and threats produce, and how are these embodied (e.g. the embodiment of fear, the “contaminated” body etc.)?
  • What is the role of technology, and more generally, materiality in intercultural communication in times of crises?

All these call attention to a variety of semiotic repertoires and semiotic resources that are not restricted to language and discourse, and which often require working across disciplines. The affective turn, the material turn, and posthumanism in the social sciences and humanities indicate the ongoing efforts to make sense and theorise social reality and communication beyond verbal language. Besides, the increasing use of the notion of (in)securitisation outside the field of security studies is an example of scholarly attempts to capture the ways in which discourses and experiences of threat permeate everyday spaces and interactions, calling for methodological innovation and interdisciplinarity.

Responding to current challenges, and in line with contemporary discursive and academic developments in the social sciences and humanities, this conference aims to foreground different ways of making sense of cultures, languages, social relations and intercultural communication in an anxious and constantly changing world. At the same time, it calls for a critical examination of the notion of ‘crisis’ and its impact on intercultural communication.