GURT – Center for Intercultural Dialogue

Call for Papers: Georgetown University Round Table 2025: Language and Food, 28 February – 2 March 2025, Georgetown University, Washington D.C. Deadline: 18 November 2024.

Food and language are omnipresent and intertwined in everyday life. We use language to talk about food, and food terms have rich cultural histories and associations. Menus and food packaging labels not only provide windows on an item’s nature and quality, but also often signal association with identities such as ethnicity, region, or class. Mealtime has long been a privileged site for the study of language in use, as people talk while they eat, and while they cook. Parents use language to socialize their children into food preferences and practices; even among adults, the taste of food is collaboratively negotiated in interaction: think wine tasting, or dinner conversation. Children in school cafeterias and co-workers in workplace break rooms talk about food. People participate in online forums on topics such as gourmet cooking, veganism, and weight loss; they use language about food to portray themselves as certain kinds of people (gourmand, disciplined eater, environmentalist, picky eater, athlete). People post photos of food on Instagram, recipe videos on TikTok and Facebook, and restaurant reviews on Yelp. Food is a necessity and a luxury; it is intertwined with identities (e.g., cultural, gendered, socioeconomic, political, religious), relationships (e.g., parent-child, friend-friend, host-guest), and values (e.g., healthful eating, ethical eating), all of which are negotiated through language.

GURT 2025 will bring together diverse scholars whose work explores intersections between language and food. The conference will be inclusive of multiple approaches, including (but not limited to) interactional sociolinguistics, conversation analysis, critical discourse analysis, multimodal discourse analysis, ethnography of communication, cultural discourse analysis, narrative analysis, variation analysis, semiotics, systemic functional linguistics, historical linguistics, comparative linguistics, computational/corpus linguistics, and cognitive linguistics. We invite submissions that consider any aspect of food and language, including (but not limited to) menus, recipes, mealtime conversations, food-related online discussions, social media posts about food, food-related podcasts, food advertisements, and documentary and reality TV shows about food.

Call for Papers: Georgetown University Round Table 2020, Multilingualism: Global South and Global North Perspectives, March 13-15, 2020, Georgetown University, Washington D.C. Deadline: October 15, 2019.

The world has always been predominantly multilingual, but in recent decades globalization and the attendant processes of mobility and technologization have catapulted multilingualism into unprecedented levels of public and academic attention. Benefits of multilingualism are actively investigated across neurocognitive, academic, economic, and social domains. At the same time, misunderstanding and mismanagement of multilingualism have also been shown by research to curtail the educational, socioeconomic, and personal opportunities of multilingual individuals, families, and communities. Today’s multilingualism can be the site for overt and covert oppression, a lived experience that is a gift for some and a curse for others, patterning along structural forces related to inequitable distribution of material and symbolic resources in the world, and rooted in histories of (post)colonial domination and human mobility. In light of these paradoxes, research must be able to account for both multilingual learning and multilingual practices at different nested levels – societies, schools and classrooms, communities and families, minds and brains – while never losing sight of material, ideological, and geopolitical inequities. Moreover, the dynamics of multilingualism can vary across diverse Global South and Global North contexts in ways that create resonances and differences and demand innovative research lenses. Reflecting this complex agenda, GURT 2020 will focus on the relation between multilingual learning and multilingual practices, globalization, and social justice with two goals: (a) to bring together research on multilingualism spanning the full spectrum of psycholinguistic-cognitive and sociolinguistic-critical approaches and (b) to facilitate dialogue about multilingualism as it is lived and investigated across diverse contexts in the Global North and the Global South.