Tag: Switzerland

U Neuchâtel PHD Candidate Positions: CA/Interactional Linguistics (Switzerland)

FellowshipsThe Centre for Applied Linguistics at the University of Neuchâtel (Switzerland), member of the Competence Centre CRIS (Centre for Research on Social Interaction) is inviting applications for two PhD-candidate positions (= two 50% doctoral assistant positions) in Conversation Analysis / Interactional Linguistics.

Start date: October 1, 2017
Duration: 4 years

The successful candidate should hold an MA degree in Linguistics (or an equivalent degree), be trained in conversation analysis and/or interactional linguistics, and motivated to develop an original PhD thesis project in either one of these fields. He or she should show an interest in contributing to one of the Centre’s main research areas (interactional competence, second language talk, grammar-in-interaction). He or she should have an operational mastery of French (or develop such a mastery
within one year), allowing him or her to interact with students and colleagues and to participate in data sessions where French conversational data is being analyzed.

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.

PhD Studentship on Reframing in Mediation (Switzerland)

The Institute of Argumentation, Linguistics and Semiotics (IALS) of USI Università della Svizzera italiana invites applications for a PhD position (100%, 3 years). The PhD candidate will develop his or her dissertation within the project: “The inferential dynamics of reframing within dispute mediators’ argumentation”, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. This dissertation will be supervised by Prof. Sara Greco.

The research project
The selected candidate will develop his or her dissertation in the framework of a research project directed by Prof. Sara Greco; this project proposes a novel interpretation of reframing as an argumentative competence of dispute mediators. The PhD candidate will be equally expected to substantially contribute to activities related to this research project, both at the scientific and at the organizational level. The project “The inferential dynamics of reframing within dispute mediators’ argumentation” is part of a broader stream of research concerning argumentation in dispute mediation that is carried out at the IALS. Within this project, regular interaction with professional mediators in Switzerland will be required.

Place of work
Lugano. Availability to travel to other parts of Switzerland and abroad (for purposes of collaboration and research) is required.

The IALS institute represents a lively research environment for a PhD student who specializes in argumentation. Interaction with several researchers specializing on argumentation in different contexts, as well as interdisciplinary interactions with colleagues inside and outside the Faculty is an asset for a PhD candidate who wants to work on argumentation in a specific communication field such as conflict resolution. The candidate will also take part in the activities of the Laboratory for the study of Argumentation in the Contexts of the Public Sphere (LACoPS).

Requirements
• A Master (or equivalent title) in argumentation, communication, language sciences, social sciences, psychology, conflict studies, or related disciplines.
• High personal interest in the analysis of discourse and argumentation. Proven attitude for a fine-grained analysis of communicative interaction. Inclination towards the study of argumentation, discourse analysis, and the linguistic specificities of the discourse of conflict resolution.
• Interest for dispute mediation and other conflict resolution practices; nuanced understanding of the human and social value of conflict resolution.
• Fluency in English is necessary. Fluency in French is also strictly required, as the PhD candidate will conduct his or her research in collaboration with a board of experts, including academics and mediators, who are largely based in the French part of Switzerland. Knowledge of Italian will be considered an added value; in any case, it is expected that the selected candidate will learn to communicate in Italian during the PhD.
• Motivation to engage in the elaboration of a PhD dissertation. Ability to work in team and autonomy in scheduling research steps. Interest for teaching and availability to collaborate with colleagues (engage in scientific dialogue, listen and think critically) are required. The ability to establish good working relations with professional mediators will be considered an important asset.

Job description
The PhD candidate will participate in all phases of the research project. He or she will have the task of setting up a collection of data for his or her dissertation, while at the same time pursuing the goals of the project. Data collection will require interaction with professional mediators in Switzerland.

The PhD candidate will write a dissertation related to the research topic of the project. He or she will collaborate in the organization of scientific and dissemination activities related to the project. It is expected that he or she will regularly collaborate with researchers at the IALS as well as other scholars who are in the scientific board of the project.

The PhD candidate is also asked to present papers at scientific conferences, and produce publications for scientific journals.

Contract terms
The project is financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the PhD student will be receiving a salary according to the SNF policies.

Starting date
1st March 2017 (at the earliest). However, the position will be kept open until a suitable candidate has been found.

Application
Applications must include: a motivation letter, a complete CV, copies of university titles, an electronic version of a research work (Master thesis or other scientific publication). The latter must be accompanied by a short summary in English (1 page maximum). A support letter written by the Master thesis supervisor (or another Professor who knows the candidate well) is equally welcome.

Applications must be sent to Prof. Sara Greco in electronic format (sara.greco AT usi.ch). For any further information about this position, please contact her.

Deadline for applications
The deadline for applications is February 10, 2017; but applications will be received until the position is filled.

CFP Visualizing (in) the New Media (Switzerland)

Call for Papers: Visualizing (in) the New Media

In November 2017, the Universities of Neuchâtel, Zurich and Bern in Switzerland will host the first international conference to focus specifically on visual communication in/about new media. In this regard, we invite the submission of abstracts for scholarly presentations in any of four overlapping thematic areas.

  1. Social interaction

Here, we envisage presentations that focus on the communicative uses of visual resources in the context of new media; for example: orthography and typography, graphematic design, the use of emojis (pictograms, emoticons, smilies), and/or the social-interactional uses of video, GIFs and non-moving images.

  1. Meta-discourse

Here, we envisage presentations that focus on people’s talk or writing about visual practices; for example: journalistic commentary about visual practices in new media (the use of emojis, for instance) or communicators’ discussions about their own or others’ visual practices in new media spaces.

  1. Visual ideologies

Here, we envisage presentations that focus on the visual depiction of new media in, for example, the context of commercial advertising, print or broadcast news, cinema and television narratives and/or public policy and educational settings.

  1. Industrial design

Here, we envisage presentations that focus on perspectives related to, for example, the visual-material design of technologies and apps, as well as the look or layout of screen interfaces, especially insofar as they concern the communicative (as opposed to technical) affordances of new media.

In selecting presentations, the conference team will privilege those adopting a multimodal approach to visual communication; in other words, studies that focus on visuality but attend to its interaction with other communicative modes – especially linguistic ones. We take a broad and critical approach to labels like “new”, “digital” and “mobile” as they are applied to communication technologies; we are nonetheless principally interested in more current, social, interactive media spaces such as micro-blogging, messaging, forums, gaming, video- and photo-sharing, and social networking.

The principal language of the conference will be English; however, the conference team welcome presentations and posters presented in German, French, and Italian (ideally, with slides or handouts offered in English). In such an interdisciplinary field, we also invite presenters to use their preferred style of delivery, whether it’s a read paper, an unscripted slideshow or some combination of the two.

Titles, abstracts and basic biographical information should be submitted using our online submission system available here: https://www.conftool.net/vinm2017/ . Abstracts should be between 300 and 500 words and written in the same language as the presentation or poster. If the abstract is in a language other than English, please provide a list of five keywords in English. We ask that you also indicate which of our four thematic areas (above) your paper addresses as well as if it is a presentation or a poster. The deadline for proposals is February 28th 2017 with an anticipated decision date of April 30th 2017.

 

Masters in Intercultural Communication at USI (Switzerland)

Applications invited for the 8th edition of the Master of Advanced Studies in Intercultural Communication (MIC) offered by the University of Italian Switzerland (USI) in Lugano. MIC is a part-time postgraduate program for professionals engaged in managing operational or strategic situations in a multicultural context and in managing multicultural human resources. The Master is organized in 9 intensive weeks of courses spread 6 to 8 weeks apart from March 2017 to September 2018 in order to allow participants to pursue their professional activity:
· 6 weeks of classes will be held at USI’s Executive Center in Lugano;
·       1 week of classes will be held at Université Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah in Fès, Morocco;
·       1 week of classes will take place in Lausanne, at the Swiss Institute for Comparative Law (ISDC). This will include visits to selected Swiss federal institutions in Bern and international organizations in Geneva;
·       1 week of courses will take place at Kasetsart University in Bangkok, Thailand.

The deadline for applications is December 31, 2016. There is a limited number of scholarships available. The official language of the Masters is English.

For information about pre-requisites, admission and fees, and a brochure, candidates can visit the MIC website.

eTourism MOOC from USI

eTourism: Communication Perspectives
by Prof. Lorenzo Cantoni, Dr. Nadzeya Kalbaska, Dr. Elena Marchiori, and Dr. Silvia Matilde De Ascaniis
USI Università della Svizzera italiana

This Swiss-made MOOC takes you on a terrific journey into eTourism and online communication. You will feel the pulse of ICTs and enjoy the beauty of Switzerland as a globally renowned tourism destination. Time to travel. Join today. Begins Oct 3, 2016.

About this course
An introduction course to a fascinating travel into the eTourism world, which crosses both space and time, and is always closely connected with communication. In fact, we are embarking to create a great study experience, which explores how Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) do matter for tourism – both for our personal experience, and for the tourism industry at large. In other words, we will together explore eTourism by using tools and models of the Communication Sciences.

Key concepts and theories covered include: Online Communication Model (OCM); Roman Jakobson’s Communication Model; Quality of online contents; User Generated Content (UGC); Web 2.0; Reputation in online Media; Intercultural communication and localisation; eLearning; Argumentation; World Heritage Sites.

Who is this course for?
We expect the following publics to be attracted by the course in order to update their skills and knowledge on a very hot topic:
* Students, in particular within tourism and hospitality programs
* Academia and researchers
* Destination managers
* People active in the industry
* Policy makers<

What do I need to know?
No prerequisite knowledge necessary to understand the concepts and experiences shared in the course.

What will I learn?
By the end of the course, learners:
* Know current eTourism applications, technologies and practices
* Know what is communication, and its major components, ICTs and their relevance to the tourism field
* Know what kinds of online training courses can be used within tourism and hospitality
* Know how to map different communication activities within the tourism sector
* Know how to run a usability test and how to make usages analysis of a website or mobile app
* Know how to plan, run and evaluate eTourism related activities, especially when it comes to the analysis of online reputation of a tourism destination
* Are aware of the crucial role played by communication and ICTs within the tourism and hospitality sectors

CFP Interactional Competences and Practices in a Second Language (Switzerland)

Interactional Competences and Practices in a Second Language (ICOP-L2)
Université de Neuchâtel – Suisse
18-20 January 2017

Throughout the past two decades, interactional competences and practices have gained unprecedented attention in research on second language (L2) acquisition, use and education. Following Dell Hymes’ conceptualization of communicative competence, various lines of research have for long been concerned with pragmatic development in an L2, mostly focusing on the realization of speech acts. Yet, it is only recently that research has started to systematically investigate how people’s capacity to engage in social interaction is affected in their L2 and how their ability to participate in such interaction evolves over time.

When participating in social interactions, we orient to each other, we synchronize our mutual conducts, we make recognizable our actions to others and we finely monitor the trajectories of other people’s actions. Opening a telephone conversation, launching a conversational storytelling, agreeing or disagreeing with others, or simply taking a turn at talk all involve highly organized socially coordinated procedures that, most typically, are experienced by participants as non-problematic in L1 talk. However, what happens when people move into an L2?

Under the heading ‘L2 interactional competences and practices in a second language’ (ICOP-L2), this conference brings together researchers from various horizons (e.g. linguistics, education, sociology) who investigate how people engage in second language talk-in-interaction: What are the basic ingredients of L2 interactional competence? How does such competence vary across situations and over time? How do L2 speakers use the linguistic resources at their disposal to accomplish social actions in coordination with others? How do linguistic and other resources (gaze, gesture, posture) work together in L2 talk? How does social interaction structure learning processes and learning products? How can L2 interactional competence and learning through interaction be addressed in educational contexts? These are among the questions that will be tackled during the conference.

Call for papers
Proposals are invited for individual papers and panels (colloquia). Individual papers will be granted a 30-minute slot including discussion; Panels will cover one or two 90-minute slots. Technical details regarding how to submit will be available soon .

The conference papers and panels will be organized in three thematic strands:

• L2 talk-in-interaction: This strand is concerned with describing the practices of L2 talk and with the (multi)semiotic resources speakers mobilize to accomplish these practices, without necessarily addressing issues of learning.

• Learning-in-interaction: This strand includes research on learning processes, activities and opportunities in social interaction in a variety of settings, including both the language classroom and learning ‘in the wild’.

• L2 interactional competence: This strand includes studies investigating the development of interactional competence over time as well as contributions addressing challenges for the assessment and the teaching of interactional competence.

All papers and panel abstracts need to be submitted before 23:59 local time in Switzerland (GTM +1) on 15 May 2016 through the conference website.

Keynote speakers
Joan Kelly Hall, Penn State University, USA
Søren Eskildsen, University of Southern Denmark, DK
John Hellermann, Portland State University, USA
Spencer Hazel, Nottingham University, UK

Invited symposium
Tim Greer, Kobe University, Japan: Current trends in research on L2 talk-in-interaction (provisional title)

Pre-conference workshops (18 January 2017)
Johannes Wagner, University of Southern Denmark, DK: Designing longitudinal research on interactional competence
Evelyne Berger, University of Helsinki, FI: Building collections
Adam Brandt, Newcastle University, UK, and Olcay Sert, Hacettepe University, TR: Conducting comparative research on L2 interactions

Europe-China Dialogue: Media and Communication Studies Summer School (Switzerland)

Europe-China Dialogue: Media and Communication Studies Summer School 2016
Lugano, Switzerland (July 4-10, 2016)

After the successful experience in 2014 and 2015, China Media Observatory of Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI) in cooperation with School of Journalism and Communication of Peking University, will operate the THIRD edition of Europe-China Dialogue: Media and Communication Studies Summer School from July 4 through July 10, 2016. For the first time, this summer school will be hosted in Europe (the first two were in China). In 2016 we will convene in Lugano, a beautiful city located in the Italian speaking region of Switzerland.

The program is open to the full variety of academic work from the field of communication and media studies for young scholars, PhD students, and master students who have strong academic interests. The summer school should especially interest scholars with a background in international communication studies, intercultural communication studies, Chinese/European media studies and culture/language studies. It aims to bring together researchers from Europe, China, the United States and other countries or regions in order to debate contemporary issues in media, communication, political economy and cultural studies in the background of a new world power structure in the making.

Inspired by the ECREA Doctoral Summer School, this summer school will bring together highly qualified and well-respected professors from Europe, China and the United States. These scholars will present and discuss their recent research and engage participants in a highly supportive international setting where young scholars can also present their own ongoing work, receive feedback on their current or future research projects from international experts, and meet students and academics from other countries, establishing valuable contacts for the future.

The deadline for the abstract submission is May.1 2016, and there will be only 20 seats available this summer. Please find more details about the summer school in English and Chinese.

All the submissions should be sent to China Media Observatory.

Jolanta A. Drzewiecka Profile

ProfilesJolanta A. Drzewiecka is Senior Assistant Professor and Intercultural Communication Chair at the Università della Svizzera italiana, Lugano, Switzerland.  Visiting Professor, University of Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland (Fall, 2015)

Jolanta Drzewiecka My research centers on construction of cultural, racial, and national differences in discourse.  I am particularly interested in contexts of systemic collapse and transition, regional and global integration, and rescaling of government. I focus on two areas: negotiation of belonging and public memories.

Immigrant identity: incorporation and representation

My work examines how immigrants negotiate identities and are represented by media.  I am developing  an innovative way of understanding how immigrants are incorporated within racial hierarchies that perpetuate domination and inequality (Drzewiecka & Steyn, 2009; Drzewiecka  & Steyn, 2012; Pande & Drzewiecka, under review).  With my South African collaborator, Melissa Steyn, I proposed a framework of incorporation as discursive intercultural translation based on a study of how Polish immigrants are incorporated racially within the distinct South African racial regionalism (Drzewiecka & Steyn, 2009).  We theorize translation as a creative and strategic process of meaning integration that results in immigrants’ reframing themselves to bid for inclusion and belonging in their new place.  Our concept of translation is based in postcolonial theory and highlights the complex processes whereby immigrants understand and connect new meanings and position themselves within racial hierarchies.  We extended this work to theorise how the symbolic and the material are inseparably interlaced to form immigrant identities (Drzewiecka & Steyn, 2012).   We demonstrated that Polish immigrants were incorporated and incorporated themselves in ways that supported continuing white domination in cultural, institutional and economic structures.  The most recent project extends the concept of racial incorporation by connecting identity capital and emotions to negotiation of belonging.

I also explore representations of immigrants in newspapers.  A recent paper examines how Polish post-EU accession migrants are represented in British newspapers (Drzewiecka, Hoops & Thomas, 2014).  We zero in on the role of media in legitimating the changing scales of government as well as precarious citizenship in representations of migrants in the European Union.  This is a rich area for application;  a follow up study examines the US immigration reform debate focusing on how citizenship and rights are shaped by the state adjusting to globalizing conditions (Drzewiecka, Pande & Saurbier, 2014).

Public memories

Another productive line of research centers on public memories, particularly those of racist violence.  In a recent project, I demonstrated through a psychoanalytic reading how knowledge of the past antisemitic violence has been blocked and the victims rendered unrecognisable to protect the fictions of the Polish gentile self (Drzewiecka, 2014).  Another paper examines the discourses of historical wound in media and how they are shaped and shape relations with the other. My current book project extends the psychoanalytical rhetorical approach to understand how memories of racial others recuperate and purify the nation in response to ongoing and new global challenges to national purity and exclusivity. Further, I am co-editing (with Susan A. Owen and Peter Ehrenhaus) a special issue of the Journal of International and Intercultural Communication on public memories, culture and difference.  The issue is scheduled for publication in 2016.

I had the pleasure of serving as the Chair of the International and Intercultural Communication Division of the National Communication Association, USA.

Selected publications

Hoops, J., Thomas, R., & Drzewiecka, J. A. (2015). Polish plumber as a pawn in the British newspaper discourse on Polish post-EU enlargement immigration to the U.K.  Journalism. Published online before print May 31, 2015, doi: 10.1177/1464884915585960.

Drzewiecka, J. A. (2014). Aphasia and a legacy of violence: disabling and enabling knowledge of the past in Poland. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 11, 362-381.

Drzewiecka, J. A., Hoops, J., & Thomas, R. (2014). Rescaling the state and disciplining workers in discourses on EU Polish migration in UK newspapers. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 31, 410-425.

Drzewiecka, J. A., & Steyn, M. (2012). Racial immigrant incorporation: material-symbolic articulation of identities. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 5, 1-19.

Drzewiecka, J. A., & Steyn, M. (2009). Discourses of exoneration in intercultural translation: Polish immigrants in South Africa. Communication Theory, 19, 188-218.

Work for CID:

Jolanta Drzewiecka wrote KC56: Racial Incorporation and KC62: Diaspora. She was also one of the participants at the National Communication Association‘s Summer Conference on Intercultural Dialogue in Istanbul, Turkey, which led to the creation of CID.

Sara Greco Profile

ProfilesSara Greco is Senior Assistant Professor of Argumentation at the Università della Svizzera italiana (Lugano, Switzerland). Her research interests cover different aspects of the analysis of argumentative interactions, both written and oral.

Sara GrecoIn particular, she has been working on the role of argumentation in conflict resolution, specifically in relation to dispute mediation (Greco Morasso 2011, 2018, 2020) and to social controversies. In her view, argumentative dialogue can be seen as a means to solve disagreement and, thus, as an alternative to conflict.

Sara Greco has also worked on inner conflict and how people make their decisions on the basis of dialogue with themselves. She has been working in particular with the case of how international migrants make their crucial migration decisions (Greco Morasso 2013, Greco 2015). Besides, she has done research on children’s argumentation (Greco et al. 2018).

In her work, Sara Greco has developed theoretical concepts of argumentation theory, in particular framing and reframing, issue, and argument schemes (Rigotti & Greco 2019); she has equally been analysing specific cases of communicative interaction in different contexts, using methods from Discourse Analysis, argumentation and linguistic semantics-pragmatics.

Sara Greco is on www.academia.edu and www.researchgate.net, and on her institutional website.

A selection of her recent publications includes:

Greco, S. (2020). Dal conflitto al dialogo: Un approccio comunicativo alla mediazione. Santarcangelo di Romagna: Maggioli.

Rigotti, E., and Greco, S. (2019). Inference in argumentation: A topics-based approach to argument schemes. Cham: Springer (Argumentation Library).

Greco, S. (2018). Designing dialogue: Argumentation as conflict management in social interaction. Tranel – Travaux Neuchâtelois de Linguistique, 68, 7-15.

Greco, S., Perret-Clermont, A.N., Iannaccone, A., Rocci, A., Convertini, J., & Schär, R. (2018). The analysis of implicit premises within children’s argumentative inferences. Informal Logic, 38(4), 438-470.

Greco Morasso, S. (2015). Argumentation from analogy in migrants’ decisions. Proceedings of the ISSA Conference, Amsterdam, July 2014. Ed. B. Garssen et al.

Bijnen, E., van, & Greco, S. (2018). Divide to unite: Making disagreement explicit in dispute mediation. Journal of Argumentation in Context, 7(3), 285-315.

Greco, S., Schär, R., Pollaroli, C., & Mercuri, C. (2018). Adding a temporal dimension to the analysis of argumentative discourse: Justified reframing as a means of turning a single-issue discussion into a complex argumentative discussion. Discourse Studies, 20(6), 726–742.

Xenitidou, M., & Greco Morasso, S. (2014). Parental discourse and identity management in the talk of indigenous and migrant speakers. Discourse & Society, 25(1), 100-121.

Greco Morasso, S. (2013). Multivoiced decisions. A study of migrants’ inner dialogue and its connection to social argumentation. Pragmatics & Cognition, 21(1), 55-80.

Greco Morasso, S., & Zittoun, T. (2014). The trajectory of food as a symbolic resource for international migrants. Outlines. Critical Practice Studies, 15(1), 28-48.

Greco Morasso, S. (2011). Argumentation in dispute mediation: A reasonable way to handle conflict. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Work for CID:

Sara Greco wrote KC73: Argumentative Dialogue, and translated it into Italian.