2nd LINEE International Conference: Multilingualism in the public sphere
Dubrovnik, May 4-6, 2012

Organizer: Institute for Anthropological Research, Zagreb (INANTRO)

Co-organizers: University of Bern, University of Vienna, University of Southampton, University of Szeged, University of Applied Languages, Munich, University of Bolzano, Charles University, Prague

The objective of this second international conference is to provide a forum for researchers studying multilingualism as social practice in various public spaces in order to rethink both the concept of ‘language’, and its role in fostering social cohesion, and the concept of the public sphere. Instead of the dominant understanding of the public sphere in political and social theory associated with the capacity for reasoned public choice attained through free and open public debates of citizens, we propose a broader anthropologically grounded concept of the sphere of public communication associated to the sociability and the potential of the encounters and communication between strangers. It refers to multiple inherently unstable and fluid publics as socially constituted by difference, and citizens communicating across linguistic and cultural boundaries within an interactive public space. The wealth of such multilingual contexts and uses of plurilingual resources in the process of intercultural communication is often neglected in public and academic domains.

While the public sphere as a communicative space has been mostly studied through the mass media discourse, we suggest a ‘bottom up’ perspective, which takes all levels of the public sphere as relevant by also studying non-mediated public arenas. We would like to explore these themes in terms of the relationships between conventional notions of the institutional public sphere, alongside informal, everyday linguistic and cultural practices through which the public is negotiated. The organizers invite interdisciplinary contributions which investigate plurilingual communication from a perspective that seeks to critically address asymmetries in knowledge and power relations and includes different types of public spaces as concrete empirical settings of functional plurilingualism, each with their specific contribution to shared intercultural communication.

Session topics:

1) Multilingual practices in public places and linguistic landscape
2) Multilingualism in institutional settings
3) Multilingualism in economy
4) Historical perspectives of multilingualism
5) General session

Further information and abstract submission:
http://www.amiando.com/lineeconference2012.html

Contact:
Anja Iveković-Martinis aimartinis@inantro.hr
Josip Lah josip.lah@inantro.hr