Call for papers

Third International Conference on Language, Literary and Cultural Studies
Department of Foreign Languages, Faculty of Humanities,
University of Vlora “Ismail Qemali”, Albania

30 May 2018
Deadline for abstract submission: 25 April 2018

LANGUAGE, CULTURE AND COMMUNITY: 21ST-CENTURY PERSPECTIVES

The 21st-century world is moving and changing very rapidly. On the one hand, the speedy development of information and communication technology, which brought along the Internet, and with it many online tools and media, social media among the most popular, has considerably changed the world of information. In an eyeshut, we find ourselves absorbed in new realities and all sources of information these technological advances unwittingly introduce us to. Most of our time is spent communicating and interacting online with our workmates, friends, and family. On the other hand, we live, work, communicate and interact in a growingly globalized space—social, cultural, linguistic and so on. Globalization has largely affected the international exchange of cultures, ideas, values and above all, concepts. Moreover, the various waves of migratory movements, owing not only to globalization, but mostly to political, social and economic crises, call for our attention, to look into the new alignments, definitions and constructions of most social concepts. In view of these, concepts like language as the primary tool for communication, culture as a construct defining and defined by language and community as an integration of both need revisiting. What are the spaces they have come to occupy from a 21st-century perspective?
We invite scholars interested in these issues to join us in the reconsideration of any of the following:
• Representations of technology in language, literature and culture.
• Globalization in language, culture and literature.
• Constructions of new realities, real and imagined, in literature.
• Émigré literature.
• Writers in the diaspora.
• Language and cultural knowledge as a means to communicate and connect.
• Defining community, building citizenship.
• Identities in the making.
• Interculturality, culture, and language teaching and learning.
• Teaching culture in the 21st-century classroom.
• The effect of technology on language learning and teaching.
• 21st-century teacher education.
• Capacity building for the labour market.
• Teachers’ concerns in the new millennium.
• Current trends in FLT, learning process, learning and teaching resources, evaluation of the teaching and learning processes.
• Multicultural education.
• Technology, language use, and communication.
• Social media and social communities.
• Community languages.
• Linguistic geographies.
• Etc.
Papers are welcomed from but are not limited to:
• World Literature
• Literary Theory
• Literary Criticism
• Cultural Studies
• Intercultural Communication
• Communication Studies
• Media Studies
• Discourse Analysis
• Pragmatics
• Linguistics
• Semiotics
• Translation Studies
• Applied Linguistics
• FLT (Foreign Language Teaching)
• FSP (Foreign Language for Specific purposes)

A special session will be organized on immigrant literature.
The conference language is English. Please send your abstracts (about 250 words) for papers (20 min) as an MS word attachment to the following email address by 25 April 2018:
armela.panajoti@univlora.edu.al
A selection of papers will be published after the conference.