Cross-cultural Pragmatics at a Crossroads III - 26-28 June 2013

INVITED SPEAKERS

Plenary 1          Istvan Kecskes (University at Albany, USA)

Plenary 2          Mona Baker (University of Manchester, UK)

Plenary 3          Lynda Yates (Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia) (TBC)

Plenary 4          Minako O’Hagan (Dublin City University, Ireland)

Plenary 5          Ana Rojo (Universidad de Murcia, Spain)

Plenary 6          Christine Béal and Véronique Traverso ( (Université Paul Valéry, Montptellier and Lyon 2, France)

(provisional order)

Outreach Event Special Guest contributor

Makiko Mizuno (Kinjo Gakuin University, Nagoya) (public and community interpreting)

CALL FOR PAPERS

The conference builds on the success of two prior Cross-cultural Pragmatics at a Crossroads conferences at the UEA - Speech Frames and Cultural Perceptions in 2006, and its larger-scale follow-up Linguistic and Cultural Representations across Media in 2011 -, this time with an even more ambitious agenda.

Like its forerunners, CCP III will be interdisciplinary, and aims to bring together, under the umbrella of cross-cultural pragmatics, researchers from domains which are particularly sensitive to cross-cultural issues, to promote the cross-fertilization of practises, ideas and theoretical approaches, and explore key concerns associated with communication across language and culture boundaries, in practice and theory.

­Making a difference, the impact theme of this third meeting, will tap into, and confront, two closely related spheres of research activity in intercultural communication:

• Research in its value and contribution to wider society,  i.e. the pursuit of research that makes a difference and ways of making it applicable and available to those for whom it can make a difference

• Research in its investigation of factors that impede or promote communication, understanding and respect for otherness in multicultural/globalised settings

Conflict and conflict resolution, negotiation at all levels (local, national, global) across languages, cultures and contexts (political, business, welfare, media, culture), and attendant failures, breakdowns and also successes, feed the news with headlines and affect our lives on an everyday basis. How do we, and how can we, make the difference?

→  How can the theories of cross-/intercultural communication be applied to solve communicative conflicts in multicultural/globalised settings, for example?  Such conflicts can be triggered not just by prejudiced or overtly ethnocentric inputs but also by uninspected assumptions that, with English as lingua franca, acquisition and knowledge of languages other than English is no longer necessary, that “cultural” contrasts can be neatly separated from communicative and linguistic issues, that avoidance of potentially conflict-laden topics/terminologies (e.g. faith-related communication, political-historical evaluations) will guarantee conflict-free communication, or that a strictly “plain” or formally defined language use will avoid misunderstanding and miscommunication.

→  How can the theories of cross-/intercultural communication be applied to promote understanding and respect for otherness in all its richness, and pre-empt communicative conflict in multicultural/globalized settings?

→  How can the theories of cross-/intercultural communication be further developed? Miscommunication between individuals and groups leads to dire consequences and on a global international level the outcomes of breakdowns or misrepresentations have a decisive and often devastating impact on whole communities and nations. The investigation into the reasons why this may occur, as well as how to solve problems and prevent them in the first place are a priority in today’s world. Parallels at local or interpersonal levels or in other contexts can be no less dramatic, and are equally in urgent need of exploration. 

CCP III will provide a platform for open dialogue on the multiple factors that play a role in both success and failure to communicate at all levels and highlight the ways forward where failure will no longer be an option, and tolerance to otherness not just an aspiration. Our understanding of IMPACT is grounded in the belief that research outcomes should reach beyond the realm of pure academia and have an impact themselves across linguistic, cultural, political or economic borders. We are also mindful of the need to recognise that research outcomes are not all equally tangible in their impact and of the need therefore constantly to challenge institutional and public understandings of the concept.

With these goals in mind, we invite researchers from various disciplines to offer theoretically reliable and practically applicable frameworks for raising awareness of the fundamental importance that cross-cultural communication has today and will have in the future. Domains of application that CCP III will be particularly interested in include: 

• Professional communication and negotiation
• Political and strategic negotiation
• Forensic linguistics and translation
• Access to justice  and public services
• Translation and communication across arts and media
• Translation and communication in the globalised world of sport
• Interfaith dialogues
• Public debates about multi-/intercultural society
• Responses to cross- and intercultural crossings   
• Other related topics.

The general framework for the conference will be provided by plenary papers delivered by distinguished scholars representing different languages and complementary perspectives: intercultural communication, intercultural and socio-pragmatics, translation and globalisation, translation and contrastive rhetoric, contrastive translation and psycholinguistics, discourse analysis and professional discourse.

By virtue of the conference theme and of the inbuilt inter-disciplinarity of cross-cultural pragmatics generally, proceedings will be informed by different methodological paradigms (e.g. cross- and intercultural pragmatics, socio-pragmatics, translation studies, interactional and critical discourse analysis, conversation analysis, linguistic typology, psycholinguistics, systemic functional linguistics, cognitive linguistics, sociolinguistics). Proposals, for individual papers (20 minutes) or proposer-led panels on a particular theme (90 to 150 minutes), will be expected clearly to identify their theoretical frame(s) of reference and methodological approach.

Outreach Event

Like its predecessor, CCP III will seek to foster the partnership between the University, its local host community and communities beyond with an end-of-conference Outreach Event that will bring together representatives from all these groups to share their views on the challenges of communication across languages and cultures. Details will be posted on the conference website.

Special Guests

In the world of Translation Studies and Intercultural Communication, the past few years have seen the rise of the idea of ‘otherness’, and attempts to understand how to build bridges to the ‘other’ worlds beyond Europe, such as Asia or Africa. Listening to the voices from other parts of the world can be an antidote not only to Anglocentrism, but also to the increasing risk of Eurocentrism. For this event, we are therefore delighted and honoured to count among our invited speakers two outstanding Japanese scholars, Makiko Mizuno and Minako O’Hagan, and to celebrate with them and with our new Centre for Japanese Studies at the UEA our commitment to promoting Japanese and Japanese Studies at the highest level.

PRACTICAL DETAILS

Abstract deadline:  15 November 2012

Language:  English, French, Spanish

Proposal:  400-word anonymous abstract (800 words for panels) to be submitted through the Linguist List at http://linguistlist.org/confcustom/ccpIII2013. Titles should give an indication of the main question/s addressed, of the data and methodology used and of the language/s of application.

Organisers: Marie-Noëlle Guillot with Roger Baines, Jo Drugan, Luna Filipovìc, Clive Matthews, Andreas Musolff, Carlos de Pablos-Ortega, Alberto Hijazo-Gascon, Giulio Pagani, Gabrina Pounds, Nana Sato-Rossberg, Alain Wolf 

m.guillot@uea.ac.uk, r.w.baines@uea.ac.uk, j.drugan@uea.ac.uk; l.filipovic@uea.ac.uk, clive.matthews@uea,ac,uk, a.musolff@uea.ac.uk, c.de-pablos@uea.ac.uk, A.Hijazo-Gascon@uea.ac.uk, g.pounds@uea.ac.uk,g.pagani@uea.ac.uk, N.Sato-Rossberg@uea.ac.uk, a.wolf@uea.ac.uk