CFP: 3rd Global Conference: Interculturalism, Meaning and Identity

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3rd Global Conference
Interculturalism, Meaning and Identity

Tuesday 10th November - Thursday 12th November 2009
Salzburg, Austria

Call for Papers
The relaunch of this multi-disciplinary project seeks to explore the new and prominent place that the idea of culture has for the construction of meaning and identity, as well as the implications for social political membership in contemporary societies. In particular the project will assess the larger context of major world transformations, for example, new forms of migration and the massive movements of people across the globe, as well as the impact and contribution of globalisation on tensions, conflicts and the sense of rootedness and belonging. Looking to encourage innovative trans-disciplinary dialogues, we warmly welcome papers from all disciplines, professions and vocations which struggle to understand what it means for people, the world over, to forge identities in rapidly changing national, social and cultural contexts.

Papers, workshops and presentations are invited on any of the following themes:

1. Contemporary Rediscoveries and Redefinitions of Culture
~ Multiple, polyvalent and contradictory conceptions of culture
~ Infinite source of meaning and identity, of membership and exclusion, of privileging and stigmatising, of worth and misery, of place and history, of violence and destruction
~ Cultural remaking of self and other; recasting of links, bonds and relations
~ The contradictory forces of culture: diversity versus homogeneity, multiplicity versus sameness, alterity versus normality, recognition versus misrecognition
~ Textures of cultures: fixed, fluid, porous, hermetic, rigid and flexible

2. Cultural Boundaries, Peoples and Nations
~ Dislocation and decoupling of culture and nation, of culture and place, of culture and history
~ Resurgence of the local, the diminishing importance of the national and the forces of the global
~ What does it mean, today, to be part of a culture, to be part of multiple cultures?
~ Massive and new forms of global migration and the new hybridity of cultures
~ Assimilation, integration, adaptation and other forms of ‘forcing’ cultures on migrants

3. Cultural Formations
~ What are the dynamics and processes that define the central tenets of a culture?
~ How are cultures defined and redefined? Who participates in the social and political task of defining and redefining culture?
~ What is shared from cultures? How are cultures shared? Who has access to the sharing of cultures?
~ Symbols and significations that connect people to cultures other than ‘their own’
~ Culture and the construction of identities: destiny, happenstance, choice and politics

4. Politicising Culture
~ Political battles over the principles and core values of a culture, of many cultures
~ The dynamics of cultural recognition and misrecognition
~ What is the place of cultural claims in today's forms of social and political membership?
~ Trans-cultural connections that escape institutional and political control
~ Cultural claims and human rights

5. Art and Cultural Representations
~ Media and the construction of cultures and identities
~ Production and reproduction of cultural recognition and misrecognition
~ The contested space of representing meaning and identity, culture and belonging
~ Art, media and how to challenge the rigid and impenetrable constructions of culture
~ Living, being and belonging through art; life imitating art and fiction

6. Crossing Cultural Boundaries
~ Interpenetration, overlapping, crossovers, interlacing, hybridisation and interdependence
~ Languages, idioms and new emerging forms of bridging the ‘invisible’ divide of cultures
~ Conceptualisations that foster the breaking down of rigid cultural boundaries
~ Equalising cultures; recognition and respect across cultures
~ How to revamp historically old concepts like tolerance, acceptance and hospitality?
~ An ethics for cultural relations

Papers will be considered on any related theme. 300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 19th June 2009. If your paper is accepted for presentation at the conference, an 8 page draft paper should be submitted by Friday 9th October 2009.

300 word abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract.

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Joint Organising Chairs:

Alejandro Cervantes-Carson
Research Director,
Inter-Disciplinary.Net,
Barcelona, Catalunya, Spain
E-Mail: acc [at] inter-disciplinary.net

Rob Fisher
Network Leader
Inter-Disciplinary.Net,
Freeland, Oxfordshire,
United Kingdom
E-Mail: ic3 [at] inter-disciplinary.net

The conference is part of the 'Diversity and Recognition' research projects, which in turn belong to the 'At the Interface' programmes of Inter-Disciplinary.Net. It aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore discussions which are innovative and challenging. All papers accepted for and presented at the conference will be eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be developed for publication in a themed hard copy volume.

For further information about the project, please visit:
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/at-the-interface/diversity-recognition/interculturalism/

For further information about the conference, please visit:
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/at-the-interface/diversity-recognition/interculturalism/call-for-papers/

CFP: 15th International Conference on Cross-Cultural Communication

Deadline extended to June 15, 2009

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Intercultural Communication and Collaboration within and across Sociolinguistic Environments

Final Call for Papers

The 15th International Conference on Cross-Cultural Communication

September 18-20, 2009
Kumamoto Gakuen University, Japan

The continuing globalization of the world brings ever-increasing opportunities to share knowledge and ideas across sociolinguistic boundaries. This is not simply a matter of the world becoming smaller or more alike--on the contrary, recognition and respect of diversity have become prerequisites in face of the need to understand and get along with each other. Moreover, intercultural sensitivity and accommodation are necessary for successful collaboration towards exchange and resolution of global issues.

The importance of effective communication across different environments has long been recognized; however, it is becoming more apparent that the need for enhanced communication skills to share ideas effectively even within the same sociolinguistic environment is posing an ever increasing challenge. This is at least partly due to the relative decrease in face-to-face communication that has become a dangerous side-effect of the bewildering increase in methods of global communication and the speed of change in the environment itself. The challenge of successful cooperation not only across but also within sociolinguistic and cultural boundaries, then, remains in the limelight today.

This year's conference aims to bring together experts in cross-cultural communication studies with a focus on recognition of the changing communicative environment in which we live and work, with the hope that new ideas and opportunities for collaboration will result. As an interdisciplinary conference on human communication across cultures, the suggested paper topics, therefore, cover a wide range of communication related themes. The following are potential paper topics.

• Approaches to intercultural communication study
• Business communication across cultures
• Communication accommodation
• Communication and globalization
• Communication education
• Computer mediated communication
• Conflict and negotiation
• Crisis management
• Cross-cultural adaptation
• Cultural and linguistic diversity
• Cultural identity and globalization
• Digital communication
• Ethnicity and communication
• Group or organizational communication across cultures
• Harmony and diversity
• Health communication across cultures
• Information technology and culture
• Interpersonal/intercultural communication
• Intercultural / global communication competence
• Language and cultural education
• Language and media
• Language and society
• Language attitude
• Language change and language stability
• Language policy
• Media and culture
• Media literacy
• Rhetoric studies
• Risk communication across cultures
• Theory of intercultural communication from different perspectives
• Research methodology in intercultural communication studies
• Translation theory
• Verbal and nonverbal communication across cultures
• Interpersonal communication across cultures

Guidelines for Submission

Categories: Abstracts and panel proposals may be submitted.

• Abstract, 150-200 words in English, including affiliations, email addresses and mailing addresses for all authors. See the sample format of the abstract below.
• Panel proposal reflecting the conference theme may be submitted. All panel proposals should provide a 100-word rationale and 150 word abstract of each panelist's paper, mailing addresses and email addresses of all panelists.
  

Deadline: Please submit the abstracts and the complete panel proposals online as an MS Word attachment by June 15, 2009. Completed paper should be done by the time of the conference. Authors will be informed at the conference where to send the completed paper and when the deadline is for the consideration of being published in one of the two issues of the IAICS journal, Intercultural Communication Studies, which will be devoted to conference papers. All submissions will be carefully reviewed.

Conference language: International English

Organizational website: http://www2.kumagaku.ac.jp/teacher/~judy/cgi/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=IAICS.IAICS

Submission to: Judy Yoneoka and/or Yuko Takeshita at iaics2009 [at] kumagaku.ac.jp

Tunghai's water supply threatened

From the Taiwan News:

The management of Tunghai University in Taichung confirmed yesterday that they had received blackmail threats both yesterday and on Thursday threatening to poison the water on campus. The management revealed that police had retrieved fingerprints from the blackmail letters and are looking for the suspect.

Tunghai University phoned the police upon discovering a blackmail letter at the door of the president's office on Thursday. A phone call was made by an unidentified male yesterday morning to the school, threatening to put poison in campus water. The school immediately shut down the water source.

The blackmailer demanded NT$5 million in cash and 50 taels of gold (about 1850g) from the university in the letter which also included a threat of throwing a chlorine bomb, which is lethal when dissolved in water or in air. A sketch of the design of the chlorine bomb was attached with the letter to prove the blackmailer's bomb-making ability, said the police.

They've turned the water back on here, but as of last night they told us not to drink it.

[Update, 10:50 p.m.: According to an e-mail sent this evening from Tunghai's president, the water towers do not show signs of contamination. The drinking water machines are still not to be used until they are all thoroughly cleaned and their filters replaced. He also hints that some news reports on the incident are not entirely accurate, but says the school administration isn't yet at liberty to go into any detail. Stay tuned for more...]

[Update, 5/3/09: The Taiwan News reports that police have caught a suspect in the extortion plot. As is often the case, closed-circuit video played a role in the arrest:

According to police, Wang had made a series of phone calls the previous two days in which he gave instructions on where the money and gold should be placed.

In one of the phone calls, he asked Tunghai University administrators to relay a demand to seven other universities and colleges in Taichung County that they must each remit NT$80,000 to a designated bank account, or their water supplies would also be poisoned.

Police traced several of the calls to a public phone. They used footage from nearby roadside close-circuit television cameras to find the registration number of the motorcycle used by the person making the phone calls.

After establishing that the suspect was a man living in Daya Township in Taichung County, police zeroed in on him Saturday night.

According to TV news, the suspected extortionist was out of work and had gambling debts.]

CFP: Writing Research Across Borders II

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Call for Proposals: Writing Research Across Borders II

George Mason University

February 17-20, 2011

Proposal Deadline May 3, 2010

As societies become more knowledge-intensive and communication technologies draw us more closely together, the importance of writing in economic, scientific, civic, personal, and social development becomes more apparent. Correspondingly, the imperative to conduct research on writing in schools and the workplace, in relationship to learning and development, and in all aspects of our lives has invigorated work among scholars in all regions of the world. The conference Writing Research Across Borders II will provide an opportunity for researchers to share their findings and set research agendas for the coming years.

Continuing the success of the three previous international research conferences held at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the 2011 Writing Research Across Borders II will be held at George Mason University in the Washington D.C./Northern Virginia area. We invite proposals that will continue to deepen the cross-disciplinary, international dialogues across the many different domains of writing research.

As in past years, this conference will focus on writing development across the lifespan, including the impact of new technologies on learning to write, early acquisition of writing, writing across grade levels (K-20), writing in the disciplines and professions, and writing in the workplace or other community and institutional settings. We invite proposals presenting research in these areas. We also invite proposals on any other areas of writing use and practice, such as writing in progressive or large scale educational programs, or proposals that link writing research and policies. We welcome papers raising methodological issues about researching writing. We invite work from any research tradition that is grounded in the tradition's previous research and pursues the methodical gathering of qualitative or quantitative data appropriate to its claims.

Proposals should identify the format preferred (panels, roundtables, individual presentations, and poster presentations). Individual or poster proposals should be a maximum of 500 words. Proposals with multiple presentations (panel and roundtable) should contain a short overview statement and then no more than 400 words per speaker. Proposals should specify the relevant research literatures, research questions, methods, data, and findings, as well as the scope and duration of the research projects.

The deadline for proposals is May 3, 2010. Please submit proposals in .doc or .rtf format by email attachment to writing [at] education.ucsb.edu. Also, be sure to include a title for your proposal and each speaker's individual talk, as well as contact information for each individual presenter.