קול קורא // לכנס: אנתרופולגיה לשונית של המזרח התיכון ואירופה [אתונה 9/20] דדליין=15.11.19

Following the growth of the COMELA, The Conference on Mediterranean and European Linguistic Anthropology, we announce The COMELA 2020, September 2-5, 2020, at The American College of Greece, Athens, Greece.

The COMELA seeks to redefine scholarship on Mediterranean and European Language and Society.

Purpose and Structure

The COMELA 2020 invites academics in the fields of Linguistics, Anthropology, Linguistic and Cultural Anthropology, and Ethnology, pertinent to The Mediterranean and Europe, to discuss work, and engage in scholarly collaborations, thus strengthening global academic networks in the field.

Politics of identity are central to language change. Here, linguistic boundaries rise and fall, motivating the ephemeral characteristics of language communities. The Mediterranean and European region is one replete with histories, with power struggles, uniquely demarcating nation, ethnicity, and community. For this, cultural and political identities, language ideologies, as well as the languages themselves, have sought boundedness, dynamics of which have indeed sought change over eons, through demographic movements, through geopolitics, through technological innovation. In a current era of technological advancement, transnational fluidity, intellectual power, capitalism, and new sexualities, then, we question, once again, the boundedness of language and identity, and ways in which to unbound languages and ideologies. More than before, we now increasingly pursue anthropological toil, so to innovate ways to locate these ideologies and their fluid boundaries, actively. We now need to increasingly unbind these languages, and their ideologies, so to arrive at progressive realizations, and to rectify, or at least see and move past, the segregations of old.

The COMELA 2020 theme, “Bounded languages… Unbounded”, encapsulates the ongoing struggle throughout Mediterranean and European regions. As the continuous tension between demarcation, and the concurrent legitimization, of languages, language ideologies, and language identities, enters an era where new modes of interactivity require language communities to take on roles super-ordinate to the past, flexible citizenship now operates within, and not only across, language communities, to unbind languages, and to create new boundaries, unlike those ever seen throughout history.

The COMELA 2020 invites work which addresses the shifting boundedness of Language Communities of the Mediterranean and Europe. Papers and posters should acknowledge and describe processes of language shape, change, and ideology, pertinent to social, cultural, political histories, and futures of Mediterranean and European regions, and by those working in Mediterranean and European regions.

Strands

Abstract and poster proposals should address one or more of the key strands related to Mediterranean and European countries and regions: