Dear Colleagues,

This is a Call for Papers / Abstracts for The COMELA 2020 (Conference on Mediterranean and European Linguistic Anthropology) in Athens, Greece (September 2-5, 2020):

Title:

The Conference on Mediterranean and European Linguistic Anthropology 2020: Bounded Languages… Unbounded

Organizers:

Helena Maragou

Professor

American University in Greece

Bounded Languages … Unbounded

The 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 regions are replete with histories, and with power struggles, that demarcate nation, ethnicity, and community. For this, cultural and political identities, language ideologies, as well as the languages themselves, have sought boundedness, the dynamics of which have influenced change over eons, effected through demographic movements, through geopolitics, and through technological innovation. In the current era of technological advancement, transnational fluidity, intellectual power, capitalism, and revised sexualities, then, we again question the boundedness of language and identity, and ways in which to unbound these languages and ideologies. We now need to increasingly unbind these languages, and their ideologies, so 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 tensions between demarcation and legitimization of languages, language ideologies, and language identities, enter a new era, flexible citizenship now operates well 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, and political histories and futures, of Mediterranean and European regions.

Strands

– Anthropological Linguistics

– Applied Sociolinguistics

– Buddhist studies and discourses

– Cognitive Anthropology and Language

– Critical Linguistic Anthropology

– Ethnographical Language Work

– Ethnography of Communication

– General Sociolinguistics

– Islamic Studies and discourses

– Language, Community, Ethnicity

– Language Contact and Change

– Language, Dialect, Sociolect, Genre

– Language Documentation

– Language, Gender, Sexuality

– Language Ideologies

– Language Minorities and Majorities

– Language Revitalization

– Language in Real and Virtual Spaces

– Language Socialization

– Language and Spatiotemporal Frames

– Multifunctionality

– Narrative and Metanarrative

– Nonverbal Semiotics

– Oral heritage

– Poetics

– Post-Structuralism and Language

– Semiotics and Semiology

– Social Psychology of Language

– Text, Context, Entextualization

Official Partners, Taylor and Francis Global Publishers, Elsevier Global Publishers, with over 180 global Higher Institution affiliates. All proceedings and publications are SCOPUS / ISI / AHCI indexed.

We invite scholars with significant work on the Linguistic Anthropology, and the Language and Society of The Mediterranean and Europe to submit abstracts (400 words max) to the following link: https://comela2020.acg.edu/submit/ by Jun 1, 2020. Decisions about acceptance of abstracts will be sent no later than June 20. 

Anastasia Tsantes

Head of Communications

Students/Affiliates:

Regular Bird: USD 220
Late Bird/On-site: USD 270

Others:

Regular Bird: USD 270
Late Bird/On-site: USD 320

Excursion: USD 110

The conference fee includes daily buffet lunch, morning and afternoon break refreshments, and one buffet dinner. The 5th September optional anthropological program is priced separately.