Call for Papers
ESTIDIA
(European Society for Transcultural and Interdisciplinary Dialogue)

6th ESTIDIA Conference

Dialogue-shared Experiences across Space andTime: Cross-linguistic and Cross-cultural Practices

15-17 June, 2022
University of Alicante, Spain

Conference Theme

From the Socratic dialogues to post-modern cyberchats, it is only in and through communicative interaction that we can understand the world, people, and how things are working around us (Bohm, 2004/1996, Rockwell 2003). By means of dialogue people are able to argue for their viewpoints, to come to terms with each other, to jointly solve problems, and to resolve conflicts (Pickering and Garrod 2021). Dialogue brings together women and men, young and old, people from the east and the west, from the north and the south. Through the creative synergy of shared thoughts, ideas, and experiences, we can travel anywhere in space and time. The ongoing proliferation of new communication channels on social media platforms (Whatsapp, Facebook, YouTube, webchat, chatbots) is expanding the opportunities for multi-participant and multi-purpose dialogue involving people from across the world willing to share information and current concerns (Papacharissi 2002). At the same time, however, recent trends in dialogue practices, primarily on new digital platforms, reveal worrying signs of growing misunderstanding, opinion bias, as well as extreme and conflicting position-takings. Many situations of communication break-down are caused not necessarily by faulty technology, but rather by certain users’ deliberate interference with and suppression of free public dialogue. At the core of these situations lie several communication-related paradoxes.

A first paradox concerns the tendency to introduce and encourage redundant monologues (instances of ad nauseum fallacy) in environments that are normally dedicated to open-ended dialogues. While there is ample user participation in a genuinely free exchange of ideas, some users exhibit a closed mindset, aggressively promoting their own interests and short-circuiting independent thinking, showing reluctance to learn about and try to understand other viewpoints that do not resonate with theirs.

A second paradox concerns the tendency to reduce the plurality and diversity of perspectives in open-ended dialogue to an oversimplified binary opposition by means of false dilemma fallacy. This is explicitly displayed in interviews where the questioner restricts the respondent’s answering options to ‘yes’ or ‘no’, or on digital platforms, where only two options are available for expressing one’s opinion: ‘like’ (thumbs up) or ‘dislike’ (thumbs down). An interactive dialogue is thus restricted to simply expressing agreement or disagreement, denying the middle ground (“Maybe…”) or any qualified response (“Another way of looking at it …”).

A third paradox concerns the tendency to exclude (‘othering’), rather than to include (bringing people together through dialogue), creating division by discrediting and viciously attacking a person rather than their views, based on social, political, racial, ethnic or religious background (ad hominem fallacy), often resorting to abusive threats (ad baculum fallacy). By blocking or distorting the meanings of other dialogue platform users, such confrontational and aggressive behaviour is meant to trigger compliance from and to embolden hate groups.

Manipulating behaviours like the ones presented above can seriously discourage and obstruct a trust-based dialogic exchange of views, disconnecting instead of connecting, creating divisions between those easily persuaded by relentless false or abusive statements and those engaged in open-minded, argument-driven dialogue. Counteracting such tendencies requires decisive and sustained collaborative action to generate shared meaning within and across language and cultures.

A special strand of research that will be foregrounded at this conference concerns theoretical and practical aspects of translation and interpreting. Through its own (communicative) nature, the field of Translation and Interpreting plays a decisive role in this attempt to counteract redundant monologues, binary discursive structures, exclusionist and manipulative communication, providing an array of instruments (scholarly, pedagogical, and professional) to meet the needs of other (neighboring) fields under this joint aim. The common ground it shares with cross-cultural and cross-linguistic domains, makes it a sine-qua-non presence in any debate with an agenda such as this one.

The development of communication (including digital) and transnational financial and political relations, together with cheaper transport from the mid-20th century on, made it necessary to respond to an ever-growing demand for multilingual communication, which led to the professionalization of Translation and Interpreting. In recent years, the growth of migration flows has brought such linguistic diversity that communication is often blocked by barriers (linguistic or behavioral) in the destination countries between service-providers and service-seekers. So far, research in this domain has focused on the analysis of dialogue needs, interpreting deontological requirements, situational variables, and interpreting process and product descriptions. Nowadays, topics such as remote interpreting (a controversial modality), professional threats (such as computers replacing humans or the generalized use of ELF), signed interpreting, ethical issues surrounding the interpreter-mediator binomial, or the psychological dimension (emotions, vicarious trauma) that characterizes dialogical interpreting as distinct from other domains, are some of the topics that raise scholarly attention. Contributions in any of these directions and especially in the more recent ones are encouraged.

At the same time, diasporic identities are permanently re-constructed in literary works written by ectopic authors and translated by diaspora translators for host societies and sometimes for diaspora receivers. Translators are not free from the influence of imagology. Leerssen (2016) encourages a redefinition of imagology in the light of recent developments, showing that the concept gains urgency (as it did after the Second World War), with resurgent nationalisms, due to crisis conditions and to membership of supranational structures, as well as unprecedented migration flows (Hoenselaars and Leerssen, 2009). However, Leerssen (2007) also acknowledges that ethnocentricity always characterized human societies and “anything that deviated from accustomed domestic patterns” was, and still is, othered “as an oddity, an anomality, a singularity.” Ethnotypes and stereotypes (as judgements made about individuals based on any observable or believed group membership), or prejudices (as irrational suspicion or hatred towards a particular group, religion, sexual orientation) are mechanisms of exclusion and barriers to intercultural communication. Doorslaer, Flynn, and Leerssen (2015) point at translation as a dynamic force which, rather than merely reflecting differences, co-constructs them. Dimitriu (2015) talks about the ‘selective import’ of ethnic stereotypes via translation, and ‘blockage’ via manipulation and self-censorship in the export of negative ethnic clichés under totalitarian regimes. Participants are invited to delve into the past and present of the relationship between translation and exclusion.

Related to cross-cultural and cross-linguistic communication, but also to translation and interpreting is the concept of translanguage. Oriyama (2001) uses this term to define ‘a developing minority language in a bilingual system’, based on the theoretical framework of language transfer and ‘interlanguage’ (Selinker 1972) which was applied to second language acquisition. The notion of translanguaging in translation studies is related to Laviosa (2015), who explores how this bilingual practice may enrich language and translation teaching in higher education. It has already been proved that in contact settings, a bilingual person usually has a command of both majority language and minority language, regardless of the order of acquisition. Bilinguals’ minority first languages are unstable, continuously changing in competence and performance. As a transitional language, translanguage is a creative tool of communication that compensates for knowledge and experience gaps. Thus, the conference welcomes contributions describing the multifaceted dialogue taking place not only between diasporas and host societies but also (and especially) within diasporas or between diasporas and home societies via translanguaging.

By expanding the opportunities for open-ended dialogue we can connect across historic social, political and geographic divides, to jointly come to grips with the big questions surrounding climate change and sustainable practice, the effects of unprecedented technological change, the challenges of multi-ethnic and pluralistic societies, as well as the diversification of linguistic and artistic ways of expression.

The 6th ESTIDIA conference, like the preceding ones, offers an open forum for cross-disciplinary and multi-level dialogue among researchers and practitioners interested in exploring dialogic and discursive interaction observable across communities of practices and various social-cultural contexts. The questions participants are called upon to consider, analyse and debate include, but are not limited to, the following:

• To what extent and in what circumstances can context-specific dialogic strategies be adjusted across languages and cultures?
• In what ways is mutual trust perceived in face-to-face interaction? How is mutual trust affected by the conditions of virtual interaction?
• What cross-cultural parallels can be noticed with regard to the gendering of face-to-face dialogues as compared to virtual ones?
• How are translanguaging practices constrained and/or facilitated by institutional norms and regulations?
• What are the new challenges of interpreting with a special focus on multimodality?
• How can we deal with translation and exclusion, past and present?
• How can translanguaging be used as a tool of communication for diasporic minorities?
• In what ways are particular keywords used in particular dialogic interactions to mislead, manipulate and/or reproduce otherness?
• What critical and intercultural practices can be developed to challenge the dissemination of stigmatizing and stereotyping language?
• In what ways can aggressive words and speech acts shape discursive processes in various socio-cultural settings?
• How are culture-specific concepts related to the articulation of individual and group identities?
• Which dialogue-based argumentation fallacies have a greater emotional impact in various communities of practice?
• How much do cross-European dialogues reveal about interaction paradigms in individual European cultures?
• What discursive and metadiscursive strategies are particularly used in dialogic acts of manipulation?
• How can the dialogues on chatbots can be distinguished from dialogues on webchats in terms of linguistic design, dialogic cues, key words and/or discourse markers?
• Why does bullying, trolling, proliferation of fake or misleading information, and other antisocial and antidemocratic behaviors seem more prevalent in interactions on social media?
• How are migration and mobility policies reflecting and/or shaping the public debates at local, national, European and international level?

Keynote speakers

Rodica Dimitriu, ’Alexandru Ioan Cuza’ University of Iaşi, Romania
Cornelia Ilie, Strömstad Academy, Sweden
Sara Laviosa, University of Bari ‘Aldo Moro’, Italy
Fabrizio Macagno, Nova University, Lisbon, Portugal
Francisco Yus, University of Alicante, Spain

Methodological Workshop

• Interpreting in Migration Contexts: Current Challenges
  Guest: Icíar Alonso, University of Salamanca, Spain

Thematic Workshops

• Gender and mass media: Interfaces of Dialogue
  Convenor: Daniela Rovenţa-Frumuşani, University of Bucharest, Romania

Further proposals for workshops are invited. They should cover a topic of relevance to the theme of the conference. Proposals should contain relevant information to enable evaluation on the basis of importance, quality, and expected output. Each workshop should have one or more designated organizers. Proposals should be 1-2 pages long and include at least the following information:

• The workshop topic and goals, their significance, and their appropriateness for ESTIDIA 2022
• The intended audience, including the research areas from which participants may come, the likely number of participants (with some of their names, if known)
• Organizers’ details: a description of the main organizers’ research and publication background in the proposed topic; and complete addresses including webpages of the organizers

Abstract Submission

We invite submissions of abstracts both for individual paper presentations (20 minutes for presentation, to be followed by 10 minutes for questions) to be scheduled in parallel sessions, and for paper presentations within thematic workshops. The thematic workshop format will be determined by the workshop organisers, taking into consideration the correlation of topics/sub-topics and the number of participants.

All abstracts should include the name, institutional affiliation and email address of the author(s), the paper title, and four-five keywords. The abstract should be approximately 500 words in length.

All abstracts will be peer-reviewed by the conference scientific committee according to the following criteria: originality and/or importance of topic; clarity of research question and purpose; data sources; theoretical approach; analytical focus; relevance of findings if already available. We especially encourage abstract submissions from early-career researchers, including postgraduate research students and postdoctoral researchers.

N.B: The methodological workshops are particularly intended for postgraduate students and early career scholars, whose participation is encouraged. Attendance at the conference methodological workshops is free, but prior booking is essential. There is, however, a limit on the number of places in the methodological workshops – a maximum of 40 people. Registration in advance is required. Please register for the workshops on the conference website.

Email abstract submissions to: estidia22@ua.es

Conference languages: English, Italian, French, Spanish, German

Important Dates

Deadline for workshop proposals: 01 October 2021
Workshop proposal notification: 25 October 2021
Deadline for abstract submission: 30 October 2021
Abstract review notification: 25 November 2021
Early bird registration: 15 January – 01 March 2022
Standard registration: 01 March – 15 April 2022

Registration fee

• The early bird registration fee for paper presenters (by 1 March 2022) is 100 EURO. The late registration fee (after 1 March 2022) is 120 EURO.
• The early bird registration fee for students is 50 EURO. The late student registration fee (after 1 March 2022) is 70 EURO.
• The early attendant registration fee is 80 EURO. The late attendant registration fee is 100 EURO.

Participation in the conference methodological workshops is free (40 places): 20 places are booked for conference attendants and the other 20 can be booked by conference participants. Registration in advance is required. Please register for the workshops on the conference website.

The conference fee includes the book of abstracts, the conference bag, refreshments/coffee breaks and the post-conference trip on 18 June 2022.

Please check our Conference website for registration details (bank account, etc.).

Publication procedure

Accepted papers (following editorial review) can be included in the conference proceedings published in International Journal of Cross-Cultural Studies and Environmental Communication (ISSN 2285–3324). Authors of high-quality papers will be given the opportunity to have their papers reviewed in view of publication in top international journals (whose profile matches the research and thematic focus of the individual papers).

Alternatively, there will also be the possibility to submit individual papers to be reviewed for inclusion in a collective volume published with a high-impact international academic publisher.

Scientific Committee

Pilar Blitvich (University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA)
Diana Boxer (University of Florida, USA)
Belinda Crawford Camiciottoli (University of Pisa, Italy)
Rodica Dimitriu (’Alexandru Ioan Cuza’ University of Iaşi, Romania)
Sara Greco (Universita della Svizzera italiana, Switzerland)
Michael Haugh (University of Queensland, Australia)
Cornelia Ilie (Strömstad Academy, Sweden)
Catalina Iliescu (University of Alicante, Spain)
Manfred Kienpointner (University of Innsbruck, Austria)
John McKeown (Uskudar American Academy, Turkey)
Sara Laviosa (University of Bari ‘Aldo Moro’, Italy)
Cezar Ornatowski (San Diego State University, USA)
Esther Pascual (Zhejiang University, China)
Daniela Rovenţa-Frumușani (University of Bucharest, Romania)
Stephanie Schnurr (University of Warwick, UK)
Sylvia Shaw (University of Westminster, UK)
Maria Sifianou (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece)
Villy Tsakona (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece)
Keiko Tsuchiya (Waseda University, Japan)
Tuija Virtanen (Åbo Akademi University, Finland)
Daniel Weiss (University of Zürich, Switzerland)
Francisco Yus (University of Alicante, Spain)
Sole Alba Zollo (University of Naples Federico II, Italy)

Organizing Committee

Catalina Iliescu (University of Alicante) coordinator
Juan Miguel Ortega (University of Alicante)
Francisco Yus (University of Alicante)
María Lopez Medel (University of Alicante)
Silvia Sánchez (University of Alicante)
Ana Maria Caramangiu (University of Alicante)
Elena Pérez (University of Alicante)
Andrea Valente (York University, Toronto, Canada)

Contact

Conference website: https://web.ua.es/estidia22

Check the Conference website periodically or send inquiries to: estidia22@ua.es