IALIC 2016 Barcelona

The 16th IALIC conference on ‘Bridging across Language and Cultures in Everyday Lives: New Roles for Changing Scenarios‘ will be held in Barcelona, Spain in November 2016. The deadline for call for presentation proposals is 15 May.

In a world of transcultural ‘mash-ups’, multilingual rap and multi-party videoconferencing apps for cellphones, there is a need for a theoretical shift towards an understanding of ‘languaging’ and ‘culturing’ as transformative practices involving social activities that go between and beyond ‘fixed’ and separate systems; practices that take place in the interstices of languages and cultures where new meanings and new understandings can emerge. Given the importance that language and culture mediators can play in today’s increasingly interconnected world, the aims of this conference are

• to promote critical engagement with the notion of mediating between cultures and languages;

•  to explore the role of technology in bridging between diverse languages and cultures;
• to explore the role of ‘broker’ in cross-cultural situations, including growing instances of ‘child language brokers’;
• to promote understanding of how language brokering is perceived by researchers and practitioners from cross-cultural situations;
• to provide a forum for a critique of existing analytical models of culture and language mediating practices that integrate current theories of language and intercultural communication;
• to provide a forum on ways in which research into language and culture mediation can inform teachers’ praxis.

You can find more information at http://ialic2016bcn.com.