7th LRI Workshop for Early-Career Researchers
Language and Belonging
Merano/Meran, 6-7 June 2024
Call for Papers
Following the successful workshops in Merano/Meran (Italy) in 2014, 2015, 2018, 2019, and in Innsbruck (Austria) in 2016, the 7th workshop for early-career researchers of the linguistic colloquium Language, Region, Identity (LRI) will be hosted again at the Villa San Marco, Merano/Meran (Italy). The workshop, jointly organised by a team from six universities and research centres in Austria, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland, aims to foster scientific exchanges within the Alpine region and beyond by offering a forum for discussing current and recently concluded projects. The workshop will feature oral presentations of 20 minutes with a subsequent discussion time of 20 min.
Each Linguistic Colloquium workshop has a specific topic of interest. The 7th edition will address the topic of language and belonging. Despite often being equated with the notions of identity and citizenship, the notion of belonging can capture various different ways in which people may belong and form emotional attachments. For several decades now, different fields of linguistic research have tackled issues in relation to belonging with different theoretical and methodological orientations. From variationist sociolinguistics, which has attempted to work out how certain linguistic features pattern around people’s belonging to certain places, social classes or genders, research on language and belonging received important contributions from orientations such as Sociolinguistic Ethnography or Discourse Analysis that have conceived of belonging as a resource that people employ strategically to construct, claim or resist forms of social inclusion or exclusion.
We welcome contributions that deal with language and belonging in relation to various intertwined social categories and groups (genders, social status, (sub)cultural groups, nationalities, professional groups, etc.) and investigate:
- how belonging is expressed, perceived, negotiated, resisted and contested,
- how categories and groups of belonging form, change and dissolve over time and in different spaces,
- how belonging links to authority, ownership and power,
- how the relation between language and belonging can be conceptualised and tackled methodologically.
Conference Venue: Academy of German-Italian Studies, Villa San Marco, Merano/Meran (Italy)
Confirmed Keynote Speakers:
- Rita Vallentin (University of Frankfurt (Oder)
- Florian Busch (University of Bern)
Submission of abstracts
If you are interested in presenting your research project at the workshop, submit an abstract of max. 500 words via ConfTool (https://lt.eurac.edu/lri24/conftool/). Deadline for abstract submission: 15th January 2024.
Abstracts should provide the following:
- clearly articulated research question(s) and its/their relevance;
- the most important details about research approach, data and methods;
- if applicable: the main preliminary results and their interpretation.
Abstracts will be reviewed by the organising team. Notification of the outcome of the review process will be sent by 15 March 2024.
All dates at a glance:
15.01.2024 Submission of abstracts
01.03.2024 Notification of acceptance
01.04.2020 Preliminary programme of the workshop
Form of presentation: oral presentation (20 minutes speaking time plus 20 minutes discussion time)
Languages: German, English, Italian
Fees: no fees foreseen
Organisation of the workshop:
Aivars Glaznieks (Institute for Applied Linguistics, Eurac Research, Bolzano, Italy)
Verena Platzgummer (Institute for Applied Linguistics, Eurac Research, Bolzano, Italy)
Stephanie Risse (Faculty of Education, University of Bolzano, Italy)
Monika Dannerer (Department of German Studies, University of Innsbruck, Austria)
Andrea Ender (German Language and Literature, University of Salzburg, Austria)
Peter Mauser (German Language and Literature, University of Salzburg, Austria)
Claudia Maria Riehl (Institute for German as a Foreign Language, University of Munich, Germany)
Regula Schmidlin (German Studies, University of Fribourg, Switzerland)
Contact: lri@eurac.edu