Call for papers for the 1st “Language and the pandemic” Conference

This conference brings together academics and practitioners from a wide variety of fields, for a collaborative, multidisciplinary exploration of the ways in which the pandemic has impacted language. All abstracts are peer-reviewed. Themes and issues for the conference include, but are not limited to：

Abstract Due Date:

January 28, 2021

Stream A: Language in the pandemic

The media shape people’s beliefs and actions around health information and political leadership. They inform identities and perspectives, even as distrust in them is widespread, through being instrumentalised by politicians, dissidents and intellectuals. Language and images are at the centre of these processes, as information is packaged and disseminated by the corporate and legacy media, and contested and delegitimised by alternative media, religious groups, NGOs, resistance groups, minorities and others. In the pandemic, these groups vie with traditional powers for control of the public agenda and perceptions. This conference explores these changing realities and relationships, as well as their symbols, technologies, affordances, and impacts. We welcome papers exploring: the language used for news about the pandemic, language and social distrust regarding news about the pandemic, language and contemporary political ideologies as they interact with news about the pandemic, among many possible topics.

Stream B: Applied linguistics

Papers are invited in any area of applied linguistics. This includes, but is not limited to:  systemic functional linguistics in language pedagogy, any other area of language teaching and learning, language assessment, ESP, multiliteracies and multimodality, second language acquisition, language teacher education, stylistics, and language policy and planning, among many. We also welcome papers from related fields, with a focus on an applied linguistics area, such as semantics, discourse analysis, World Englishes, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics, phonetics and phonology, among many. Papers may address issues connected to the pandemic, or not.

Stream C: Language and healthcare in the pandemic

Language mediates our understanding of the spectrum of health and ease through discomfort and illness. It helps us express our awareness of these states in our daily lives, and negotiate expectations and outcomes with family, friends, employers, practitioners and caregivers. Among practitioners, language shapes team interactions, patient reception, the quality of care delivered and received, patient satisfaction, and health outcomes. This stream focuses on language use within any of the various healthcare contexts and settings. Papers might explore questions of language in the delivery and experience of healthcare, and they might employ any of the various analytic methods used in language studies.

Stream D: Data analytics and the pandemic

In order to find out how the pandemic is impacting students, we are soliciting papers from teachers, lecturers and professors. These papers ask use structured interviews, and evaluate the data with content analysis software. Conference participants interested in cooperating with this effort will publish papers in a journal special issue with HEDRA advisory board members.  If you are interested in this, please click here.

The conference welcomes abstracts from academics and researchers working in linguistics, as well as in media, computing, social sciences, healthcare, and business, and also from people working in interdisciplinary and interprofessional fields, and others. Participants will be able to watch a plenary session, and participate in a live-stream roundtable, and a conference roundtable discussions.

Keynote Speaker

Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen

Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen is Chair Professor of the Department of English, the Faculty of Humanities at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, where he is a member of the PolySystemic Research Group. He has degrees in linguistics from Lund University (BA), where he also studied Arabic and philosophy, and from UCLA (MA, PhD), and has previously held positions at USC/ Information Sciences Institute, Sydney University, and Macquarie University. He has held visiting appointments at e.g. the University of Hamburg and the Brain Science Division of the RIKEN Institute in Tokyo. He is Honorary Professor, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, the Australian National University, Canberra, and Guest Professor, University of Science and Technology, Beijing.

With other members of the PolySystemic Research Group in the Faculty of Humanities at PolyU, he is working on medical discourse/ health communication, language across the curriculum and other aspects of educational linguistics, multilingual studies (language comparison and typology, translation studies and second/foreign language education), language arts, and the language of space.  Matthiessen has lectured and given courses around the world, including in China, Japan, S. Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, India, Greece, Germany, Denmark and the UK, Lebanon, Canada, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina and Chile, Tunisia and Ghana; and he is involved in a number of international research networks.

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