November 8 – 9, 2018
University of Bern, Switzerland
As Salazar (2016) claims, the concept of mobility captures the impression that today's world is structured around the constant flow not only of people, but also of cultures, objects, capital, services, media, images, information and ideas. It is not surprising, therefore, that in the social and human sciences mobility turn has been put forward and named. As a result, new theoretical concepts that attempt to describe the new spatial and temporal dynamics of today's world: deterritorialization, reterritorialization, spatial-temporal compression, scalarity, etc. have emerged. The mobility turn is conceived as a turn because it breaks with the traditional correspondence between person, place and culture. But perhaps the most important aspect of the mobility turn is that it highlights that the concept of mobility does not have an immutable meaning but varies according to people, social circumstances and the very concept of mobility, which is necessarily defined through its counterpart, immobility.
Mobility turn is therefore a different way of framing and encompassing global mobility, showing how physical mobility of people entails economic, social and cultural mobility, the transformation of institutions at different levels and spheres, and the mobilization of (linguistic) ideologies.
The committee welcomes papers from a sociolinguistic, discursive or ethnographic linguistic perspective on theoretical or methodological aspects researching or examining the interrelationship between mobility and communicative practices in spaces where Ibero-Romanic languages (Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, Galician) and Creole languages with an Ibero-Romanic base come into contact with other languages due to (im)mobility.
Key note speakers:
Alexandre Duchêne (Université de Fribourg)
Marleen Haboud (Universidad Católica del Ecuador)
Luisa Martin Rojo (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)
Li Wei (University College, London)
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