Call for Papers

Discourses from Latin America and the Caribbean: Current Concepts and Challenges

We invite submission of abstracts for a panel entitled “Discourses from Latin America and the Caribbean: Current Concepts and Challenges”, to be proposed as a part of The Sixth International Conference on Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines (CADAAD 2016), which will take place at the University of Catania in Italy, 5-7 September 2016.

The Latin American and the Caribbean regions have traditionally been the focus of a wide variety of research due to their unique and rich particularities, able to challenge conventional dogmas and methods across the Social Sciences. Among these complexities and contradictions, Puri (1999:14) mentions the marked “neo-colonial dependency, global capital’s assaults on sovereignty, cyclical and mass migrations of population, environmental and cultural ravages, and bitter ethnic tensions among the members of its disparate diasporas”.

In light of the above, the proposed panel aims to investigate the pervasive relationship between language, discourse and society in the Latin America and Caribbean regions. We welcome papers dealing with contemporary social, political, economic and cultural aspects of the area from a discourse-analytical perspective. Possible topics include, but are by no means limited to, the following:

  • Power and identity
  • Ethnic and race relations
  • Migration, integration and discrimination
  • Conflict and aggression
  • Gender and sexuality
  • History and memory
  • Nation and nationalism
  • Social movements
  • (New) media and advertising
  • Political parties and institutions
  • Education and literacy practices
  • Environment and climate change
  • Health and mental health
  • Business and economics

We welcome papers which approach these topics from different theoretical and analytical perspectives, including but without being limited to the following:

  • Cognitive Linguistics
  • Conversation Analysis
  • Corpus Linguistics
  • Critical Discourse Analysis
  • Discursive Psychology
  • Forensic Linguistics
  • Functional Linguistics
  • Media and Mass Communication Studies
  • Multimodality
  • Pragmatics and Argumentation Theory
  • Sociolinguistics

We welcome abstracts of 250-350 words (excluding references) to be sent as MS Word (.doc or .docx) attachment to Eleonora Esposito (eleonora.esposito[at]unina.it) or José Manuel Ferreiro Gómez (j.ferreirogomez[at]lancaster.ac.uk) or Carolina Pérez-Arredondo (c.perez[at]lancaster.ac.uk). We suggest that your abstract includes a discussion of the context, theoretical framework and methodology, contribution to the field and a short bibliography. Please include in the body of the email, but not in the abstract itself, (1) your name, (2) affiliation and (3) email address.

Submissions are due by 20 November at the very latest. Notification of acceptance to the panel will be sent on 5 December 2015. All abstracts will then be subject to the general CADAAD review processes after 15 December 2015. The definitive acceptance of panel proposals and notification is expected by March 1, 2016.

It is intended that papers presented at the panel are collected in a thematically arranged volume to be submitted to an international publisher.

For more information on the panel or the conference, please contact the panel conveners or visit the conference website: http://www.cadaad2016.unict.it