The CALA – The Conference on Asian Linguistic Anthropology

The CALA 2020, February 2020, Sarawak, Malaysia, follows the success of The CALA 2019, in Cambodia, thus extending work on Asian Linguistic Anthropology, and Asian Language and Society.

Asian Text, Global Context:

The CALA 2020 theme, “Asian Text, Global Context”, describes a culmination of 100 years of East-West global communication. Throughout the past century, the symbolisms of Asian ‘text’ have been significantly emphasized, contested, (re)interpreted, distorted, while employed for both political and Anthropological purpose. Asian text has become a highly representational, authenticating, and legitimizing device, and its potency as such cannot be underestimated. Never has it shown more significance than in the current era, where its intensified usage, and its qualities in Asian identities long contested, seek description both through etic and emic frames.
The Asian text has thus become iconic, symbolic, and indexical, in that, as a verbal, non-verbal, and visual artifact, it encompasses the whole semiotic spectrum of that which is performatively Asian, and distinct from the Non-Asian, yet a text which can interlink the East and the West, through a multitude of textual modes. The continuous recentralization and recontextualization of Asian texts, both locally and globally, have hence become vital to representations of Asia, Linguistically, Anthropologically, Socioculturally, Politically, and much more.
The CALA 2020 thus calls for renewed interpretations of Asian texts, and asks that we seek new perspectives of these complex texts, in global contexts. These interpretations increase in significance as; return migration to Asia is now a salient factor in transnational flows; online texts and their textual modes now compete ever more enthusiastically to effect disjunctures in previously Western dominated technologies; ontological conceptions of life and social interaction now increasingly draw from Asian philosophies, sociocultural models, lifeworlds, and Asian urban anthropologies, thus producing interstices for new or revised textual and textualized semiotics; the entangled complexities and intersubjectivities of political, sociocultural, and religious practices and their constraints motivate engagements in interfaith dialogue, shifting ethnic demarcations, and sociopolitical interventions. Ultimately, the massive sets of Eastern demographics, and their expansive set of social dynamics, models, and praxis, continue to uniquely inform and complexify productions of Asian texts, in both local and in global contexts.

Strands:

Language, dialect, sociolect, genre
Nonverbal semiotics
Multifunctionality
Language and embodiment
Ethnographical language work
Language, gender, sexuality
Language ideologies
Narrative and metanarrative
Language and spatial and temporal frames
Language minorities and majorities
Language in real and virtual spaces
Language contact and change
Poetics
Anthropological linguistics
Applied sociolinguistics
Cognitive Anthropology and language
Critical Linguistic Anthropology
Post-structuralism and language
Semiotics and semiology
Language documentation
General sociolinguistics
Language socialization
Social psychology of language
Language revitalization
Ethnography of communication
Language, community, ethnicity

Chronology:

CALL FOR PAPERS:

Opens: November 17, 2018 at midnight (UTC Time)

Closes: May 9, 2019 at midnight (UTC Time)

REGISTRATION:

Early Bird

Opens:  March 10, 2019 at midnight (UTC Time)

Closes:  June 14, 2019 at midnight (UTC Time)

Normal Bird

Opens: June 15, 2019 at midnight (UTC Time)

Closes: September 25, 2019 at midnight (UTC Time)

Presenters must register before September 25, 2019, midnight (UTC Time), to guarantee a place in the program. Registration will remain open after this, but conference organizers cannot guarantee placement in the conference.

Late Bird

Opens: September 26, 2019 at midnight (UTC Time)

Closes: February 8, 2020 (Conference end)

NOTICE OF ACCEPTANCE
No later than June 10, 2019 at midnight (UTC Time)

CONFERENCE DATES
Wednesday, February 5, 2020
Thursday, February 6, 2020
Friday, February 7, 2020
Saturday, February 8, 2020 – Full day of optional Anthropological Excursion (separate cost)

cala2020@upm.edu.my

http://cala2020.upm.edu.my/