Plurilingual and pluricultural communication: the annual conference of the International Association for Language and Intercultural Communication

Jessica Bradley

This year’s International Association for Languages and Intercultural Communication (IALIC) annual conference was held in Bordeaux, France, with the theme of ‘Towards a plurilingual curriculum: fostering pluricultural communication in the digital age’, or, ‘Vers un curriculum plurilingue: favoriser la communication pluriculturelle à l’ère numérique’. IALIC is an interdisciplinary research association which brings together scholars from all over the world with interests in all things language(s) and intercultural. The annual conferences showcase research and pedagogy in vibrant and engaging ways. As a researcher whose work explores multilingualism and creative practice, the conference always offers the space for intellectual conversation and attentive critique. The ‘language and intercultural’ umbrella is broad — meaning that the papers and colloquia at the conference covered a wide range of areas and approaches, with lots of space for difference and critical challenge. The conference also represents the opportunity to meet with colleagues working in similar areas and to hear about research from across international contexts: it is an intercultural event in itself. And it was wonderful to attend a conference hosted by a French university, meaning I got to spend time hearing and speaking French. Although I regularly read in French, I don’t manage to speak it very often.

Image 1: Bordeaux, France

A real highlight for me this year was the Saturday keynote presentation ‘Decolonial Gestures and Agency in Indigenous Research: Reshaping and Refining Intercultural Dialogue’ by Colombia-based scholars Beatrix Peña Dix and José Aldemar Álvarez, giving reflexive accounts of the complexity of undertaking decolonial research in the university and sharing their learning from across projects. Decoloniality and activism were the theme of a number of papers and colloquia, including critical examples from Brazil, Italy, Canada, Spain and Morocco. The opening keynote on Thursday morning by Anthony Liddicoat explored curriculum as policy, linking very much to some of the ideas we engage with in undergraduate teaching for the BA Education, Culture and Childhood for EDU105 Critical Curriculum Study. Arts-based intercultural research was the focus of a colloquium led by Giuliana Ferri on ‘Transformative paradigms in intercultural research’. Áine McAllister and Giuliana Ferri drew on poetic inquiry and restoration, Fotini Diamantidaki and Tiecheng Li explored film-making and editing in collaborative online learning, while Emma Brooks considered silences in research as ethical practice — asking, when and how do we decide to just do rather than research.

My paper, ‘Semiotic landscapes and creative practice: intersections of art education and language education’, explored visual artists’ engagements with language in public space, drawing on research artist-researcher Louise Atkinson. In it, I focused on artist Leo Fitzmaurice’s 2007 ‘Arcadia’ installation, which plays with road signs and words to provoke and disrupt. This is explored in more detail in our monograph, ‘The Art of the Linguistic Landscape’ which we will submit next year.

Jessica Bradley presenting at IALIC

At the conference I was also invited to respond to new monograph written by Cristina Ros i Solé, ‘Material Interculturality: Making Sense with Everyday Objects’, alongside Giuliana Ferri. Published in Routledge Studies in Language and Intercultural Communication, the book explores the role of objects in narrating and shaping our intercultural lives.

Material Interculturality

Merci à tous, et à la prochaine !

*Jessica Bradley is Senior Lecturer in Literacies and Language in the School of Education where she is co-Director for Internationalisation and deputy director of the EdD.*