[Commlist] Call for Papers: Seventh Middlesex Roundtable on Signs, Language and Communication

 From 17-18 January the seventh /Middlesex Roundtable on Signs, 
Language and Communication/ will take place at Middlesex University 
London. The roundtable will be preceded by a pre-conference workshop on 
16 January at the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies of the 
School of Advanced Study, University of London.

The theme for the Roundtable will be /The Return of the Repressed:/ 
/Language, Responsibility and Freedom of Speech/.

One remarkable feature of contemporary public communication is the 
increasing polarisation, the increasing intolerance for diverging 
viewpoints, the violent responses, predominantly on social media, 
towards the free expression of ideas and the rising disregard for the 
values of scientific inquiry: objectivity, rationality, open debate. It 
is not uncommon today for universities to have to provide security for 
academics who have voiced scientifically-informed insights and 
viewpoints in the media. Amid a global culture that prides itself on its 
data-driven, evidence-based approach to governance at all levels of 
society, on its commitment to diversity, equity and equality, including 
in the area of decolonising epistemologies, as well as on the centrality 
with which it encourages individual well-being and individual 
expression, the open, free and respectful dialogue among views, insights 
and experiences has probably never been under so much threat.

We are experiencing repression within freedom. This repression focuses 
mainly on what can and cannot be said Thus, the question of what 
constitutes well-functioning, sustainable communicative environments for 
human societies and how institutions and practices can be developed that 
foster such environments, is a key question for contemporary language 
and communication scholarship. For academics, as Roy Harris stated in 
2005 <https://www.afaf.org.uk/roy-harris-on-academic-freedom/>, freedom 
is threatened by complicity in specialization, in the glorification of 
peer review and in the funding lottery.

The Middlesex Roundtable invites paper presentations that address the 
current communicative cultures from a range of perspectives: linguistic, 
ethical, legal-political, communicational, therapeutic, etc.

The Roundtable adopts a flipped conference style format: short 
presentations (15 minutes), with ample time for conversation and 
dialogue. Papers may be circulated in advance but there is no 
requirement to do so.

Prior to the Roundtable we will host a half-day workshop on /The Three 
Parameters of/

/Communication in Roy Harris' Work: Critical Approaches. / An important 
aspect of integrational theory

is the idea that we are all born into a world in which human beings are 
incessantly communicating and making signs. Human communication is made 
possible because there is a 'communicational

infrastructure' for all of us already in place. It is this 
infrastructure which constrains and makes possible human communication 
as we know it. Roy Harris identified these limits and possibilities of 
human communication as being determined by factors of three kinds, 
perceived and experienced individually by the respective sign-makers, 
namely i) biomechanical factors, concerning the physical and mental 
capabilities of human beings, (ii) circumstantial factors, relating to 
the details of specific situations (iii) macrosocial factors, concerning 
the established practices within the community. This workshop is an 
opportunity to explore the usefulness of the three parameters (or one 
specific parameter) for (empirical) linguistic inquiry and critically 
assess their validity as 'lay-oriented' explanatory concepts. Papers 
will be 20 minutes long with 10 minutes for discussion.

The Roundtable and workshop will be offered in hybrid format, with a 
preference for in-person attendance. Please send your abstract by 20 
December to Johan Siebers, (j.siebers /at/ mdx.ac.uk) <mailto:(j.siebers /at/ mdx.ac.uk)>.

The organising committee:
Professor Johan Siebers (Middlesex)
Dr Adrian Pable (Haute école spécialisée de la Suisse italienne)
Professor Emeritus Paul Cobley (Middlesex)

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