Events at the Centre for Research on Language and Culture Contact

The Center for Language and Culture Contact (CRLCC) at Glendon College will soon be approaching its 20th anniversary. To mark the occasion, an international conference will be held on May 9-10, 2025, on topics related to language, culture, and knowledge contact in the 21^st century.

Contact is a rich, multipronged concept. It can be linked to travel, migration, communication, translation, trade and exchange, cooperation, and solidarity, among other experiences and forms of relation. It can happen synchronically within specific spaces (multicultural societies, global cities, organizations or workplaces, multilingual classrooms, networks, airports, chatrooms, etc.) or diachronically, as seen historically in processes such as colonization and globalization. Whether physical or virtual, contact inherently entails movement and non-fixity.

While cultural contact has the potential to bring people together, foster mutual understanding and tolerance, and facilitate the exchange of ideas for innovation and change, it can also be prompted by force and lead to violence and oppression. The impact and effects of contact, therefore, hinge on various factors, including power dynamics between individuals and groups, the level of cultural awareness, and the willingness to engage in dialogue and cooperation.

From postcolonial and migration perspectives, the intensification of intercultural contacts has given rise to new and highly dynamic spaces, encompassing geographical, cultural, linguistic, cognitive, and epistemological dimensions. Related to other concepts such as the “third space”, coined by Homi Bhabha, the “contact zone”, by Mary Louise Pratt, or the “translation zone”, by Emily Apter, these spaces are often friction-driven (Tsing) and may entail potential risks, such as engulfment and effacement, or prove beneficial through processes like hybridization and cross-fertilization. 

In recent years, the transnational turn, fueled by a critique of globalization that relies on the apparent fluidity of spatial mobility and the supposed efficiency of global interconnection, has drawn attention to the forms of contact and interaction that occur in complex, unstructured, unpredictable and even chaotic contexts, leading to the production and emergence of new forms of culture and identity. This shift has led to the realization that “modern and globalized experiences of (re)attachment, multiple belongings, belonging-at-a-distance, supranational agreements, diaspora cultures, and global cities reveal the limitations of the national optic for characterizing twenty-first century ways of life” (Mattea Cussel, 4). As pointed out by Naoki Sakai, the traditional way of understanding international and intercultural dynamics, which relies on contrasting and juxtaposing spaces, cultures, and languages, is no longer as applicable or relevant in the contemporary world. Additionally, the binary logic used to frame concepts, such as colonized vs. colonizer, migrant vs. host society, North vs. South, mother tongue vs. foreign language, and so on, is also losing relevance. Thus, to fully understand the experiences of culture, language and identity in today’s interconnected world, it is crucial to move away from dichotomies to a more nuanced and complex way of thinking. In this conference, we aim to engage with the concept of contact and its various forms, centering on this shift from international relations to transnational dynamics, and from binary logic to complex and multidimensional thinking.

We welcome submissions on the theme of language, culture, and knowledge contact and engagement. We encourage exploration of the interconnections between these areas of research from various perspectives. Topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Conceptual extension of the notion of contact: connection, interaction, exchange, encounter, event, relation, entanglement, node, cluster, etc.
• Spatial representations and visualizations of contact: lines, thresholds, edges, boundaries, borders, zones of in-betweenness and transit, etc.
• Outcomes of contact: fusion, hybridization, engulfment, effacement, trace, assimilation, adaptation, appropriation, sedimentation, friction, traction, stitching
• Competing identities and allegiances in multilingual and multicultural contexts
• Subjectivity in contact: heterodox (Pratt), hyphenated or nomadic (Braidotti)
• Contact and the role of neutral intermediaries, gatekeepers, facilitators and intercultural mediators
• Travel and traffic of theories, ideas, and knowledges across geographical, disciplinary, theoretical and discursive boundaries  
• Contact, hierarchy and power dynamics in the 21^st century
• Literary, narrative, translational and discursive practices resulting from transnational and translingual writing
• World literature versus national, migrant, diasporic or postcolonial literature
• Representations of contact in literature, cinema and visual arts
• Translation and interpreting understood as contact
• Editorial and institutional management of linguistic and cultural contact (publishing houses, museums, art galleries, theatres, opera houses, etc.)
• Contact and translanguaging practices
• Minorized languages, language policies and revitalization
• Contact, agency, identity, becoming
• Narratives of contact
• Contact and the formation of subjectivity
• The materialities and economies of contact, labour, and care
• Cultural contact and new technologies (audiovisual, sensory, cross-modal)
• Transdisciplinary contacts and new interdisciplinary articulations of knowledge
• Contact and epistemic justice
• Contact and ethics
• Colonial and imperial languages vs. Global English(es)