International Student Conference

April 10-11, 2025 Hybrid

This conference aims to provide a platform for students to present and discuss their research in English Studies, focusing on the role of discourse in language, literature, and cultural representation. Objectives include fostering interdisciplinary conversations, bringing together students and scholars from various English Studies disciplines, and encouraging critical analyses of language impact on societal norms, values, and cultural narratives. To actively encourage student participation and engagement, the conference is offered free of charge.

Contributions are invited that align with but are not limited to the following thematic areas: linguistics (pragmatics, discourse analysis, media linguistics), literary studies (narratives and discourse in literature, postcolonial discourse, critical theory and discourse), cultural studies (discourse and culture, discourse and identity, representation in popular culture), cross-disciplinary approaches (intersections of language, literature, and culture; multimodal discourse analysis).

Speakers


Malachi Black
University of San Diego, USA
Łukasz Grabowski
University of Opole, Poland
Laura Vilkaitė-Lozdienė
Vilnius University, Lithuania
Kotryna Garanasvili
Vilnius University, Lithuania
Adlina Ariffin
International Islamic University Malaysia, Malaysia
Andreas Mahler
Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
Andreas Mahler

Andreas Mahler

Freie Universität Berlin, Germany

About the keynote speaker
↗️ Andreas Mahler is Chair of English Literature and Literary Systematics at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany.
↗️ His main research areas are early modern literature, the shift from realism to modernism, textual poetics, and literary theory (semiotics, intermediality, literary anthropology, and aesthetics).
↗️ He has published on early modern satire, comedy and comedies, genre theory, the city, and the question of epochs in literature.
 

Keynote presentation Discourse and Society. On the Verbal Making of ‘Culture’

↗️ The thesis I want to pursue is that society is produced by discourse. Far from merely mirroring what already seems to exist, discourse, I propose, is a central agent in the verbal construction and institution of social structures which we make and in which we then live. For this, I first discuss the relation between our imaginary and society, attempting to describe society as a ‘habitat’ artificially made by us and at the same time paradoxically defining and determining us as cultural beings. I then try to embed this in the sociological and philosophical discussion on constructivism, establishing what we call ‘society’ and/or ‘culture’ and/or ‘reality’ as the result of semantic processes of verbalization which we then optimistically tend to ‘reify’ into existing ‘facts’. That this is possible seems to lie anthropologically in the human faculty of cognitively understanding, and creating, arbitrary signs, which finds its first expression in the exteriorizing discovery of the self in the mirror and then serves as the main matrix of infinitely building and modifying, but also stabilizing, our ‘world’. The emerging world-like ‘semiosphere’ is thus fabricated out of words/lexemes, texts – and, first and foremost, discourses, understood as semantic ‘systems of thinking and arguing’ that, through incessant dialogic translation and re-translation, negotiatingly build a specific universe of discourse that we have made and in which we(more or less) feel at home. This is finally briefly demonstrated with regard to the workings of political discourse in action in order to(metonymically) illustrate that the social world is of our own making and that it is, above all, text-generated discourses that are its main media.

Partners


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