The Faculty of Letters of Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iasi and the Center for Inter-American Studies of the University of Graz have the pleasure to invite you to:
INTERCULTURAL 
COMMUNICATION
INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM FOR STUDENTS AND YOUNG RESEARCHERS
6 – 7 May 2017
Call for Papers
We live in a world (the “global village” as theorized by Marshall McLuhan in The Gutenberg Galaxy) and an age (the “Information Age” as sociologist Manuel Castells called it in his trilogy) when intercultural and cross-cultural communication is essential.
McLuhan had the prescience of the Internet as an "extension of consciousness." Indeed, as our current experience shows, the new media technology facilitates our real-time communicative activities. This new reality generates new sociological structures within the context of culture and has strong impacts on language and writing style, which need to be explored. McLuhan himself conceded that far from being harmoniously welded, the global village may create discontinuity and division under the pressure of its diversity.
As early as 1959, anthropologist Edward T. Hall argued in The Silent Language that ”culture is communication and communication is culture.” However, culture has never been monolithic, and cultural construals differ. In The Self and Social Behaviour in Differing Cultural Contexts psychologist Harry C. Triandis distinguishes between individualistic and collectivistic cultures. Likewise, although masculinity and femininity exist in all cultures, it is one that tends to predominate in a given culture.
Nonetheless, in the past few years the communal conversation among cultures has been disturbed by terrorist attacks and very strong anti-globalization movements. However the plot woven by the two big “stories” of the year 2016 (Brexit and Trump’s triumph in the US presidential elections) may develop, issues of intercultural and cross-cultural communication will always be at stake.
We encourage interdisciplinary approaches to issues of globalization versus regionalization, nationalism and populism, and we invite papers written in English on the following topics:
Inter-American / American StudiesFilm and Adaptation StudiesMedia and Communication StudiesCultural StudiesTranslation StudiesGender StudiesLinguisticsLiteratures in EnglishTEFL
Please submit your abstracts (of maximum 200 words) by 1 April 2017 at the following address: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.