This annual international event is co-organised by the Literacies and Language Research Cluster in the School of Education, The University of Sheffield and with the Sheffield Institute of Education at Sheffield Hallam University.
The theme for this year's conference is 'Towards (extra)ordinary literacies and linguistic futures', where we invite delegates to explore possible futures, and the role of language, and of course literacies, in imagining new realities, beyond ‘standard’ language/s and deficit understandings of language/s.
Our conference theme of futures builds on the developing body of research and scholarship in language-focused fields - including, but not limited to intercultural communication, literacies, applied linguistics and sociolinguistics - which calls on scholars to not take language for granted. This includes research which engages with post-human and new materialist philosophies, embracing the embodied nature of language and working to ‘decentre’ (MacLure, 2013) or ‘provincialise’ language (Thurlow, 2016; Harvey et al., 2021).