Tackling future challenges through critical language awarenessSymposium and inaugural networking meeting

Activity: Organising and attending an event Organising and contributing to an event Academic

Description


Our society today is rooted in a complex network of interactions where meaning-making and communication play a crucial role, shaping our understanding, attitudes, and actions towards our physical and social environment. As highlighted by the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals, sustainable development is as much about promoting social equality and community resilience as it is about ensuring the well-being of our planet. In the realization of these goals, language and communication are pivotal. They shape our understanding of the world, our attitudes, and our behaviours, ultimately inspiring action towards a sustainable future. The constitutive role of language goes beyond the technical skills of communication. It sets the frames for interpretation, influences perceptions, and constructs social realities. This is especially critical in tackling abstract and intangible issues like environmental crises, political extremism and social polarization or responsible business.

Our knowledge-based society constructs knowledge and understanding of major societal issues through discourse. Critical language awareness enables us to notice how language and discourse shape society, how it constitutes knowledge and how it is invested with ideologies. Critical language awareness has the potential to empower individuals, promoting higher levels of analytical and critical thinking skills, reflexivity, and a democratic, responsible mindset. To navigate the complexity of future challenges - whether they be environmental, social, or economic - it is vital to foster such an awareness. Yet, despite its clear importance, CLA receives insufficient attention as a key competency for future generations. This is what our project aims to address. Our aim is to explore the different ways ENLIGHT-partners employ critical language awareness to meet contemporary societal challenges. For this network meeting, we will focus on two ENIGHT flagship challenges in particular: climate changes and equity.


Proposed Project plan
Our project will bring together experts from ENLIGHT-partner universities and others for an academic network meeting aimed at consolidating existing partnerships, expanding academic networks, and building future research collaborations. We have three main goals in mind:
To build new connections, by learning from and about each other’s work and fostering new research collaboration;
To foster grant collaboration, by exploring and making agreements about joint grant applications within the Erasmus/ENLIGHT, Horizon, and other schemes;
To establish a theme network on CLA and a draft proposal for the ENLIGHT call that is expected in the Fall of 2023.

The network meeting would allow participants to get to know each other (better), build a European network of CLA-experts, and explore different types of collaboration (research, grants, conferences). This is emphatically a legacy-oriented project in that it seeks to both culminate in grant applications, future meeting at ENLIGHT-partner universities, and the establishing of a theme network.
Period12-Nov-2023
Event typeSeminar
LocationGroningnen, NetherlandsShow on map
Degree of RecognitionInternational

Keywords

  • critical language awareness
  • responsible communication
  • discourse analysis
  • sustainabilty
  • storytelling
  • democratic citizenship