[IGALA] ***** SPAM 5.9 ***** 2nd CfP “What are your pronouns and why does it matter?”, Oct 2024, Montpellier, France

[ann coady]

Dear all,

Please find below the 2nd call for proposals for the *international
interdisciplinary conference*: "*What are your pronouns? And why does it
matter?*", to be held at Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier 3,
*17th-18th October
2024.*

This interdisciplinary conference welcomes proposals from a variety of
disciplines including (but not restricted to) sociolinguistics, pragmatics,
Critical Discourse Analysis, philosophy, cultural, civilisation or literary
studies that shed light on how these new pronoun sharing practices matter.
Communications can exploit various data (ethnographic data, interviews,
surveys, online corpora, press articles, autobiographies, novels, TV
series, films…) from any critical perspective. Comparative linguistics
approaches are welcome, as long as the focus is on English.

The conference aims to answer some of (but not exclusively) the following
questions:

   - Who employs these new pronoun sharing practices and why?
   - What do these practices index about a speaker? How does this practice
   relate to other political stances?
   - How have these new practices changed the indexical value of pronouns over
   recent years?
   - Do people choose different pronouns depending on the context (e.g.,
   professional email dating site...)? How can we explain this?
   - Do people choose different pronouns depending on the context (e.g.,
   professional email signature, bio on dating sites, pronoun rounds…)? If
   so, why?
   - Apart from *he/him*, *she/her* and *they/them*, what other pronouns are
   used and why?
   - What are people’s attitudes to these new practices? How are they
   perceived?
   - If these new practices are the heir to past struggles for
   gender-neutral pronouns, to what extent are they the continuation of
   these struggles? In what ways is the debate about pronouns today
   different from that of the 1960s and 70s? How does the use of non-binary
   singular *they* impact the use and perception of singular *they* as a
   generic gender-neutral pronoun (“somebody called but *they* didn’t leave
   a message”)?
   - How can we explain the backlash against these practices? What role do
   these practices play in the current climate of the culture wars and moral
   panic about gender?
   - To what extent do these practices open up a positive space for those
   questioning gender norms? Is the invitation to become pronominallyvisible,
   and therefore to make public what might be private, a source of liberation
   or alternatively a source of potential anxiety? Does it generate
   opportunities for gender fluidity or simply reify gender divisions and
   therefore gender hierarchies?
   - How does this phenomenon play out in different languages compared to
   English, or in different varieties of English?
   - What is the future of this new phenomenon? Will it become widespread,
   partly also because it helps recipients of an email to identify the gender
   of someone whose first name might not be marked for gender?

Full details can be found on the website: https://pronouns.sciencesconf.org/
A selection of papers will be considered for publication.

Proposals of around 300 words to be sent to whypronounsmatter2024 at gmail.com

Deadline for submission: 15th February 2024
Notification of acceptance: 15th April 2024

Registration fees: 60€ if attending in person, free for students and online
participants.

Please note that the language of the conference is English. However,
comparative approaches are welcome, as long as the focus is on English.

Guest speakers:

   - Lal Zimman, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA (online)
   - Laura Paterson, The Open University, UK (in person)
   - Claudine Raynaud, Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier 3, France (in
   person)



Ann COADY

MCF en linguistique anglaise

UNIVERSITÉ PAUL-VALÉRY MONTPELLIER 3

UFR2 Langues et Cultures Étrangères et Régionales

Bureau A313, Route de Mende - 34199 Montpellier cedex 5

Etudes Montpelliéraines du Monde Anglophone (EMMA)

CV HAL <https://cv.hal.science/ann-coady> — fiche chercheuse EMMA
<https://emma.www.univ-montp3.fr/fr/annuaire_recherche/ann-coady>
[image: Logo UM3] <https://www.univ-montp3.fr/>[image: Logo composante]
<https://www.univ-montp3.fr/>
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