[Linganth] CFP: Inaugural ELAN Conference

[Meghanne Barker]

Conference Theme: “Linguistic Anthropology in Europe: Past, Present,
Futures”

Leiden University, Netherlands, 6-7 November 2025

Keynote speaker: Dr Aurora Donzelli, Associate Professor, University of
Bologna

(See keynote bio below)

We are delighted to announce the first ELAN conference. The goal of this
conference of ELAN, the Linguistic Anthropology Network of EASA, is to
bring together a wide range of scholars interested in doing and defining
linguistic anthropology in the European context, whether Europe is their
fieldsite, institutional base, or European scholars are simply key
interlocutors.

How do we define linguistic anthropology, and how do we carry out
linguistic anthropology? In the North American context, linguistic
anthropology has commonly been associated with a particular history that
stretches from Franz Boas’ establishment of the “four fields” of
anthropology at the turn of the twentieth century to later efforts to bring
insights from American pragmatist semiotics, interactional approaches,
Conversation Analysis, and folklore to bear on anthropological research on
language-in-use. European linguistic anthropological scholarship, by
contrast, emerges from a broader and more varied history of engagement
between studies of language, signs, and culture, that has developed across
a range of disciplinary contexts and approaches, including but not limited
to anthropological linguistics, sociolinguistics, ethnolinguistics, and
Continental semiotics.

In this conference, we invite linguistic anthropologists, broadly defined,
to come together to explore the range of theoretical and methodological
approaches that have composed and now compose linguistic anthropological
scholarship in Europe and to imagine future possibilities and directions
for carrying out linguistic anthropological research in and on Europe. We
welcome papers, panels, and roundtables that showcase scholars’ own
linguistic anthropological scholarship, examine intersections and dialogues
between different theoretical traditions, and/or reflect on the past,
present and future of linguistic anthropology in Europe.

ELAN’s mission is to support research and teaching in linguistic
anthropology across European academic institutions and to facilitate
community building among linguistic anthropologists and allied scholars who
work, study, research, or are otherwise interested in Europe. The network
was founded in 2018 by Dr Laura Siragusa and Dr Jenanne K Ferguson. Find
out more about ELAN here <https://www.easaonline.org/networks/elan/>.

To propose a paper or pre-formed panel or roundtable, please fill out the
google form here <https://forms.gle/3BHw9F8RNEhxPMnc6>.

If you are submitting a paper, we ask for a 150-word abstract and short bio
(50-100 words).

If you are submitting a pre-formed panel (of 4-6 people), we ask for a
panel abstract (150 words) and abstracts (100 words) and bios (50-100
words) for each participant. If you have a discussant, the discussant does
not need an abstract.

If you are submitting a pre-formed roundtable (of 4-6 people), we ask for a
roundtable abstract (150 words) and bios (50-100 words) for each
participant.

If you have an alternative format to propose, we are very open to your
suggestions for an interactive or creative workshop or other format. Please use
the same form <https://forms.gle/3BHw9F8RNEhxPMnc6> to make this suggestion.

Deadline: 15 May 2025

We aim to notify all applicants of our decisions by July 1. If you have
questions, feel free to contact the organizers of the conference.

N.B. This conference will be held in person. If you would like to present
your work to the ELAN community online, we have a monthly online workshop
that runs throughout the academic year. Sign up for the ELAN listserv to
receive information about spring 2025 workshops. For the 2025-2026 academic
year, we will circulate a call for papers for the workshop sometime in
summer or fall 2025.

We hope to see you in Leiden in November!

Meghanne Barker, meghanne.barker at gmail.com

Elina I. Hartikainen, e.i.hartikainen at sai.uio.no

Chelsie Yount chelsie.yount at gmail.com <<chelsie.yount at gmail.com>>

Janet Connor j.e.connor at hum.leidenuniv.nl

About Dr Donzelli:

Aurora Donzelli is Associate Professor of linguistic and social
anthropology at the University of Bologna, Italy—a position she took after
teaching for over a decade in New York, at Sarah Lawrence College. Her
research deals with language and political economy in different contexts. Aside
from her long-term fieldwork in Indonesia, she has worked on US political
discourse and the postcolonial Lusophonic imagination in Portugal and East
Timor. In Methods of Desire
<https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/methods-of-desire-language-morality-and-affect-in-neoliberal-indonesia/>
 (University of Hawaii Press, 2019), she examines how the growing influence
of transnational lending agencies such as the IMF and the World Bank is
transforming how people desire, voice their entitlements, and imagine the
future in upland Indonesia. Her second monograph, One or Two Words
<https://nuspress.nus.edu.sg/products/one-or-two-words-language-and-politics-in-the-toraja-highlands-of-indonesia#:~:text=Aurora%20Donzelli&text=Moving%20from%20this%20understatement%2C%20which,world's%20most%20linguistically%20diverse%20countries.>(NUS
Press, 2020), analyzes the transformations in political talk ensuing from
Indonesia’s administrative restructuring and describes the emerging forms
of cosmopolitan indigeneity and the novel ways of imagining the
nation-state in the Indonesian peripheries. Entitled Back to the Roots, her
current book project explores the Italian “neorural revival” as a
linguistic and cultural response to the parallel standardization of
agricultural labor and human interaction ensuing from the post-WWII rural
exodus.

Dr Donzelli received her BA and MA in Philosophy at the University of Pavia
and her PhD in anthropology from the University of Milan-Bicocca and held
research and teaching appointments in Europe, US, and Southeast Asia,
including the University of Milano-Bicocca, the Institute of Social
Sciences and Institute of Theoretical and Computational Linguistics, in
Lisbon, the Asian Civilizations Museum (ACM) in Singapore. Her research has
received support from the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren
Foundation, and the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology.
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