36.3490, Confs: The Politics of Intercomprehension (Belgium)

Tue Nov 18 03:05:02 UTC 2025

LINGUIST List: Vol-36-3490. Tue Nov 18 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.3490, Confs: The Politics of Intercomprehension (Belgium)

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Date: 14-Nov-2025
From: Camille Marvin [camille.marvin at umons.ac.be]
Subject: The Politics of Intercomprehension

The Politics of Intercomprehension

Date: 18-Jun-2026 - 19-Jun-2026
Location: Mons, Belgium
Contact: Camille Marvin
Contact Email: camille.marvin at umons.ac.be

Linguistic Field(s): Anthropological Linguistics; Applied Linguistics;
Philosophy of Language; Sociolinguistics

Submission Deadline: 30-Dec-2025

We are pleased to invite you to a two-day conference of different
academic and activist perspectives that will tug at the ideological
threads woven into intercomprehension and unfasten it from its purely
linguistic interpretation to achieve a transdisciplinary
understanding.
In the Global North, linguistic intercomprehension is understood as
the process of an interlocutor understanding unknown languages within
the same linguistic family as their primarily used languages
(Melo-Pfeifer: 2015). It has been lauded as a practice subversive to
monolingual norms and aligned with European values (Clua: 2007; Dzik:
2019; Meiẞner: 2011), without much contextualization of the colonial
ontology underpinning European frameworks of multilingualism and
multiculturalism. Projects of minority language revitalization have
increasingly promoted intercomprehension as a tool for democratic
collaboration, but its consequences for linguistically-isolated
communities (e.g. Euskera in Euskal Herria, which does not belong to
the same linguistic family as neighboring minority languages) has not
been explored. What are the benefits and limitations to such
practices? How does increased technological intervention transform
these practices? Furthermore, we invite contributions that critically
explore how politics of intercomprehension are enacted for vulnerable
groups, particularly when understanding and intelligibility are
transformed into responsibilities rather than rights. For instance,
situations of migration and (im)mobility offer unique contexts to
further understand how intercomprehension happens when people are
mixed together or forced apart (Faulstich-Orellana and
Rodríguez-Minkoff: 2016).
With this conference we aspire to highlight contexts of communication
often neglected by hearing academics, such as those explored in Deaf
Studies and Disability Studies. Intercomprehension is often
characterized as an inherent element of communication in deaf
communities (Zeshan: 2015), an idea which scholars have critically
examined (see Bagga-Gupta: 2019; De Meulder et al.: 2019; Moriarty
Harrelson: 2019; Moriarty Harrelson and Kusters: 2021). Studies such
as these navigate the relation between intercomprehension and
intersubjectivity as tools to analyze how people create shared
understanding (Gillespie & Cornish: 2009; Heasman & Gillespie: 2019).
Research on neurodivergence illuminates the topic of
intercomprehension and how language users ‘queer’ ableist notions of
languaging and understanding (Walker: 2015). It is essential to
include such perspectives in our discussions so that hearing and
neurotypical academics do not perpetuate ableism, audism and oralism
through their work and theorizations of comprehension and
intelligibility (Bauman: 2004; O’Connell: 2021; Rajagopalan: 2010).
We also invite participants to analyze the relationships between
intercomprehension and different conceptualizations of
multilingualism. Of particular interest is the moral and ideological
work that surrounds this intersection. For example, does the
application of intercomprehension practices signify a more democratic
future for language users, or are its liberatory aspects overstated,
as Jürgen Jaspers warned with translanguaging (2018)? Moreover, the
ontological limits of linguistic intercomprehension seem to be
restrained to human multilingualism. How can the “animal turn” in
sociolinguistics (Cornips: 2025) contribute to theorizing
intercomprehension as a distributed and emergent property between
sociomaterial actors, human and non-human?
This conference welcomes creative approaches to questions such as
these to understand the political and ideological contours of a
multilingual future based in intercomprehension.
Submission Guidelines:
Deadline for submissions: December 30th, 2025
We aim to offer a space and occasion for transdisciplinary
collaboration, and invite contributions from scholars, educators,
activists, artists and students in the form of 20-minute
presentations. These presentations can be traditional research papers
but we remain open to other more interactive and creative formats.
The conference is linguistically flexible: we invite the inclusion of
other languages, but request that at least one element of the
presentation (e.g. visual, spoken) be presented in English. Sign
language interpreting services will be available for deaf
participants.
Submissions for contributions should include an abstract or proposal
written in English, of no more than 400 words. Please include the
title of your presentation, as well as contributor details (full name,
pronouns if desired, email address, affiliations). A reference list is
not required.
If you plan to propose a presentation of more than one
author/presenter, only one submission is required, but please include
the details of all presenters.
Please send your submission to camille.marvin at umons.ac.be. You will
receive confirmation of your abstract's reception and will be notified
of acceptance by January 15, 2026.
Information about registration will be sent out towards the end of
January 2026. Please note that there will be a registration fee of 100
euros.
Keynote Speakers:
Lou Harvey, The University of Leeds: "To be is to communicate":
Neuroqueering for hospitable communicative futures
Maite Puigdevall Serralvo, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya:
Ideologies, Practices and Multilingual Governance: Learning
Intercomprehension in a Catalan Energy Cooperative
Organization Committee:
Camille Marvin, Université de Mons and Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
Juan Jiménez-Salcedo, Université de Mons
Béatrice Costa, Université de Mons
Jürgen Jaspers, Université Libre de Bruxelles
Scientific Committee:
Leonie Cornips, Maastricht University
Béatrice Costa, Université de Mons
James Costa, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle
Julien Degueldre, Université de Mons
Eva Eppler, University of Roehampton
Gonzalo Francisco Sánchez, Université de Mons
Lou Harvey, The University of Leeds
Jürgen Jaspers, Université Libre de Bruxelles
Juan Jiménez-Salcedo, Université de Mons
Ibon Manterola, Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea
Camille Marvin, Université de Mons and Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
Adil Moustaoui, Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Dai O’Brien, University of York
Laurence Pieropan, Université de Mons
Maite Puigdevall Serralvo, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
Joan Pujolar Cos, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
Gudrun Vanderbauwhede, Université de Mons
John Walsh, University of Galway
Hua Zhu, University College London

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