36.3251, Confs: Interdisciplinary Conference on Communicating Love and Desire (Denmark)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-36-3251. Mon Oct 27 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.3251, Confs: Interdisciplinary Conference on Communicating Love and Desire (Denmark)

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Date: 22-Oct-2025
From: Míša Hejná [misa.hejna at cc.au.dk]
Subject: Interdisciplinary Conference on Communicating Love and Desire


Interdisciplinary Conference on Communicating Love and Desire
Short Title: ICoLaDe

Date: 27-May-2026 - 29-May-2026
Location: Aarhus, Denmark
Contact: Michaela Hejná
Contact Email: misa.hejna at cc.au.dk
Meeting URL: https://misahejna.wixsite.com/icolade

Linguistic Field(s): Anthropological Linguistics; Discourse Analysis;
Ling & Literature; Psycholinguistics; Sociolinguistics

Submission Deadline: 31-Dec-2025

While love and desire are often treated as personal and private
matters, they are also sites of conflict, negotiation, and power.
Historically, controlling expressions of desire has been used to
enforce social hierarchies, gender norms, and colonial power. Even
today, conflicts over consent, domestic violence, LGBTQ+ rights, and
cross-cultural misunderstandings reveal the urgent need to better
understand how love and desire are communicated. Addressing these
questions is not only of academic interest but also has practical
relevance for public health, education, migration policy, and social
cohesion. This three-day conference aims to bridge disciplinary
divides to illuminate how better communication about love and desire
can help address these real-world challenges.
While love can be and has been seen as different from desire, there
are important overlaps between the two. Different types of love
incorporate different types of desire. Yet, many questions remain
unanswered about how different types are (mis)communicated. Some of
these questions, which will be targeted by the conference, are the
following:
1. How are different types of love and desire (mis-)communicated?
2. How do we communicate love and desire successfully?
3. Is communicating love and desire limited only to human-human
interactions? If not, what significant cross-species and
cross-communicator differences emerge?
4. How are discourses of love utilised for greater societal good?
Abstracts of 200-500 words (excluding references) should be submitted
via EasyChair by the end of 2025 (31st December 2025, midnight, CET).
EasyChair submission portal:
https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=icolade1
Conference website: https://misahejna.wixsite.com/icolade
Oral presentations, poster presentations, and video essay
presentations will be supported.
ICoLaDe is going to be a hybrid conference, with a registration fee of
1000 DKK for in-person participants. The fee covers catering for all
three days (excluding an evening dinner).
A collected volume of contributions will be edited as a follow-up on
the conference.
How are different types of love and desire communicated?
Love and desire permeate our existence and have been argued to be
universal across cultures. But are love and desire communicated in the
same ways across cultures? If so, what are the universals of
communicating love and desire? While the current research suggests
that there are important overlaps, it has also been acknowledged that
some aspects of the field are heavily skewed towards WEIRD samples.
Thus, most of our understanding of how love and desire are
communicated may not enable us to reach larger-scale cross-cultural
conclusions. The conference will particularly welcome papers that will
contribute to this area, especially with respect to potential
miscommunication. Another aim of this conference is to explicitly
reflect on the representation of different types of love and desire
within and across different disciplines. A closer look at diverse
disciplinary approaches reveals that some scholars/disciplines focus
on one rather than the other in the absence of the other. The third
typologically oriented aim of the conference therefore is to bring
scholars together who do not tend to consider the role of both in
their work.
How do we communicate love and desire successfully?
When we communicate different types of love and desire, what makes the
communication process successful? Less work exists in this area,
although the implications of understanding successful communication of
love and desire can have broader-scale societal impact, especially in
the current times of political upheavals and uncertainty.
Is communicating love and desire limited only to human-human
interactions?
While it could be said that love is at the core of being human, love
is nevertheless not limited to human-human interactions. Firstly,
relationships with different forms of attachment exist between human
and non-human animals as well as human animals and non-animals, such
as plants and AI. Pet-directed speech and most recently the emergence
of bonding relationships with AI provide relevant examples. With the
advent of highly developed interactive AI, the world of dating apps
has also seen the use of AI in shaping the users’ interactions with
potential human partners. The third goal of the conference is to reach
an overview of academic and societal questions we should be asking
ourselves in this area of communicating love and desire.
How are discourses of love utilised for the greater societal good?
Finally, the last question of the conference builds on the previous
three. Some scholars have suggested that love studies and love
discourses are crucial in tackling many of the wicked problems,
including for instance discrimination and global climate change. But
how exactly can scholars working on communicative aspects of love and
desire contribute towards greater societal good?  What are some of the
practical steps we can take.



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