19-22 March 2024, Bern, Switzerland
Deadline for abstract submission: April 30th 2024
This workshop aims to bring together scholars from all career stages working on the intersection of multilingualism, aging, and dementia to discuss common challenges and approach best practice solutions.
Call for Papers:
Internationally, the continuously growing prevalence of dementia coincides with an increasingly growing multilingual population, highlighting the pressing demand for research exploring the connection between multilingualism and dementia. In the past years, this intersection has seen a growth of interest, especially among scholars investigating what has been coined as the discursivist approach, necessitating a platform to address challenges, foster collaboration, and develop a guide tailored to the unique needs of multilingualism and dementia research. Therefore, the workshop aim is three-fold, namely to
- identify practical, ethical, and methodological challenges of empirical projects at the intersection of multilingualism and dementia,
- to actively discuss those challenges and jointly work towards best practices for empirical research in this field.
- start an inventory of existing (multilingual) corpora within the dementia context and their respective accessibility, language repertoires, contexts and settings of recordings.
We envision a workshop of dynamic engagement and collaborative problem-solving at its core that goes beyond theoretical presentations. With this vision in mind, we invite expressions of interest for two types of contributions. Both types of contributions will serve as catalysts for lively discussion sessions, where participants will jointly explore challenges, share insights, and co-create solutions. We therefore invite linguists at any stage of their career working with mono-, bi-, and multilingual datasets to contribute to one of the two themes:
- Impulse Presentation In these short presentations, participants will highlight a specific challenge encountered during any stage of research in the intersection of dementia and multilingualism, along with a solution that has been proposed or already successfully implemented. These presentations aim to stimulate discussion and exchange of ideas on practical strategies for overcoming obstacles in this complex field.
- Empirical Project Introduction Participants are encouraged to present brief introductions to empirical projects, sharing details such as methodologies employed, datasets utilized, and initial findings. Importantly, presenters are encouraged to bring data to the session, enabling collaborative exploration and constructive discussion of alternative solutions to methodological challenges. This interactive format will allow participants to actively engage with real-world data and collectively brainstorm innovative approaches to research in multilingual dementia contexts.
Please indicate your interest of participation in form of a 250-word abstract until April 30, 2024. Please also include a short bio note (150 words).
Notification of acceptance: May 15th
Workshop registration deadline: June 15th
Full funding for a limited number of scholars to participate, covering travel expenses, accommodation, and workshop registration fees.