Multilingual 2.0? Profs. Gramling & Warner

Profs. Gramling and Warner talk about their recent grant and project. This project display new and creative scholarship that crosses disciplinary boundaries and intellectual orientations, bringing people together from diverse areas at the University of Arizona.

Over the past decade, a wide range of scholars have been working on projects that seek to clarify what multilingualism means—whether those scholars are housed in psycholinguistics, literature, translation studies, second language acquisition, history, linguistic anthropology, computer science, or education departments. But rarely do these researchers have the opportunity to speak with one another in a transdisciplinary setting about their findings. Meanwhile, the phenomena that we call "multilingual" or "monolingual" are changing before our very eyes—amid the rise of social networking, hypertextuality, national security discourses in Europe and North America, the industrialization of translation, and new phenomena of global migration.

Supported by a generous Collaboration and Innovation Grant from the UofA's newly founded Confluence: A Center for Creative Inquiry, German Studies Profs. Chantelle Warner and David Gramling are collaborating with Turkish Studies Prof. Aslı Iğsız on a new research endeavor entitled "Multilingual, 2.0?" Beginning with an international symposium on April 13-15, 2012, the initiative will bridge scholarly gaps between the humanistic, social, behavioral, and technical sciences and aims to make the University of Arizona a primary international hub for research on multilingualism. In the run-up to the Symposium, we will convene a campus-wide working group in Fall 2011.

Part of the project is an international symposium to promote a truly transdisciplinary conversation about multilingualism—one of the defining phenomena of the twenty-first century, among others. The symposium will be held on the University of Arizona campus, on April 13-15, 2012. Symposium participants will be grouped into dialogic clusters. These clusters will not be organized by discipline, but rather across disciplines. Accordingly, each speaker will have ample time to respond to her/his colleagues' prepared remarks, before the attending audience is then welcomed to pose questions. The symposium will be open to a public audience, and intends to generate a more permanent cross-disciplinary collaboration on multilingualism and monolingualism research over the coming decades.

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