Inaugural ELAN Conference
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.
To propose a paper or pre-formed panel or roundtable, please fill out the google form here. 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.
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!