The Blackwell Compass series is organizing an interesting-looking virtual interdisciplinary conference for the second half of October at http://www.blackwell-compass.com/home_conference. It’s free and there’s still time to sign up. Sneak previews of some of the papers are available at http://compassconference.wordpress.com/
I know I’ll be particularly interested in the paper about language and communication in the Spanish conquest of America (http://compassconference.wordpress.com/2009/09/25/sneak-preview-language-and-communication-in-the-spanish-conquest-of-america/. The other sociolinguistics papers look decidedly Sociolinguistics 1.0, though. But it never hurts to look outside the discipline and there is going to be some great stuff from geography, too …
The topics offer a great interdisciplinary spread but at the same time it’s a bit disappointing to see a conference devoted to “breaking down the barriers” and headed by a visual from the fall of the Berlin wall so firmly in the hand of UK & US academics. A shame the conference organizers didn’t think to look outside the monolingual walls of the usual Anglophone hegemony …
