In the beginning was the word … and then … technology


Third ASSE International Conference on British and American Studies
organized in collaboration with the Corporate Training and Continuing Education Center at Canadian Institute of Technology

26-28 November 2015

Tirana, Albania

Call for papers

Deadline for proposals: 15 July 2015


“It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.”

Albert Einstein

Technology has been part of human life since the early ages. If language, identified in the call with the ‘word,’ developed in the first place to enable human communication, technology grew out of the need to cope with the environment, namely out of the need to eat, to work, to feel protected and also to communicate.
Every age in the history of mankind is witness to great advances of technology, which have contributed not only to improving and facilitating life in general as well as to speeding up scientific progress but also to changing mentalities, shaking beliefs, shuffling and reorganizing human order. What is more, these advances have cherished the fantasy of men and writers thus giving way to science fiction. Writers have envisioned travel on the moon, robots, eternal life, life on other planets and many other things. They have encouraged mankind to challenge itself and make the imaginable real.
In the recent decades, technology has advanced to a tremendous speed that it is so difficult to keep pace with it. The applications of technology in the field of communication but not only are manifold to the point that they have transformed and redefined many aspects of human life. Whilst on the one hand, these have facilitated life in general and human communication in particular, they have also brought the need to revisit several concepts and ideas related primarily to them.
If once communication was first and dictated developments in technology, it can now be claimed that technology comes first and dictates the way we communicate.
Although the applications of technology are countless, the conference seeks to particularly explore the intersections between word and technology, that is, to trace all possible applications of technology in language, literature and culture.
We invite scholars to join us in the reconsideration of past and present relations of word and technology from the twenty-first century perspective.

Some possible topics the conference aims at addressing include:

• Representations of technology in language, literature, and culture
• Technological realities and fantasies in literature
• The role of literature in a world of technology
• Science and literature: bridging the gap
• Human imagination and technology
• How technology is transforming language, literature, and culture
• Applications of technology in linguistics
• The influence of technology in human communication
• ICT in language learning and teaching
• Educational technology in English Studies: Issues and trends
• Pedagogical Innovations in Education
• Instructional design and innovative pedagogy
• Online learning, distance learning, e-learning, blended learning
• Technological literacy
• Emerging educational technologies
• etc.

Papers are welcomed from but are not limited to:

• British and Commonwealth Literature
• American Literature
• Literary Theory
• Literary Criticism
• Cultural Studies
• Intercultural Communication
• Communication Studies
• Media Studies
• Social Studies
• (Critical) Discourse Analysis
• Pragmatics
• Linguistics
• Corpus Linguistics
• Semiotics
• Translation / Interpretation Studies
• Applied Linguistics
• ESP

The conference language is English. Please send your abstracts (about 250 words) for papers (20 min) as an MS word attachment to the following Email-address by 15 July 2015:

wt@assenglish.org.

Please follow the template to be found at http://www.assenglish.org/wt/cfp for the abstract submissions.

A selection of papers will be published in the journal in esse: English Studies in Albania, Vol. 6, No. 1 and Vol. 6, No. 2. (http://www.assenglish.org/publications/)