The ISCA members’ forum newsletter is off on a break for a few months, but we wanted to share a few important updates and announcements from the EMCA community. We also want to remind everyone that if you have any news that you think is relevant for the larger community, please send us an email at pubs@conversationanalysis.org and we will try to include it in the newsletter.
It is a bit of a momentous occasion. We started this newsletter right before much of the world closed down to combat the covid-19 pandemic. After two years though, it seems that lives are returning to something resembling what we could consider normal. Many of us are able to go back to our office, teaching once again takes place in classrooms at the university, and we can once again see our colleagues at conferences. This bodes well for the International Conference on Conversation Analysis, which was delayed because of the pandemic, and will now take place in Brisbane in 2023. Abstract submission is now open, and we look forward to seeing many people next year.
We hope everyone in the EMCA community was just as excited as we were when the announcement came out for the sixth International Conference on Conversation Analysis, to be held in Brisbane, Australia, in July 2023. Like the Olympic Games, it had to be delayed for a year because of COVID, but we can finally start looking forward to the central conference of our community. The call for panels is currently open with a submission deadline on March 4th.
After more than one and a half years, it seems that in some parts of the world, universities are slowly returning to normal, or at least, a new normal. Particularly for those of us fortunate enough to live in countries where vaccines are easily available, we have the opportunity again to see our students and our colleagues. Classes, colloquia and defenses are often back to in-person. At the same time, virtual is clearly not going anywhere.
It is the middle of summer in the northern hemisphere, a time when many of us would normally pack our suitcases, travel the world, and present our research in a range of conference venues. Unfortunately, we have had to manage as a globally distributed community with events like the International Pragmatics Conference taking place online. And while not everyone is a fan of Zoom presentations, virtual lectures organised by Rutgers, Loughborough, York, and Mannheim are attracting hundreds of scholars from around the world – some getting up in the middle of the night! It seems that, if nothing else, Covid is bringing us together as a global community in new ways.
The year has been off to quite an inauspicious start. While vaccine rollouts show promise for life possibly returning back to normal at some point this year in some parts of the world, the state of the pandemic still means that most of our teaching and research will remain at least partly remote for a while yet. What this means for conferences, such as the International Pragmatics Conference, which is supposed to take place in Switzerland in June/July, remains to be seen. Will we move to a hybrid system or will we stick to a virtual conference?
Happy New Year! And more importantly, welcome to the second year of the ISCA Newsletter. We have left a strange year behind us. With the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, academic life has been turned upside down: research projects have been temporarily suspended, online teaching has become the norm, most have to work from home, and ICCA 2022 had to be postponed. And while there is light at the end of the tunnel, the immediate outlook is still pretty bleak, with many countries dealing with new and extended lockdown measures.
After a short summer hiatus, we are back with the third edition of the ISCA Newsletter. With the growing stress and anxiety many of us are experiencing due to a range of global issues, this seems an opportune time to share some positive developments, which show how we as a community can come together. While it will be a while before we get to see each other again in person, we manage to find ways to keep connected and indeed use this time to become even more of a global, inclusive community. And who knows, some of these innovations may be here to stay.
When we started the ISCA Forum newsletter in January, and even a few months ago, when we started preparing this second edition, few of us could have anticipated our strange new situation. As we write this, most of us the world is on lockdown, and academic life is moving almost entirely online. While this is a highly stressful time, there are some silver linings. One among them is that it is bringing our community closer together. Data sessions and working groups are no longer restricted by geographical distances. Moving meetings to online platforms means that everyone can join in from everywhere.