TATE 2022 conference attempts to find out how ‘boundaries’ in ELT are constructed and reconstructed in an age of openness and exchange. It is also an opportunity to revisit the notion of ‘boundary’ in an age of globalization and study how the text (literary or otherwise) rewrites notions of ‘border’, ‘non-border’ or ‘border crossing’ in such a context of fast change and mobility.
Topics related to aboriginal cultures, canonical vs. non-canonical literature, notions of place, space and identity will likewise be addressed in the conference.
This conference is an opportunity to settle these questions and appease practitioners’ apprehension about a field massively influenced by virtual and physical shuttling between borders and communities. Accordingly, re-conceptualizing languages and cultures, re-demarcating speech communities, re-visiting competence, and re-weaving identities necessitate border contestation. The conference is not meant to tear down boundaries, but rather to look critically at the processes that create and sustain them and to creatively imagine alternatives (Kostoulas, 2019).
While creativity implies an informed ability to follow and flout rules and norms, “criticality entails using available evidence insightfully to question and problematize received wisdom in ELT (LiWei, 2011).