CALA 2020 - Asian Text, Global Context

The CALA 2020, in February 2020, in Bintulu, Sarawak Land of the Hornbills, Malaysia, will follow on from the success of the CALA 2019 in January 2019, in Siem Reap, Cambodia. The CALA 2020 will thus expand on work on Asian Linguistic Anthropology, as well as Asian Language and Society. Here, the world’s prominent Linguistic Anthropologists will gather to discuss work on Linguistics, Anthropology, and Language and Society, in and of Asia, and beyond.
With an increased focus on the significance of Asian Language and society, the Annual CALA Conference has emerged at an appropriate time, allowing academics from the West to tap into, and work with, Academia in the East. Scholars in institutions throughout Asia have increasingly affiliated with the CALA network, as have those in Western contexts, to explore the vast possibilities of the Conference on Asian Linguistic Anthropology, academically, and socioculturally, where the CALA network has now well contributed and has significantly boosted research, publications, and academic networks, globally.
Themed Asian Text, Global Context, The CALA 2020 will represent over 300 years of East-West global interaction, communication, and transnationalism. Throughout, symbolisms of Asian ‘texts’ have been significantly emphasized, (re)interpreted, contested, and distorted, while employed for cultural and political purpose. Asian texts have become highly representational, authenticating, and legitimizing sociopolitical and cultural devices, and theirpotency should not be underestimated. Never have these texts shown more significance than in the present, as their intensified use, and their qualities in Asian identities long contested, seek this Linguistic Anthropological exploration.
The Asian text has thus become iconic, symbolic, and indexical, in that, as a verbal, non-verbal, and visual artifact, it encompasses the whole semiotic spectrum of that which is performatively Asian, and distinct from the Non-Asian, yet a text which can interlink the East and the West, through a multitude of textual modes. The continuous recentralization and recontextualization of Asian texts, both locally and globally, have hence become vital to representations of Asia, Linguistically, Anthropologically, Socioculturally, Politically, and much more.
The CALA 2020 thus calls for renewed interpretations of Asian texts, and asks that we seek new perspectives of these complex texts, in global contexts. These interpretations increase in significance as; return migration to Asia is now a salient factor in transnational flows; online texts and their textual modes now compete ever more enthusiastically to effect disjunctures in previously Western dominated technologies; ontological conceptions of life and social interaction now increasingly draw from Asian philosophies, sociocultural models, lifeworlds, and Asian urban anthropologies, thus producing interstices for new or revised textual and textualized semiotics; the entangled complexities and intersubjectivities of political, sociocultural, and religious practices and their constraints motivate engagements in interfaith dialogue, shifting ethnic demarcations, and sociopolitical interventions. Ultimately, the massive sets of Eastern demographics, and their expansive set of social dynamics, models, and praxis, continue to uniquely inform and complexify productions of Asian texts, in both local and in global contexts.