This conference focus is on questions concerning the uptake of the study of languages and the identity of Modern Languages as a discipline within the academy, which are of urgent national concern. Modern Languages as an interdisciplinary field of enquiry bring a wide spectrum of insights to bear on the most urgent global challenges: debates around space, access, mobility, justice, the global and the local lie at the heart of new research in Modern Languages. Especially recent events – Me Too, BLM, Covid, the war in Ukraine, increasingly more tangible and ubiquitously felt effects of climate change – throw into sharp relief how closely the global and the local are intertwined. Those different aspects cannot productively be explored without thinking about language/s.

The ‘where’ of research in Modern Languages is primarily – but not exclusively – a question of the location of the ‘target’ or subject cultures and their languages. It also encompasses the question of the researcher’s subject position; institutional factors determining perceptions of cultural difference and visibility of Modern Languages research; social factors determining access to language learning and exposure to the positives of intercultural exchange (as opposed to those negatively configured in rhetoric surrounding migration); and a politically sensitive, critical perception of changing mobility, topographies, and of the global/local relationship in the Anthropocene.

Confirmed plenary speakers include Alison Phipps, Siraj Ahmed, Mieke Bal and, as roundtable participants, Charles Burdett, Janice Carruthers, Emma Cayley, Charles Forsdick, and Neil Kenny.