Center for the Study of Language and Society (CSLS)

Conferences

VALS-ASLA Conference

The VALS-ASLA Conference 2024 took place on 12 and 13 February 2024 at the University of Bern. It was a success and we would like to thank the entire team for their commitment!

VALS-ASLA, the Swiss Association for Applied Linguistics, is a forum for the exchange of knowledge and information in the field of Applied Linguistics, an interdisciplinary field of linguistics in which language-related challenges and real-life problems are examined and results are applied in both practice and theory development.

The theme of the 2024 conference in Bern was Asymmetries and Inequalities in Language. With this theme, we sought to highlight the ways in which language and language issues reflect and reproduce social divisions, but also how linguistic analyses can help to uncover and sometimes even redress inequalities in society. We aimed to showcase research on language and social issues from a wide range of theoretical, methodological and geopolitical perspectives, and to encourage discussions on the role that asymmetries and inequalities play in our research.