In recent years, more and more attention has been paid across the corporate and academic worlds to managing diversity and inclusion (D&I). Like the entire D&I agenda, its communicative dimension attempts to respond both to economic needs and to moral and ethical concerns.

On the one hand, celebrating a commitment to D&I has established itself as an effective and profitable strategy to attract customers and employees alike. Indeed, research focusing on different languages has shown that organizations are increasingly relying on their expressive ability to convey an inclusive identity and to represent values such as D&I as part of their institutional DNA.

On the other hand, organizations face the challenge of overcoming and tackling one of the most significant concerns of societies today, exclusion, which is often intertwined with continuing tensions between majority and minority identity groups. These tensions have a strong communicative dimension, relating, for example, to exclusion from important workplace interactions due to language diversity or to communication practices that are discriminatory and/or threaten identities.

This interdisciplinary conference aims to gain insights into communication for, within and about a diverse society. In order to do so, it will bring together researchers and practitioners to discuss two main issues:

• how organizations communicate D&I across languages; and

• how they approach language-related issues arising within global and diverse settings.