Vienna University of Economics and Business, 29 – 30 April 2022

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

In line with this focus, we welcome contributions on a wide variety of contexts and various (sign) languages. Specifically, abstracts are invited for a 20-minutes presentation on any of the following, and on related topics:

• Organizational communication on D&I in CSR reports, D&I reports, websites, social
  media, etc. across languages, including multimodal, semiotic and semantic aspects

• Inclusive communication in organizational environments across languages, including
  multimodal and language-specific aspects

• Organizational provision for barrier-free access to communication across languages
  (with particular reference to the diversity dimensions of age and disability, as well as
  intersectional approaches)

• Linguistic diversity in multilingual and international organizational environments

Languages

Presentations may be held in: English, German, Romance languages or Slavic languages
Slides: English

Conference website: https://www.wu.ac.at/diversityandinclusion

The paper submission deadline has now passed.

[This text was contributed by the conferece organizers at Department of Foreign Language Business Communication Vienna University of Economics and Business; with support from Vienna Chamber of Commerce - Diversity Network, and WU STaR]

[News photo credits go to: © Evelyn Brezina 2021]