Practicing bio-cultural and multilingual diversity in ecolinguistics

Call for papers

The 8th International Conference on Ecolinguistics will take place the first week of July 2026 in Rennes, France. We want to discuss and practice approaches to the ecolinguistic commitment for sustainable futures and ecojustice with a special focus on multilingual and multisensory encounters. ICE-8 aims to provide a dynamic and stimulating space for sharing ecolinguistic research and practices.

Ecolinguistics, a discipline first consolidated in the 1990s and a research field which has been rapidly expanding in the last ten years, takes special interest in language and ecology, with a particular attention to the interconnections between language and natural ecology. However, terms such as language, nature, or ecology have different connotations for researchers and schools of thought. By exploring the role of language in the life sustaining interactions of humans, other species and the physical environment, ecolinguists question boundaries and definitions of and between language and non-language, humans and non-humans, or humans and environment.

Moving beyond traditional sociolinguistic concerns that have tended to use ecology as a metaphor for theorizing language contact and change, ecolinguists investigate how human linguistic activity impacts the wider ecological relationships of interdependence that human beings inhabit and depend on for their well-being and survival (Steffensen 2024). This ‘inclusive’ (Cornips 2019) perspective of ecolinguistics calls for approaches to language research that reconceptualisze language, not as an anthropocentric capacity that separates humans from the more-than-human world, but as an earthly practice that entangles human beings with other species and ecosystems we share the planet with in myriad ways. This work is important as ever as we find ourselves living through what environmental scientists describe as a ‘polycrisis’ involving a nexus of escalating ecological catastrophes brought about by extractive and exploitative modes of human relations with the earth. Recognizing the immensity of the environmental challenges we face today, ecolinguists are shedding light on the diversity of linguistic practices that shape human interactions with natural ecologies. These include relationships of control and commodification as well as of care and flourishing cohabitation. While early work focused primarily on critical analyses of environmental texts, contemporary ecolinguistics has expanded to include:

• Studies of how multisensory and embodied discourse mediates real-world encounters between human and non-human actors;
• Explorations of how emerging ecomedia and digital linguistic practices make beneficial ecological actions, identities and communities more or less possible;
• Posthumanist and post-anthropocentric approaches to linguistics that investigate language itself as an ecological phenomenon co-constituted through diverse human relationships with other species and places;
• Decolonial and Southern approaches in ecolinguistics that examine how local and indigenous languaging practices work outside of dominant colonial language ideologies that have historically served to sever human relations from the wider ecological contexts they depend on.
• Cognitive perspectives that view language, not as a bounded entity located inside the head, but as a distributed activity that only emerges from the dynamic interactions among human and non-human bodies, minds, and their shared ecological contexts.

By bringing these various theoretical and methodological approaches into conversation, ICE-8 aims to explore how different conceptualizations of the language-ecology relationship can inform both scholarly understanding and practical responses to contemporary environmental challenges. We particularly welcome contributions that:

• Bridge traditional discourse analytic approaches in ecolinguistics with newer theoretical frameworks including multisensorial, material, embodied, posthumanist and digital approaches.
• Study how language mediates situated human interactions with other species and ecosystems.
• Investigate how decolonial and Southern environmental knowledge and values manifest in speaking and listening practices, and consider Indigenous and non-Western theoretical perspectives on language and discourse.
• Explore interdisciplinary approaches combining linguistic analysis with insights from environmental sciences, anthropology, cognitive science, and other relevant fields.
• Examine historical and contemporary discourses in promoting environmental awareness and activism.
• Analyze the role of language ideologies in challenging or reinforcing destructive human relationships with nature.
• Develop new theoretical and methodological frameworks for understanding language-ecology relationships.

The conference will bring into conversation and joint practice ecolinguistic approaches fostering diversity, including language diversity and bio-cultural diversity. The conference aims to be multilingual, multimodal, and multisensory. Therefore, the organising committee is dedicated to two guiding principles. First, we plan a creative and active conference. This means adding discussion time, workshops, artistic performances, and excursions alongside more classic presentation formats. Second, our aim is to make ICE 8 a truly multilingual conference, so we will experiment with translation and interpretationg. We are particularly looking forward to receiving contributions in marginalised languages in academia, including regional languages and minority languages. Further, we encourage contributions that are well-grounded in ecological issues and questions.

During ICE 8, we are also interested in discussing and imagining answers to the following questions, either in the form of individual presentations, workshops, dialogue, or artistic contributions:

• How can we enable perspectives for action and positive change in our contemporary world?
• How can we move past eco-anxiety to climate hope?
• How can we introduce new stories of development?
• How can we enable the participation in ecolinguistic research of those not included in academia (children, elderly, non-humans)?
• What role can we attribute to AI and new digital technologies in establishing new stories and positive change?
• How can we de-center accounts of ecolinguistics from different regions and language-backgrounds?
• What place could we assign to multispecies communication and multispecies ethnography in ecolinguistics?
• How do environmental activists, scientists and ecolinguists work together?
• How can language policies rely on or include ecolinguistic principles to foster multilingualism and a knowledge of the environment that would help protect it?
• How does or can language (re)shape social-ecological power relations?
• How does the concept of eco-translation (as defined in Cronin, 2017) travel and make a contribution to theories and practices of translation that can induce ecological thoughts and behaviours?
• How should we teach ecolinguistics and/or include ecolinguistics in the teaching of other subjects?

Multilingual conference approach

As it may be relevant to show that we can both make a plea for multilingualism and experience it ourselves, the double objective of the following suggestions is having the participants in the conference hear languages other than French and English, but also ensuring inter-comprehension between the largest possible number of participants. We suggest therefore several means of making the conference truly multilingual to authors and moderators:

1. Depending on available interpreters or facilitators, organisation, budget, and declared wishes of attendants:
• We may offer workshops in French and English.
• Some discussions or workshops could take place in one language and be reported to the rest of participants in French or English.
• We will offer on-site or remote interpreting for some paper presentation sessions or individual talks. In such cases, presentations and/or any preparation document should be sent in advance to the organisers for interpreters (the deadline will be communicated when the submissions to be interpreted are accepted by the scientific committee).
2. If the latter possibility proves too difficult or expensive to offer for some languages or if they find it more convenient, authors themselves could make their talk multilingual in several ways:

• Flipped conference: You could decide to record your talk before the conference, in English, French, German, Italian or Spanish, and send the video before 19th December 2025, so that it could be subtitled into French and/or English, perhaps German, Italian and/or Spanish, by students of the Master’s Degree in Translation and Interpretation of Rennes 2 University. Authors of such videos commit themselves 1) to limit the duration of their video to 15 min., 2) to send the script of their video through the website of the conference to make subtitling easier; 3) to be available for an exchange with participants during the conference in July 2026, either on site or online.
• Own interpreter: You can come with your own interpreter, who will interpret consecutively (more or less long parts of the discourse) into French or English for the audience. You should then announce it in your paper proposal, and the programme would provide more time for such presentations.
• Multilingual presentations: You can offer conferences in one language with a slide presentation in another, and even change these languages at one point in the presentation.

Possibilities of being active during the conference

The organisers invite participants with and without their own communication. All participants are thus invited to join one or several workshops. Workshop topics could include:

• Co-creative Restorying Practices
• Climate Hope
• What do we want to eat in 2050? – Creative writing workshop
• Multispecies language landscapes
• Corpus-assisted approaches to ecolinguistics
• New stories "fresco"

• With an individual presentation:
• Participate with a prerecorded and translated presentation; answer questions either remotely or during a live, on-site panel
• Participate with a presentation on site
• Organise a workshop
• Organise a dialogue or conversation
• Participate in workshops (registration with conference registration)
• Participate in dialogue (registration with conference registration)

Do you want to give a presentation, organise a workshop or topical conversation? Please provide us with an abstract by 1st October 2025!

Please note: the names and contact details of the author(s), organiser or organising team should be provided in the submission form of the website. They should not in any case be mentioned in the abstract, since it will be blind-reviewed.

Individual presentations should not exceed 20 minutes. The abstract of up to 300 words should provide details on the content of the presentation in relation to the conference theme, specify the mode of presentation (prerecorded, on site) and the language or languages of presentation.

Workshops can last from two hours to a full day. The abstract of up to 500 words needs to include the following information: mode (in-person, online), language(s) and translation / interpreting requirements, equipment needed, duration of workshop, approximate number of participants.

Dialogues and conversations are topical debates moderated by one or two persons. They should last one or two hours and are supposed to tackle a concrete question or problem. The moderator may invite one to four guests who will make a contribution to spark a wider discussion. The abstract of up to 300 words needs to include the following information: main issue addressed, mode (in-person, online), language(s) and translation / interpreting requirements, envisaged duration of discussion, approximate number of participants.

Artistic contributions are welcome. Please send us a short, informal email, spelling out your idea and how it could enrich the conference. We will try our best to accommodate creative and artistic contributions.

While selected parts will be open to online participants, it will not be a fully hybrid event. We are looking forward to seeing you in Rennes from 9 to 11 July 2026.

References

Cornips, Leonie. 2019, The final frontier: non-human animals on the linguistic research agenda, in Janine Berns and Elena Tribushinina (dir.), Linguistics in the Netherlands, 36, p. 13-19. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Cronin, Michael. 2017. Eco-Translation. Translation and Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene. London: Routledge.

Lamb, Gavin. 2024. Multispecies Discourse Analysis. The Nexus of discourse and practice in sea turtle tourism and conservation. Bloomsbury Academic.

Lechevrel, Nadège. 2010. Les approches écologiques en linguistique: enquête critique. Louvain-la-Neuve: Bruylant-Academia.

Maeko, Busani & Liqhwa Siziba, L. 2024. Environmental Conservation and the Bulawayo CBD as a Linguistic Landscape Construction: An Ecolinguistics Perspective. Journal of Asian and African Studies.

Steffensen, Sune Vork, Döring, Martin, & Cowley, Stephen (eds.). 2024. Language as an Ecological Phenomenon: Languaging and Bioecologies in Human-Environment Relationships. Bloomsbury Academic (Bloomsbury Advances in Ecolinguistics).

Steffensen, Sune Vork. 2024. On the demarcation of ecolinguistics. Journal of World Languages 10(3): 499-527. https://doi.org/10.1515/jwl-2024-0043

Stibbe, Arran. 2024. Econarrative. Ethics, Ecology, and the Search for New Narratives to Live By. Bloomsbury Academic.

Vallego, J. 2023. Ecolinguistics and AI: integrating eco-awareness in natural language processing. Language & Ecology. https://www.ecoling.net/_files/ugd/ae088a_13cc4828a28e4955804d38e8721056cf.pdf.