Prof. Johannes Riquet (Tampere University): Migrant Railroads and Global Trains: Allegories of Dis/connection in an Age of Planetary Migration and Environmental Crisis
Connected to a larger project on the poetics of interruption in British and American railway fiction, this talk examines the train as a figure of dis/connection in twenty-first-century literature and film. Since the beginnings of train travel, the railway has held out the promise of spatial connection and integration, but it has also been haunted by interferences and interruptions that continually defer and disrupt technological modernity’s fantasy of ordered space-time. My talk focuses on contemporary narrative transformations of this tension in two distinct (but interrelated) contexts. In the first part, I examine the train as figure of migratory movements that creates real and imagined connections across national, continental, and ideological borders while also troubling these links. To do so, I explore how stories of interrupted movement on the railroad serve to transport transnational, migrant, and diasporic imaginaries through such strategies as discontinuous narrative forms or poetic images of dis/connection (e.g. in Colson Whitehead’s novel The Underground Railroad and Cary Joji Fukunaga’s film Sin Nombre). In the second part, I turn to the imaginative possibility of global trains within the fantastic geographies of speculative fiction (including Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer). In projecting post-apocalyptic scenarios, these narratives resonate with the new environmental associations of the railway as a green and ‘sustainable’ mode of transport but they do so ambivalently, both reframing and perpetuating the association between trains and industrial modernity. Overall, I aim to shed light on the railway as an uneasy and multi-layered allegory of the world in an age of planetary migration and environmental crisis.
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Prof. Helen Kelly-Holmes (University of Limerick): English and Sustainable Multilingualism 4.0: How Did We Get Here and Where Are We Going?
The relationship between technology, English, and multilingualism has always been complex, depending on prevailing technological advances and political-economic regimes. With the mainstreaming of Artificial Intelligence and the Smart Web, we seem, however, to be entering into a less predictable and comprehensible period of development, the outcomes of which are uncertain. Tracing the evolution, sometimes in parallel, sometimes in divergence, of English and multilingualism since the emergence of digital technologies, we can identify a number of patterns emerging that may inform the future development. From a prolonged period of English monolingual dominance with its roots in the development of the WWW, a kind of partial multilingualism took hold with bigger languages gradually challenging this dominance. The advent of participatory technologies and interfaces enhanced this multilingualism even further and created spaces for smaller languages, whose marginalization had, up to then, been exacerbated by the advance of digital technologies. Having charted these developments and their consequences, the paper will then go on to speculate on how the 4.0 era, in which AI is becoming integrated into all of the everyday interactions we have with and through technology, will impact on the dominance of English and the sustainability of the current levels and spaces for multilingualism.
The panel on "The Future of English Studies Teaching" focuses on discussing the future prospects of English linguistics, applied linguistics, translation and literary studies across Finnish universities. It addresses questions concerning societal developments and administrative changes affecting the teaching of English studies and the kind of collaboration needed to address the challenges.
Confirmed speakers include Prof. Päivi Pahta (University of Tampere), Prof. Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen (University of Helsinki) and Dr. Janne Skaffari (University of Turku). The panel will be moderated by Dr. Niina Hynninen.