Gestures in the Public Sphere. Politics, Sports and Performing Arts

GESPIN 9 will shift its focus to the use of gestures in the public sphere. This includes a broad spectrum of instances and occasions for these types of communication: the language and gestures found in political campaigns; by players and coaches on sports fields and courts; of musicians and conductors during performance, instruction, and rehearsal; as well as many more. Gespin also invites research on uses of gesture alone – such as when coaches and teammates communicate during a match on the football field, or instances when players perform celebratory enactments after scoring an important goal, or when they engage with large audiences both on site in the stadium or mediated through television and social media. The gestures found in musical performances are also included here, such as those seen in the music genres of rap or metal. Because today, gestures in the public sphere are most often viewed via digital devices – smartphones, tablets, and laptop screens – they are most often perceived in a mediatized form. For this reason, GESPIN 9 invites researchers interested in including reflections on the mediatization of gestures in the public sphere.

The multifaceted scope of the conference will be reflected in its keynotes, and a pre-conference workshop will offer introductions to methods for multimodal language and audiovisual media analysis. The GESPIN 9 will close with a post conference event featuring a lecture by Prof. Cornelia Müller.

To encourage the exchange across disciplines, GESPIN conferences are traditionally small-scale – with only one track for talks – and zoom in on the tight relationship between vocal and visual communication. This GESPIN 9 will continue the small-scale format.

GESPIN invites participants from a broad range of research backgrounds including cultural studies, gesture studies, multimodality studies, cognitive and interactional linguistics, pragmatics, psychology, psychotherapy, semiotics, sports science, dance, theatre, film, philosophy, as well as media studies.

Abstract submission for talks and posters opens in January!

See you soon in Frankfurt (Oder),

Your host Cornelia Müller and Team!

(Katerina Papadopoulou, Jeanette-Christine Bauer, Clara Kindler-Mathôt, Sarah Schön, Jana Junge, Julie Shipley, Susanne Fenger)