2026 Philippine Studies Conference - 'Archipelagic Tongues: Philippine Languages and Meaning-making, Austronesian Worlds and Global Futures'

The 2026 Philippine Studies Conference will explore Philippine languages in their fullest sense: as systems of communication, sites of power, repositories of knowledge, and creative, political, and ethical practices. 

The conference will also examine Philippine languages in relation to Austronesian connections, colonial and postcolonial formations, World Englishes, Unequal Englishes, translanguaging, linguistic landscapes, translation, education, migration, and cultural production, as well as the semiotic forms and practices through which meanings are made, contested, and circulated — across visual, sonic, spatial, embodied, and material modes.

This year’s conference is being developed in collaboration with colleagues from the Oxford English Dictionary, the UCL Department of Linguistics, and the University of the Philippines Department of Linguistics. These collaborations reflect a shared commitment to critical, historical, and global approaches to language, and support the conference’s focus on Philippine languages, Austronesian worlds, World Englishes, translation, and the circulation of words, meanings, and linguistic knowledge across time and space.

The conference encourages interdisciplinary, decolonial, and experimental approaches.  The call for papers welcomes proposals from scholars, early career researchers, educators, artists, translators, language practitioners, and community-based researchers, including work that engages non-textual, practice-based, or multimodal forms of inquiry and knowledge-making.