[Air-l] AoIR in Latin-America

[egeorge at uottawa.ca]

Hi all,

I was member of the steering committee of the conference in Toronto and
responsible of the proposals made in French. I totally agree with the
opinion of Alex Kuskis. I will only add that I remember  some remarks of
several members of this list -- from the USA but also from English Canada
-- who were very negative with the idea to have a bilingual or
multilingual conference.

Best Wishes
Éric

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Éric GEORGE (http://aix1.uottawa.ca/~egeorge/)


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In my recollection the inclusion of French presenters in
Toronto worked reasonably well, given the association's
executive attempts to subvert the bilingual French and English
presentations they had initially agreed to. As a member of the
Toronto organizing committee, I recall that we felt it important
for AIR to grow internationally by recognizing the bilingual
nature of their Canadian conference host country. With the help
of people like David Mitchell, former editor of the Canadian
Journal of Communication, we secured Canadian government
funding for translation services and the call for papers was duly
issued in French and English. There were a sufficent number of
French-speaking scholars to assess French-language proposals.
Cyber-philosopher Pierre Levy was secured to present one of
the keynotes and all seemed well with the world.

Then, a few months before the conference, the Toronto
organizers were instructed by the AIR executive to cancel the
French sessions and return the government funding offered for
translation purposes. The Toronto conference chair refused
and was deposed by the executive group, who installed a
number of recently-involved locals more amenable to their
wishes. Needless to say, those of us who had worked
on the conference for 2 years were devastated, but managed
to get the French sessions held anyway by arranging for
set-up and support. The Francophone scholars who were
aware of what had happened were upset, but thanked
the deposed organizers. This heavy-handedness caused
considerable bad feeling and set back AIR in this part of
Canada, where several people have expressed a disinclination
to be members until AIR becomes more than tokenly
international.

I air this dirty laundry now (pun intended) because of
our Vancouver colleagues expressed desire to hold the
conference, the discussions about AIR in Latin America,
and language on the Internet. Now, I would never expect
my native language of Latvian to be accommodated by
AIR (nor the Croatian that someone mentioned), but when
the conference is held in countries where major world
languages such as Spanish or French are spoken, and when
local organizers are willing to go the extra distance to
secure funding, translation and organization, leaving it to
the executive to just show up, why would the association
continue to insist on its anglo-centrism? The executive who
decided that English was to be the association's working
language in all matters was almost all-American, and all
English-speaking, except for one token member. Is that
reflective of an association that purports to be international?
......................Alex Kuskis
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