Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Landscapes in Language, Society, and Cognition
Short Title: ILANSCO
Theme: Emerging Landscapes: Languages and Landscapes in Conflict

Date: 16-Sep-2026 - 18-Sep-2026
Location: Prague, Czech Republic
Meeting URL: https://www.eu.avcr.cz/permalink/74a631b4-4d01-11f0-ba1a-005056bf6eb8

Linguistic Field(s): Anthropological Linguistics; Cognitive Science; Discourse Analysis; Sociolinguistics; Text/Corpus Linguistics

Submission Deadline: 31-Dec-2025

In 2024, the first conference Interdisciplinary perspectives on landscapes in language, society, and cognition (ILANSCO 2024) took place at the University of Zürich in Switzerland. This unique encounter brought together researchers from various disciplines - linguistics, anthropology, history, geography, psychology and others - who shared their passion for landscape perception and presented their frontier research on the role of language and other factors in this process. In 2026, we would like to continue this stimulating intellectual exchange and invite you to participate in ILANSCO 2026 to take place in the premises of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague, the political and cultural heart of Czechia.

In recent years, landscape perception has become an important topic in fundamental research across the social and natural sciences with a clear application potential in a number of practical fields such as conservation biology, landscape engineering, architectural design, regional and urban development, forestry, and agriculture. Advancing research has shown that how humans relate to landscape is all but trivial. Multiple factors - linguistic and extra-linguistic - influence landscape perception and subsequent spatial behavior. Pioneering works have shown the extreme variability of landscape perception and the influence of language on cognition (e.g. Levinson, 2003; Levinson ‒ Wilkins, 2006; Burenhult ‒ Levinson, 2008; Johnson ‒ Hunn, 2010; Turk ‒ Mark ‒ Stea, 2011). At the same time, more-than-representational approaches in anthropology, geography, and history have emphasized the importance of embodiment, emotion, and affect, as well as the role of ideology, discourse, and temporality in landscape perception (e.g. Cosgrove, 1984; Duncan, 1990; Ingold, 2000; Wylie, 2005). Still others have shown how landscape perception is intricately tied to social relations influencing one’s sense of self and collective identity (e.g. Basso, 1996). Finally, much advancement has been made in our understanding of the political dimension of the linguistic landscape (Berg ‒ Vuolteenaho, 2009).

All of these studies have shown that landscapes do not exist “out there” waiting to be discovered by expert scientists. Rather, they emerge from the interaction between the perceiving embodied subject, the linguistic and extra-linguistic tools at his/her disposal, the short-term and long-term social context, and the activity of the more-than-human agents participating in the landscapes’ co-creation. Since all of these factors change, so do these emerging landscapes, landscape perception thus being an open-ended and negotiated process. As a consequence, landscapes are frontiers. They are receding horizons which we approach but never quite reach, changing as we proceed towards them. They are both everyday and exceptional, banal as well as sacred, consensual as well as contradictory, palpable as well as imaginative, matter-of-fact as well as challenging. At ILANSCO 2026, we would like to encourage researchers to explore this frontier, emergent character of landscapes from an interdisciplinary perspective incorporating linguistic and extra-linguistic insights.

Specifically, we would like to invite researchers to focus on landscape perception in frontier situations where:
1) our standard perceptual tools, linguistic and extra-linguistic, are stretched to their limits, for example, in extreme situations, newly settled areas, political revolutions or rapidly changing natural and social environments (e.g. Henshaw, 2006),
2) our research methods and theories struggle to adequately capture and explain empirical observation, for example, when linguistic description and somatic experience appear to differ from, or even contradict, each other (e.g. Feinberg ‒ Genz,
2012), or
3) landscape itself is a contested or contingent concept, arising from an interplay of linguistic, ethnic, political, and environmental factors, for example, in multilingual situations with conflicting claims to territory and the symbolic meaning of landscape (e.g. Adderley ‒ Mills, 2014; Rose-Redwood ‒ Alderman ‒ Azaryahu, 2018; Saunders ‒ Cornish, 2021; Berr ‒ Koegst ‒ Kühne, 2024).

To tackle these and related questions, we invite original, interdisciplinary contributions using applied, theoretical, quantitative, qualitative, experimental, and computational approaches.

We especially encourage contributions from early career researchers and presentations of ongoing and unpublished research.

Abstracts should not exceed 300 words excluding title and references; they should mention three to five keywords. Submissions should provide information on the topic, data, methodology, and theoretical framework(s) of the contribution and clearly state their interdisciplinary character and/or relevance beyond their main discipline. All submissions will undergo anonymous peer review. Each paper will have a 20-minute slot for presentation, followed by a 10-minute discussion.

The organizing team is planning a joint publication after the conference.

Deadline for the submission of proposals: 31 December 2025
Information of acceptance: 28 February 2026
Registration deadline: 30 April 2026

Registration fee: 75 EUR (students), 150 EUR (full price)
Venue: Czech Academy of Sciences, Národní třída 3, Prague

Further information: Přemysl Mácha, Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences, [email protected], and Žaneta Dvořáková, Institute of Czech Language, Czech Academy of Sciences, [email protected]