IAFOR > The European Conference on Aging (EGen) > EGen2024 Overview

EGen2024 Overview

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Join us in London (and online) for EGen2024!

July 11–15, 2024 | SOAS & University College London, UK

We are very excited to host The 3rd European Conference on Aging & Gerontology (EGen2024), the sister conference to The Asian Conference on Aging & Gerontology (AGen), which has been held in Japan since 2015.

IAFOR has joined efforts with The Bartlett Real Estate Institute at UCL, UK, the National Archive of Computerized Data on Aging (NACDA) at the University of Michigan, the IAFOR Research Centre at OSIPP, Osaka University, Japan, and academic leaders and thinkers of all disciplines from a wide range of prestigious institutions to host a conference that brings together all disciplines to discuss one of the greatest challenges humanity currently faces: the ageing of the population. Scholars from practically every discipline are welcomed to bring their perspective, as ageing involves almost all aspects of humanities, science and policy. With thematic streams covering many disciplines such as the built environment, frailty, loneliness, the silver economy, and others, EGen2024 will again provide a great opportunity for researchers.

The European Conference on Aging & Gerontology (EGen) is an interdisciplinary conference held alongside The European Conference on Education (ECE), The European Conference on Language Learning (ECLL).

We look forward to meeting you in London and online.

– The EGen2024 Programme Committee

Key Information
  • Location & Venue: Held at SOAS & University College London, UK
  • Dates: Thursday, July 11, 2024 ​to Monday, July 15, 2024
  • Early Bird Abstract Submission Deadline: February 16, 2024*
  • Final Abstract Submission Deadline: April 19, 2024
  • Registration Deadline for Presenters: May 24, 2024

*Submit early to take advantage of the discounted registration rates. Learn more about our registration options.

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Speakers

  • Anne Boddington
    Anne Boddington
    Kingston University, UK
  • Evangelia Chrysikou
    Evangelia Chrysikou
    University College London, UK
  • Alfonso J. García-Osuna
    Alfonso J. García-Osuna
    Hofstra University, United States
  • Joseph Haldane
    Joseph Haldane
    The International Academic Forum (IAFOR), Japan
  • Donald E. Hall
    Donald E. Hall
    Binghamton University, USA
  • Brendan Howe
    Brendan Howe
    Ewha Womans University, South Korea
  • David Mallows
    David Mallows
    UCL Institute of Education, United Kingdom
  • Ljiljana Markovic
    Ljiljana Markovic
    European Centre for Peace and Development (ECPD), United Nations’ University for Peace
  • Ana Pellicer-Sánchez
    Ana Pellicer-Sánchez
    UCL Institute of Education, United Kingdom
  • Neelam Raina
    Neelam Raina
    Middlesex University, United Kingdom

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Programme

  • How to Destroy a University
    How to Destroy a University
    Keynote Presentation: Donald E. Hall
  • The Examination of Eye Movements in Language Learning Research: A Focus on Vocabulary
    The Examination of Eye Movements in Language Learning Research: A Focus on Vocabulary
    Keynote Presentation: Ana Pellicer-Sánchez
  • Humanities at the Helm: Mobilising Scholars to Confront the Planetary Climate Crisis
    Humanities at the Helm: Mobilising Scholars to Confront the Planetary Climate Crisis
    Keynote Presentation: Alfonso J. García-Osuna

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Conference Committees

Global Programme Committee

Dr Joseph Haldane, IAFOR and Osaka University, Japan, & University College London, United Kingdom
Professor Jun Arima, President, IAFOR & University of Tokyo, Japan
Professor Anne Boddington, Executive Vice-President and Provost, IAFOR & Middlesex University, United Kingdom
Professor Barbara Lockee, Virginia Tech, United States
Professor Donald E. Hall, Binghamton University, United States
Dr James W. McNally, University of Michigan, United States & NACDA Program on Aging
Dr Grant Black, Chuo University, Japan
Professor Dexter Da Silva, Keisen University, Japan
Professor Gary E. Swanson, University of Northern Colorado, United States (fmr.)
Professor Baden Offord, Centre for Human Rights Education, Curtin University, Australia & Cultural Studies Association of Australasia
Professor Frank S. Ravitch, Michigan State University College of Law, United States
Professor William Baber, Kyoto University, Japan

Members of the IAFOR Board of Directors and The Academic Governing Board are standing members of the Global Programme Committee. Members of the IAAB are consultative members.

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Conference Programme Committee

Conference Chair

Evangelia Chrysikou
Evangelia Chrysikou
Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction
University College London
United Kingdom

Conference Programme Committee Members

    Marilyn Aviles, Institute of Healthcare Engineering, UCL, United Kingdom
    Dimitrios Buhalis, Bournemouth University Business School, United Kingdom
    Dorina Cadar, Brighton & Sussex Medical School, United Kingdom
    Stefano Capolongo, Polytechnic University of Milan, Italy
    Carina Dantes, SHINE 2Europe, Portugal
    Eddy Davelaar, Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck, University of London, United Kingdom
    Isaiah Durosaiye, School of Architecture, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom
    Joseph Falzon, Centre for Research & Innovation, Malta
    Ava Fatah, Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, United Kingdom
    Joseph Haldane, The International Academic Forum (IAFOR), Japan
    Paul Higgs, Faculty of Brain Sciences, UCL, United Kingdom
    Fernando Loizides, School of Computer Science & Informatics, Cardiff University, United Kingdom
    Christina Malathouni, School of Architecture, University of Liverpool, United Kingdom
    Paul McGarry, Greater Manchester Combined Authority, United Kingdom
    James W. McNally, University of Michigan & NACDA Program on Aging, USA
    Elena Petelos, Faculty of Medicine, University of Crete, Greece & Faculty of Health, Medicine & Life Sciences, Maastricht University, Netherlands
    Haruko Satoh, Osaka University, Japan
    Eleftheria Savvopoulou, SynThesis Architects, Greece
    Anastasios Tellios, School of Architecture, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
    Georgios Tsakos, Institute of Epidemiology & Health Care, UCL, United Kingdom
    Chariklia Tziraki-Segal, Hellenic Mediterranean University, Greece & Melabev: Community Club for Elders, Israel
    Antoinette Vietsch, Politician (Former MP), Architect, Healthcare Planner, the Netherlands
    Greg Williams, University of Manchester, United Kingdom

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Conference Review Committee

IAFOR's peer review process, which involves both reciprocal review and the use of Review Committees, is overseen by the Conference Programme Committee under the guidance of the International Academic Board (IAB). Review Committee members are established academics who hold PhDs or other terminal degrees in their fields and who have previous peer review experience.

If you would like to apply to serve on the EGen2024 Review Committee, please visit our application page.

Apply to Join the Review Committee

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Event Partners

The European Conference on Aging & Gerontology (EGen) is run in partnership with The Bartlett Real Estate Institute at UCL, The National Archive of Computerized Data on Aging (NACDA) at the University of Michigan, USA, and the IAFOR Research Centre at Osaka University.

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Event Supporters

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Anne Boddington
Kingston University, UK

Biography

Anne Boddington is Professor of Design Innovation, Pro Vice Chancellor for Research, Business and Innovation at Kingston University in the UK and recently appointed as the Sub Panel Chair for Art & Design: History, Practice & Theory for the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021. Professor Boddington has extensive experience of the leadership, management and evaluation of art and design education and art and design research in higher education across the UK and internationally. She is an experienced chair and has held trustee and governance roles across the creative and cultural sector including as trustee of the Design Council, an independent Governor, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (RSA), an affiliate member of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), a member of the executive of the Council for Higher Education in Art & Design (CHEAD) and a member of the advisory board of the Arts & Humanities Research Council. She has an international reputation in creative education and research and has been a partner, a collaborator, a reviewer and evaluator for a wide range of international projects and reviews across different nations in Europe, the Middle East, Southern and east Asia and North America.

Evangelia Chrysikou
University College London, UK

Biography

Dr Evangelia Chrysikou is a registered architect and senior research fellow at UCL. She owns the award-winning SynThesis Architects (London – Athens), that specialises in medical facilities. Her work received prestigious awards (Singapore 2009, Kuala Lumpur 2012, Brisbane 2013, Birmingham 2014, London 2014). Parallel activities include teaching at medical and architectural schools, research (UK, France, Belgium, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Greece and the Middle East) and advisory. She advised the Hellenic Secretary of Health and is the author of the new national guidelines for mental health facilities. Dr Chrysikou is the author of the book ‘Architecture for Psychiatric Environments and Therapeutic Spaces’, healthcare architecture editor, reviewer, active member of several professional and scientific associations and a TED-MED speaker. She is a Trustee, Member of the Board and Director of Research at DIMHN (UK) and Member of the Board at the Scholar’s Association Onassis Foundation.

Featured Interview (2022) | Featured Interview with Miriam Weber, WHO European Healthy Cities Network Chair for Utrecht, Netherlands
Alfonso J. García-Osuna
Hofstra University, United States

Biography

Alfonso J. García-Osuna has taught at Hofstra University and at City University of NY-Kingsborough for over 35 years. He specialises in mediaeval and early modern literature, receiving his PhD (1989) from the Graduate School of the City University of New York. He has completed postdoctoral work at the University of Valladolid, Spain, has published six books, and is a frequent contributor to specialised journals. Additionally, Dr García-Osuna is the editor of the IAFOR Journal of Arts and Humanities.

Alfonso received primary and secondary education in Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, the place where his family originated and where he grew up. An avid cyclist, he has completed the Road to Santiago, an 867-kilometre route through northern Spain, eight times.

Panel Presentation (2024) | TBA
Joseph Haldane
The International Academic Forum (IAFOR), Japan

Biography

Joseph Haldane is the Founder, Chairman and CEO of IAFOR. He is responsible for devising strategy, setting policies, forging institutional partnerships, implementing projects, and overseeing the organisation’s international business and academic operations, including research, publications and events.

Dr Haldane is a founding Co-Director of the IAFOR Research Centre, an interdisciplinary think tank situated at The Osaka School of International Public Policy (OSIPP), Osaka University, where since 2015 he has also been a Guest Professor, teaching on the postgraduate Global Governance Course.

A Member of the World Economic Forum’s Expert Network for Global Governance, Professor Haldane’s research and teaching is on history, politics, international affairs and international education, as well as governance and decision making.

In 2020 Dr Haldane was appointed Honorary Professor of UCL (University College London), through the Bartlett School of Construction and Project Management. He also holds Visiting Professorships in the Faculty of Philology at the University of Belgrade, and at the School of Business at Doshisha University in Kyoto, where he teaches Ethics and Governance on the MBA programme. He is a Member of the International Advisory Council of the Department of Educational Foundations at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

Dr Haldane holds a PhD from the University of London in 19th-century French Studies, and has had full-time faculty positions at the University of Paris XII Paris-Est Créteil, Sciences Po Paris, and Nagoya University of Commerce and Business, as well as visiting positions at the French Press Institute in the University of Paris II Panthéon-Assas, The School of Journalism at Sciences Po Paris, and the School of Journalism at Moscow State University (Russia).

Dr Haldane has given invited lectures and presentations to universities and conferences around the world, including at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, and advised universities, NGOs and governments on issues relating to international education policy, public-private partnerships, and multi-stakeholder forums. He was the project lead on the 2019 Kansai Resilience Forum, held by the Japanese Government through the Prime Minister’s Office and the Cabinet Office in collaboration with IAFOR.

From 2012-2014, Dr Haldane served as Treasurer of the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan (Chubu), and since 2015 he has been a Trustee of the HOPE International Development Agency (Japan). He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society in 2012, and the Royal Society of Arts in 2015.

Donald E. Hall
Binghamton University, USA

Biography

Donald E. Hall is Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs at Binghamton University (SUNY), USA. He was formerly Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Sciences, and Engineering at the University of Rochester, USA, and held a previous position as Dean of Arts and Sciences at Lehigh University, USA. Provost Hall has published widely in the fields of British Studies, Gender Theory, Cultural Studies, and Professional Studies. Over the course of his career, he served as Jackson Distinguished Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English (and previously Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages) at West Virginia University. Before that, he was Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English at California State University, Northridge, where he taught for 13 years. He is a recipient of the University Distinguished Teaching Award at CSUN, was a visiting professor at the National University of Rwanda, was Lansdowne Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University of Victoria (Canada), was Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Cultural Studies at Karl Franzens University in Graz, Austria, and was Fulbright Specialist at the University of Helsinki. He has also taught in Sweden, Romania, Hungary, and China. He served on numerous panels and committees for the Modern Language Association (MLA), including the Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion, and the Convention Program Committee. In 2012, he served as national President of the Association of Departments of English. From 2013-2017, he served on the Executive Council of the MLA.

His current and forthcoming work examines issues such as professional responsibility and academic community-building, the dialogics of social change and activist intellectualism, and the Victorian (and our continuing) interest in the deployment of instrumental agency over our social, vocational, and sexual selves. Among his many books and editions are the influential faculty development guides, The Academic Self and The Academic Community, both published by Ohio State University Press. Subjectivities and Reading Sexualities: Hermeneutic Theory and The Future of Queer Studies were both published by Routledge Press. Most recently he and Annamarie Jagose, of the University of Auckland, co-edited a volume titled The Routledge Queer Studies Reader. Though he is a full-time administrator, he continues to lecture worldwide on the value of a liberal arts education and the need for nurturing global competencies in students and interdisciplinary dialogue in and beyond the classroom.

Professor Donald E. Hall is a Vice-President of the IAFOR Academic Governing Board.

Keynote Presentation (2024) | The Work of the University in Perilous Times
Brendan Howe
Ewha Womans University, South Korea

Biography

Brendan Howe is Dean and Professor of the Graduate School of International Studies, Ewha Womans University, South Korea, where he has also served two terms as Associate Dean and Department Chair. He is also currently the President of the Asian Political and International Studies Association, and an Honorary Ambassador of Public Diplomacy and advisor for the Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He has held visiting professorships and research fellowships at the East-West Center (where he is currently enjoying a second term as a POSCO Visiting Research Fellow), the Freie Universität Berlin, De La Salle University, the University of Sydney, Korea National Defence University, Georgetown University, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak, and Beijing Foreign Studies University.

Educated at the University of Oxford, the University of Kent at Canterbury, Trinity College Dublin, and Georgetown University, his ongoing research agendas focus on traditional and non-traditional security in East Asia, human security, middle powers, public diplomacy, post-crisis development, comprehensive peacebuilding and conflict transformation. He has authored, co-authored, or edited around 100 related publications including Society and Democracy in South Korea and Indonesia (Palgrave, 2022), The Niche Diplomacy of Asian Middle Powers (Lexington Books, 2021), UN Governance: Peace and Human Security in Cambodia and Timor-Leste (Springer, 2020), Regional Cooperation for Peace and Development (Routledge, 2018), National Security, State Centricity, and Governance in East Asia (Springer, 2017), Peacekeeping and the Asia-Pacific (Brill, 2016), Democratic Governance in East Asia (Springer, 2015), Post-Conflict Development in East Asia (Ashgate, 2014), and The Protection and Promotion of Human Security in East Asia (Palgrave, 2013).

Panel Presentation (2024) | TBA
David Mallows
UCL Institute of Education, United Kingdom

Biography

Dr David Mallows is an Associate Professor at the UCL Institute of Education in the United Kingdom, where he also directs the IOE Academic Writing Centre. He has over 35 years of experience in adult education as a teacher, trainer, and researcher. His past roles include training future ESOL teachers and managing CELTA and other initial and continuing training programs.

Dr Mallows also held the position of Director of Research at the National Research and Development Centre for Adult Literacy and Numeracy (NRDC), directing a diverse range of research projects on adult literacy, language, and numeracy. He currently collaborates with colleagues in Spain, Brazil, and Portugal on adult education research.

In addition to his research activities, Dr Mallows currently contributes to the UCL Institute of Education's MA TESOL program, leading the English Language Teaching Classroom Practice module. He also supervises PhD students in the fields of adult education and academic writing.

Keynote Presentation (2024) | TBA
Ljiljana Markovic
European Centre for Peace and Development (ECPD), United Nations’ University for Peace

Biography

Ljiljana Markovic is a Professor of Japanese Studies in the European Centre for Peace and Development (ECPD) of the United Nations University for Peace, and Special Advisor to the Executive Director and ECPD Academic Director. She is also a Visiting Professor at Toho University and Osaka University, Japan, and Gabriele d'Annunzio University, Italy.

Professor Markovic is the author of a large number of publications in the fields of Japanese Studies and Economics. She completed her bachelor’s and master's degrees at Cambridge University, United Kingdom, before pursuing her doctorate at Chuo University, Japan. For many years, she was a Professor at the Faculty of Philology at the University of Belgrade, Serbia, with terms as Dean (2016-2020) and Vice Dean of Financial Affairs (2008-2016). She has served as the Chairperson of the International Silk Road Academic Studies Symposium since 2017.

Professor Markovic received the Gaimu Daijin Sho Award from the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Japan in 2010. In the following year, she received the Dositej Obradovic Award for Pedagogical Achievement. Professor Markovic recent accolades include the Medal of Merit by the President of Serbia in 2020, the Isidora Sekulic Medal for Academic Achievement in 2021, and the Order of the Rising Sun (Gold Rays with Rosette) in 2022, an Imperial Decoration awarded by the Government of Japan for her "outstanding contribution to establishing and improving friendly relations with Japan”.

Panel Presentation (2024) | TBA
Ana Pellicer-Sánchez
UCL Institute of Education, United Kingdom

Biography

Dr Ana Pellicer-Sánchez is an Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics and TESOL at the Institute of Education in the Faculty of Education and Society University College London (UCL), United Kingdom. She is a member of the UCL Centre for Applied Linguistics, where she conducts research on second language acquisition. Her research focuses on the teaching and learning of vocabulary in a second or foreign language. Recently, she has turned her focus on the use of eye-tracking technology to examine the cognitive processes involved in vocabulary learning when using different input conditions. Her work has appeared in international journals such as Language Learning, Language Teaching Research, Language Teaching, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, and The Modern Language Journal, among others. She is co-author of Eye-tracking in Applied Linguistics Research (2018), and co-editor of Understanding formulaic language: A second language acquisition perspective (2019). She has recently co-edited a special issue on “Eye-tracking in Vocabulary Research in Research Methods in Applied Linguistics” (2024).

Dr Pellicer-Sánchez has participated in a number of national and international projects and committees, exploring the acquisition of English in different contexts. She has been the convenor of the Vocabulary Studies Special Interest Group of the British Association of Applied Linguistics (2018-2022) and the co-chair of the London Second Language Acquisition Research Forum (2019-2021). She is also a founding member of the British Council Eye-tracking Special Interest Group. Currently, she serves as associate editor of The Language Learning Journal, and as a member of the advisory board of various academic journals.

Keynote Presentation (2024) | The Examination of Eye Movements in Language Learning Research: A Focus on Vocabulary
Neelam Raina
Middlesex University, United Kingdom

Biography

Dr Neelam Raina is an Associate Professor of Design and Development at Middlesex University, London. Her research interests include conflict, security, peace building, material cultures, gender, and livelihood generation in fragile, conflict affected states. Raina’s work explores notions of healing, trauma, peace and reflection through the embodied practices of making, using material culture and tacit knowledge as the underpinning for approaching violence and peace building and for sustainable income generation. Raina is a post conflict reconstruction expert with a focus on South Asia where she has conducted extensive empirical research over the last two decades. The Women, Peace and Security agenda is key to Neelam’s and her research seeks to foreground voices of vulnerable and marginalised women.

Dr Raina has led several large-scale competitively funded research projects which examine material and social practices through which Muslim women in conflict areas reproduce themselves on a daily and generational basis, and through which the social relations and material bases of capitalism are renewed. Her work allows connections to be built between, creative home-based workers who are largely seen as peripheral, to development economics, and on the fringes of formal employment and contributors to GDP; to the larger notions of peace building, countering and preventing violent extremism, poverty spirals and conflict theory through culturally significant, socially relevant practices. She connects the British creative industry into solution-based impactful approaches to global challenges through research.

Raina is a strong advocate for Afghan women and is the Director of the Secretariat to the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Afghan women and girls in UK parliament. Her research in Afghanistan is ongoing as she brings women’s tacit knowledge to commercially viable spaces from the confines of the home.

Raina has a PhD in Design and Development, and a Master’s in Design and Manufacture from De Montfort University, Leicester. From 2018-2021, she was the Challenge Leader for UKRI’s Conflict and Security Portfolio for the Global Challenges Research Fund. Raina has been a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics at the Centre for Women, Peace and Security. She is the editor for the International Journal of Traditional Arts, and her new work Creative Economies of Culture in South Asia – Performers and Craftspeople was published in 2021.

Keynote Presentation (2024) | TBA

Previous Presentations

Featured Panel Presentation (2023) | Schrodinger’s Box of Interdisciplinarity – Inside and Outside the Box Thinking About Global Challenges
How to Destroy a University
Keynote Presentation: Donald E. Hall

Universities across the globe are under attack, and threats are coming from many directions. Some of us find ourselves at ground zero in the culture wars: in the United States, for example, college campuses have become battlegrounds over questions of social justice, fact-based understandings of history, and the roots of inequality. American universities have seen intense verbal and even physical clashes arising from differences in opinion over the causes of and solutions to ongoing conflict in the Middle East, as well as proxy battles over the role of diversity offices and initiatives attempting to address systemic racism.

However, some existential threats come not from external cultural forces, but instead from disastrous internal leadership decisions and governmental policies.

In this call to action, I want to examine the tragic situation that one of my former employers—West Virginia University—finds itself in. A noxious combination of financial mismanagement, ignorance of enrollment trends, and wholesale state divestment from higher education has led to a gutting of key liberal arts programs, the termination of many tenured faculty, and deep cost-cutting that signals an impending death spiral of diminishing worth. We who are on the frontlines must find ways to challenge those who, through willful actions or ignorance, threaten the very existence of universities as we know them. This is not a call to martyrdom, but it is a call to action.

In this address, which will reference (among others) works by Michel de Certeau and Michel Foucault, both of whom were embroiled in the radical politics that shook late 1960s French higher education, I will argue for a multivalent tacticality that is at once radical in intent but also self-protective in nature. I ask conference members to take the work of IAFOR—its advocacy for international/intercultural/interdisciplinary understanding—back to their home campuses. The empathy, self-awareness, and commitment to understanding that we learn to exercise at IAFOR conferences represent critical skill sets we must draw on as we grapple with and respond to the growing volatility of our academic lives.

Read presenter's biographies
The Examination of Eye Movements in Language Learning Research: A Focus on Vocabulary
Keynote Presentation: Ana Pellicer-Sánchez

Vocabulary is one of the key components of language proficiency and is crucial for successful communication in a second language. Learners need to acquire large vocabulary sizes in order to understand a range of written and spoken texts, as well as to communicate with ease with others in the target language. Thus, a main concern of language researchers and practitioners has been to find effective approaches to support learners in acquiring the huge vocabulary learning targets. Vocabulary gains in research studies have traditionally been measured using offline tests, e.g., post-treatment vocabulary tests. However, in the last decade, we have witnessed an unprecedented increase in the number of vocabulary studies using eye-tracking, specifically to explore learners’ online processing of new words and their relationship with lexical gains. Until now, eye-tracking and its techniques have been predominantly used in psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology as a measure of cognitive effort and attention allocation. Second language acquisition research has begun to incorporate the utilisation of eye-tracking as a key tool for language acquisition studies.

The aim of this presentation is to provide an overview of what eye-tracking has shown so far in its early stages as a tool to study second language vocabulary learning. The presentation will first provide an introduction to the eye-tracking technique, showing its main advantages and affordances for the study of vocabulary learning. It will then illustrate the use of eye-tracking in vocabulary research, through the presentation of examples from recent studies on learning from reading and subtitled viewing. Directions for future research will be identified as well during the talk.

Read presenter's biography
Humanities at the Helm: Mobilising Scholars to Confront the Planetary Climate Crisis
Keynote Presentation: Alfonso J. García-Osuna

As the challenges of climate change mount, the role of humanists in addressing this existential threat has become increasingly important. While science undoubtedly plays the pivotal role in understanding and mitigating climate change, a review of the literature (Levine, 2023; Schaus, 2020) shows that humanists have generally been complacent spectators. There is scant analysis regarding the ways in which humanism can engage productively in the conversation on climate change and what it can bring to the table. This paper aims to change that. The research design employed involves a comprehensive examination of the possible intersections between humanism and climate action through a multidisciplinary lens. Drawing upon the work of noted scholars like Caroline Levine, Amitav Ghosh, and Marc Schaus, the paper synthesises diverse perspectives to elucidate the potential roles and responsibilities of humanists in combating global warming. Additionally, qualitative analysis of historical and contemporary examples of humanist texts is utilised to illustrate several practical applications of humanistic principles in addressing the climate crisis. This results in the itemisation of socio-cultural insights with which humanism can serve as a catalyst for transformative change in the fight against climate change. This paper concludes that exclusive to humanists are specific weapons with which to tackle the climate crisis, as well as an arsenal of unique perspectives that can be used to advocate for systemic change, promote sustainable lifestyles, and cultivate that ethical sense of environmental stewardship that science alone cannot bring to bear on the crisis.

Read presenter's biography