PROGRAMME

THURSDAY, 30th of October 2025

9:30 – 10:00 - OPENING REMARKS
José Sílvio Moreira Fernandes (Rector UMa), Margarida Pocinho (President FAH/UMa), Elena Bollinger (UMa), Ana Raquel Fernandes (ULICES), Agnieszka Łowczanin (University of Lodz)

10:00 – 11:00 - KEYNOTE I Chair Agnieszka Łowczanin
Repression, Memory and Identity: Paula Rego, ORLAN, and Angela Carter Marie Mulvey-Roberts

11:00 – 11:15 COFFEE BREAK

11:15 – 12:45 SESSION 1 - Chair Elena Bollinger
’Searching for what is just beyond your grasp’: Jhumpa Lahiri’s addressing identity across languages, Luísa Maria Flora
Memory, power and resistance in Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police (1994), Margarida Pereira Martins
Landscapes of Haunted Memories: Postgenerational Trauma in Selected Polish Cultural Narratives, Agnieszka Łowczanin

12:45 – 14:00 LUNCH BREAK

14:00 – 15:30 - SESSION 2.1 Chair Margarida Pereira Martins
Does the Rise of LLMs Demand a Foucauldian Rethink of Discourse, Knowledge, and Subjectivity?, Mickie de Wet
Digital Palimpsests: How Mediatised Memory Reshapes Contemporary Identity Construction, Samuel Mateus
Digital Dialogues for Peace: How Middle Eastern Activists Use Social Media for Digital Peacebuilding, Stefania Manca

14:00 – 15:30 SESSION 2.2 Chair Maria José Pires
The Testaments by Margaret Atwood, Reaffirming Women’s Identity through Memory Testimonies. Insight readings for the Citizenship programme of secondary students, Paula Alexandra Couto
Factors influencing interactions in English as a lingua franca in a short study abroad program, Katarzyna Budzińska
Conceptual Networks of HARM in Romanian and English Paremiology, Gabriela Corina Santa (Câmpean)

15:30 – 15:45 COFFEE BREAK

15:45 – 17:30 Auditório I SESSION 3.1 Chair Luísa Maria Flora
Imagery Reflecting Experience: Angela Carter and a Sensory Mediation of Cultural Memory in Portugal, Maria José Pires
More than death, less than life: Charlotte Wood’s novel The Weekend and the border of identity, Zuzanna Zarebska
Stories, Games, and Teenage Voices: Digital Storytelling in Museum Interaction, Vanessa Cesário
Echoes Across Languages: Woolf Translating Tolstoy, Elena Bollinger

15:45 – 17:30  SESSION 3.2 Chair Luís Pimenta
Translating the horror: Holocaust terminology in literature, Maria João Ferro
Aesthetic Distance and Ethical Witnessing: Amis and Glazer on Holocaust Representation, Ana Raquel Fernandes
“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn”: Teaching the Holocaust in the Context of the Portuguese State School Special Programme for At-Risk Students, Alexandra Cheira
Ideology through Metaphor in The Handmaid’s Tale: Language, Memory, and Resistance Across Novel and Screen, Diana Alexandra Avram

FRIDAY, 31st of October 2025

9:00 – 10:00 - KEYNOTE II Chair Alcina Sousa
Evaluative and Affective Meaning in Digital Contexts: A Pragmatic Analysis of Adjectives in Instagram Lifestyle Captions, Teodora Popescu

10:00 – 11:30 - SESSION 4.1 Chair Elena Bollinger
The Holy Fool in Ukrainian and Russian traditions of the Intercession, Svitlana Kobets
Reinterpreting the Estado Novo Through the Lens of Portuguese and Anglophone Historical Narratives, Ana Rita Pereira Brettes
Heterotopias of eternity and festival as memory practices in discourses of selected youth organisations acting in Poland, Helena Ostrowicka Celina Czech-Włodarczyk

10:00 – 11:30 - SESSION 4.2 Chair Paul Gross
To see a world in a drop of water: eco-memories in contemporary fiction in English, Ana Bessa Carvalho
Past and Possible Worlds in Andrew Crumey’s D’Alembert’s Principle, Katarzyna Pisarska
Reports from the Crime Scene. Patrick Keiller and his ‘Robinson Trilogy’, Artur Piskorz

11:30 – 11:45 COFFEE BREAK 

11:45 – 13:15 SESSION 5.1 Chair Ana Raquel Fernandes
Engagement shifts from real world encounters toward virtual world interaction with  impact on identity, emotions, (dis)empowerment, and mental health, Sylke Meyerhuber
Constructing Inner Deictic Centre (IDC) identities in health, science and well-being  (fake) news: a proximization contrastive corpus-based study of websites labelled as  disinformation disseminators and online newspapers and magazines websites, Alexandra Nunes
Oneness, Otherness, and Identity Displacement: A Socio-Pragmatic Approach, Jagoda Granić

11:45 – 13:15 SESSION 5.2 Chair Maria João Ferro
Sarbievius in Manuscripts: Unpublished Translations of Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski, Krzysztof Fordoński
Poetic Memory or Political Identity: A Sentiment Analysis of Romanian 19th-Century Poetry and Its Political  Appropriation, Teodora Susarenco
Italian Opera on the London Stage: Translation and Bilingualism in Early Eighteenth-Century Librettos, Jorge Bastos da Silva

13:15 – 14:30 LUNCH BREAK

30 – 15:30 PANEL PART 1 Chair Alexandra Cheira
Deconstructing Holocaust Distortion: A Digital and Educational Response to Misinformation
Teaching the Holocaust and Holocaust Distortion - Student perspectives from  Greece, Hungary, Italy and Portugal, Luca Koltai
Addressing Holocaust Distortion in the Classroom - Research Informed Testimonybased Digital Educational Materials, Gabriella Komoly, Andrea Szőnyi

15:30 – 15:45 COFFEE BREAK 

5:45 – 16:45 Auditório I PANEL PART 2 Chair Agnieszka Łowczanin
Unmasking the Distortion of the Shoah: Rethinking Jewish Resistance and Educational Narratives, Silvia Guetta, Greta Martini
Portugal and the Holocaust: Confronting Silence, Distortion, and Denial, Zsófia Gombár, Ana Raquel Fernandes, Maria João Ferro

16:45 – 17:45 KEYNOTE III Chair Zsófia Gombár
Voices of Memory: Testimonies and the Dialogue Between Witness and  Learner, Past and Present, Andrea Szőnyi

17:45 – 18:00 CLOSING REMARKS, Members of the Organizing Committe

Programme (pdf format) available here.

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The International Conference Discourses in Interaction explores the connections between memory studies, literary studies, interactional linguistics, pragmatics, media analysis and cultural studies to provide a comprehensive perspective on the complexities of human communication. Thematically, it builds upon two previous academic venues held at the University of Madeira, Discourses in Interaction: Literary & Film-induced Tourism and Discourses in Interaction II: Experiences, Memories and Identities, while sharing their genre-crossing and interdiscursive approaches.

Drawing on the critical perspective by Baynham and Lee, this conference proposes to “consider translanguaging and translation in tandem – across languages, language varieties, registers, and discourses, and in a diverse range of contexts” (2019:74). This range of contexts is meant to address a more nuanced understanding of the concepts of memory and identity which carry strategic, political and ethical implications on the way we represent the relationship between the past and the present in a contemporary globalised society.

Inspired by Andreas Huyssen’s Present Pasts (2003), we seek submissions which examine the extent to which memories travel and transform across borders, and media, impacting identity and belonging, along with the role of mediation in shaping diasporic narratives, knowledge and socio-political aspects of remembering and forgetting. Contributions may also delve into the ethical implications of empowerment and silencing within socio-historical discourses, collective memory and archives. We encourage discussions on the impact of propaganda and (dis)information strategies, as well as on the promotion of historical accuracy and initiatives which prioritize education and awareness in the public sphere. Furthermore, we welcome reflections on fictional and non-fictional representations of (collective) remembrance and forgetting, and their relationship with historical discourse on memory and identity.

We invite panel, roundtable, paper or art-based proposals and workshops dealing with, but not restricted to, the following topics:

1. Transcultural Mobility and (Dis)Location: Memory, Authenticity, and Mediation
2. Encoding / Decoding Emotion and Multimodal Narratives of the Self
3. (Re)addressing Knowledge, Ethics, and Aesthetics Paradigms
4. From Cognitivism to Ecologism in Language Studies
5. Rhetoric and Gender Studies
6. Mis/Disinformation and Publishing in the Digital Age
7. Deconstructing Propaganda: Strategies for Media Literacy
8. Holocaust and Genocide Denial and Distortion
9. Activism and Social Justice Movements
10. Agency, Voice, and (Dis)Empowering Discourses
11. Language and Artificial Intelligence
12. Interpreting, Translation, and Terminology
13. (Digital) Storytelling as Translanguaging
14. Dealing with the Past: Historical Discourses and Literary Representations

Proposals should be sent as PDF to <discourses.interaction@mail.uma.pt> by March 30, 2025, including: proposed format of presentation, title, abstract (up to 250 words), 5 keywords, presenter name(s), email(s), institution(s), and bionote(s) (up to 100 words).

ORGANISING COMMITTEE  
Agnieszka LowczaniN (University of Lodz) 
Alcina Sousa (CEAUL- ULICES / University of Madeira) 
Ana Raquel Fernandes (CEAUL-ULICES / Universidade Europeia) 
Elena Bollinger (CEAUL-ULICES / (University of Madeira) 
Paul Gross (University of Madeira) 
Zsófia Gombár (CEAUL-ULICES / University of Lisbon)