Theory Workshop

(Photos: https://bold-hotels.com/en/bold-campus/gallery/hotel/)

Workshop Report

On March 28–30, 2023, ViCom hosted a workshop for projects from its theory cluster at the Bold Campus in Königstein (Taunus). The main aim was to bring together ViCom researchers working on theory building and to identify core theoretical questions to be addressed by ViCom.

Day one started with short presentations of each of the projects involved for an overview of the research agenda in ViCom’s theory cluster. It concluded in an evening bowling tournament at the workshop venue.

A talk by ViCom Mercator Fellow, Philippe Schlenker then kick-started the second workshop day. In this talk, the core difficulties associated with integrating visual aspects into linguistic theory were discussed. The afternoon session that followed brought together researchers from various projects by way of a ‚rotating coffee table‘. In this setup, members of different projects were assigned to other projects’ members in order to learn of each other’s aims and issues in visual communication research. After discussing their shared problems and joint research questions, many of the pairings eventually agreed on future collaborations in mutually beneficial aspects. In the early evening, we explored the Taunus together, walking all the way up to Burg Königstein.

The third and last day began with a talk by our external guest Hans-Martin Gärtner on self-pointings. In the afternoon, open issues identified over the course of the workshop were taken up for discussion by dedicated groups and eventually addressed in the plenum.

A final exchange of ideas on open questions and plans for future steps concluded the workshop. After this fruitful three-day workshop, ViCom’s theory cluster now has a much clearer outlook on what issues we have to look at, and what approaches can be used to tackle them in the future.

(Photos: Cornelia Ebert, Volker Struckmeier)

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