To situate speech as a concept and a practice in Asia is to encounter multiple histories of suppression: from colonial conquests that subjugated local groups and their cultures, imperial tutelage that structured collective ways of life and expression, through Cold War interventions that antagonized homegrown ideological formations, political orders that stifled dissent and critique, and on to the current algorithmic regimes that distort the public sphere and its opportunities for discussion and deliberation. These socio-historical conditions have occasioned perceptions of Asia as a site where the production and performance of speech are perpetually subsumed under a kind of capture and control, while rendering Asian speakers and other communicators as subjects purportedly inferior to their Euro-American counterparts and thus necessitating further education and refinement.

Questioning these frames of mind that have had deep and damaging effects not only on the vitality of speech communities but also on the valuation of oral traditions and spoken practices in the region, the Department of Speech Communication and Theatre Arts (DSCTA) of the University of the Philippines initiates a conference that accounts for the myriad ways that Asia actually enables and is, in turn, enabled by speech as an idea, an act, a performance, a process, and a system of thought and action. This collective gathering explores the argument that Asia has generated—and continues to do so—specific agents, audiences, sites, practices, relations, and situations that all comprise and intermingle within a dynamic ecology of speech-related or communicative knowledge and practice.

In this examination of the complexity of speech in Asia, the phrase “freedom of speech” comes into clear view. In its conventional sense, this idiom often relates to a fundamental human right enshrined in the Constitution (“free speech”) and to a crucial aspect of life under modern democracies (“the speech of the free”). This conference dedicated to Freedoms of Speech in Asia probes this freedom in the plural with the goal of embedding its value in a broader horizon of gestures, expectations, and meanings, as well as making it relevant to diverse types and figures of speech that come into existence in everyday life in Asia. The key question here is not just “What are the freedoms that Asian speakers enjoy?” but also “How does Asia serve as a locus where various modes, methods, and manifestations of speech may play out freely?” These freedoms, therefore, cannot be reduced to readily available entitlements that simply need to be claimed and carried out; instead, they further refer to conditions of possibility that permit speech to come about diversely and assume a range of functions flexibly.

In what other ways might speech be understood and evaluated aside from its common conceptualization as a modality of ferrying across messages? What various actions and intelligences animate and emanate from how speech is composed and circulated? How have academic institutions regarded speech as a subject of scholarship and research, if not an object of knowledge and power? What new insights have communication studies and other allied academic disciplines generated from the 20th to the 21st centuries to rethink speech as a mode of communication? How do Asians employ speech as a means to and a goal of their enacted human agency and social activism or advocacy? And how has speech functioned as a medium for constructing, critiquing, and prospecting the transformation of reality?

This conference invites submissions from academics, scholars, students, performers, and practitioners from diverse disciplinary backgrounds that reckon with the situations of speech, the state of speakers and other kinds of communicators, and the textualities and ethnographies of speech communication within the social, political, academic, and cultural structures of Asia.

Sub-themes include but are not limited to:
  1. Speech, Culture, and History
    1. Speakers who shape the nation and/or the region
    2. Oral traditions of indigenous communities
    3. Speakers and spoken practices in the post-colonies
    4. Western influences on speeches and speakers in Asia
    5. Oral communication in Asian cultures
  2. Speech, Politics, and Society  
    1. Speakers and speeches in political regimes 
    2. Speech as critical practice
    3. The right to free speech, expression, and assembly
    4. Subversive speakers and speeches
    5. The publics of speech 
  3. Performing Speech
    1. The presentation of speakers/communicators in everyday life
    2. Speakers in creative industries
    3. Speech in the performing arts
    4. The aesthetics of speechmaking
    5. The role of voice and speech in aesthetic communication
  4. Speech in Relational Contexts
    1. Speech and the Asian family
    2. The role of speech in conflict management and resolution  
    3. Gendered speeches and speakers 
    4. Communicating in intercultural contexts
    5. Organizational communication
  5. Speech Communication Studies and Pedagogies
    1. Instructional communication
    2. Developing Speech/Oral communication curricula
    3. Teaching Speech Communication in educational contexts
    4. Speech training for market industries
    5. The professionalization of speech pedagogies and practices 
  6. Theorizations of Speech Communication
    1. Decolonizing speech
    2. The Asian speaking subject
    3. New directions in speech communication research
    4. Speech and new media technologies
    5. Digital platforms for speakers and their speeches
 
GUIDELINES

Please submit a 300-word abstract and a 100-word biographical note in a single Word document through this portal by 30 April 2023. Presenters will be notified by early June 2023.

Please contact Mr. Karl Lewis L. Cruz at  dscta-conferences.upd@up.edu.ph for any clarifications.


To begin your submission, please proceed to the next page.