The Special Interest Group on Language and Rights (SIGLaR) organizes an interdisciplinary workshop on language rights on September 21st-22nd, 2018 at the University of Warsaw. We invite empirical presentations addressing language rights or access to written/spoken/signed language in the following contexts: healthcare, education, social services, police/justice, asylum and migration. Presentations shall be 15-minute long. Studies may focus on the local or national level and describe both potential language issues and examples of good and less recommendable practices. For example, a case study can describe what happens when a patient who does not know the local language is admitted to a hospital or has to go to court as a defendant: what kind of linguistic rights the person has according to the law; what the potential and common language issues in such a situation are; how these issues are resolved and how they should be resolved.
The aim of the workshop is to engage researchers and other stakeholders to identify key challenges and possible solutions in the field of language rights in any context. In order to explore the complexity of language rights and language issues, we invite experts and stakeholders representing a wide range of specialties: translation and interpreting, linguistics, law and legal studies, social work, sociology anthropology, pedagogy, etc. We particularly encourage joint presentations by scholars and field actors or by scholars representing two different fields.