Professional practices and contexts : perspectives of practitioners and scholars

The relation and collaboration between scholars and practitioners in order to understand practices in the professions has long been discussed within and across applied sciences and theoretical disciplines. However, research approaches claiming to combine theoretical and practical needs and expectations sometimes lack either solid grounding in empirical data or thorough reflection from theoretical perspectives. Given that an increased interest in research settings can be observed with linguists investigating e.g. literacy practices in the workplace, companies’ annual general meetings, or health literacy with methods such as participant observation, linguistic ethnography and discourse analysis, this symposium aims to take the discussion further by rethinking studies of professions, professional communication and professional settings from theoretical and practical angles. The symposium invites contributions both from cooperation with other disciplines as well as with practitioners, and scholars from different disciplines who investigate professional settings where language plays a key role. We especially encourage contributions with a public outreach in the form of cooperations between academia and practitioners. The focus can be e.g. on the discourse of the field investigated, the challenges for the professionals, customers, patients, citizens, next of kin, or other stakeholders as well as languages for specific purposes or plain languages. Contributions could also hightlight the specific role of language brokers in multilingual professional settings. From theoretical angles, the contributions may explain how and why studies of professional communication contribute to further developing empirically grounded theories of language use in context in an increasingly digitized and glocalized professional world. From practical angles, the contributions could elaborate on potential pitfalls and benefits practitioners can expect from collaborating with researchers from various disciplines. For example, how practitioners can engage in – and benefit from – research projects by co-creating knowledge together with academic researchers. Phases of such activity include identifying wicked problems, formulating pertinent research questions, developing shared languages, engaging in ongoing dialogue, finding results and conclusions based on mutual learning, as well as developing and implementing tools that foster sustainable solutions