The Linguistics Department in Faculty of Humanities at Universitas Indonesia held the First International Conference on Transdisciplinary Linguistics (ICTL 2018) in Faculty of Humanities, UI Campus, Depok, West Java from October 10 to October 12, 2018.
This conference was a forum for all researchers of various disciplines who were interested in linguistics. The theme of this conference was “The Role of Language in All Aspects of Human Life”. It was meant to open our horizon on the fact that linguistics was not only a science that analyzed language structure and meaning, but it also played a role as a research instrument in various aspects of human life. This big theme was then elaborated into many subthemes relevant with linguistics development and national issues. This conference, thus, was expected to develop interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and transdisciplinary linguistic theories. The 58 abstracts that were submitted to the conference were divided into six parallel sessions where they are presented.
During the three-day conference, ICTL 2018 invited two keynote speakers, which were Prof. Dr. James. T. Collins from Institute of Ethnic Studies/Institute of the Malay World and Civilization, National University of Malaysia who delivered a presentation on ‘Global Eras and Language Diversity in Indonesia: Transdisciplinary Projects towards Language Maintenance and Revitalization’, and Prof. Theo Van Leeuwen from University of Technology Sydney, Australia who presented his study on ‘Function and Identity in Multimodal Discourse Analysis’. There were also plenary speakers, who were Prof. Gladys Tang (Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong), Dr. Kohei Watanabe (Tokyo University, Japan), Dr. Mohammed Al-Batineh (Yarmouk University, Yordania), Sisilia S. Halimi, Ph.D. (Universitas Indonesia), and Dr. Tom Hoogervorst (Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Carribean Studies Leiden, the Netherlands).
In the opening ceremony, Dr. Bernadette Kushartanti, M.Hum. as conference director said that this conference was a unification of numerous linguistics seminars in the Faculty of Humanities which were previously held separately. There were various focuses, such as lexicology and lexicography, translation and interpreting studies, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis and semiotics, and educational linguistics. In his opening speech, The Dean of Faculty of Humanities Universitas Indonesia, Dr. Adrianus Laurens Gerung Waworuntu, M.A. also emphasized that the conference was expected to not only expand our knowledge, but also to broaden participants’ network.
