Distinguished Lectures in Humanities

This presentation examines the urgent need to decolonize English Medium Instruction (EMI) in higher education by challenging the dominance of native English norms, addressing linguistic imperialism, and critically assessing the pervasive influence of imported Western curricula. Often, these resources reinforce colonial power dynamics by prioritizing Western perspectives and marginalizing local knowledge systems. Through Global Englishes frameworks, I will explore strategies for inclusive EMI practices that integrate diverse linguistic and cultural perspectives. Such strategies aim to foster curricula that respect local identities and empower students and educators in non-Anglophone contexts. Drawing on data from the Southeast Asian context, I will explore ways to foster an equitable, decolonized approach to internationalization in higher education that aligns with broader goals of internationalisation and linguistic justice.

Event date: 29/11/2024
Speaker: Dr. Nicola GALLOWAY (University of Glasgow)
Hosted by: Faculty of Humanities

The idea of translanguaging has disrupted much of the thinking about language, communication and learning and raised some fundamental questions about human language and human cognition. One of these questions concerns an assumption that seems to underlie a great deal of the work on intercultural communication, and that is, speakers of different named languages not only use language differently, but also think differently and have different worldviews. In this talk, I want to invite the participants to rethink about this issue, from the perspective of Translanguaging, which posits that bilinguals and multilinguals do not think unilingually and thinking goes beyond named languages and indeed beyond what has traditionally been conceived as linguistic versus non-linguistic processes. I offer my views on the existing work in intercultural communication and cross-linguistic studies of cognitive processing and Linguistic Relativity. Implications of this common-humanity-based conceptual stance for intercultural communication including business and workplace lingua franca communication, as well as for language learning and pedagogy, and research design are discussed.

Event date: 18/07/2024
Speaker: Prof. Wei LI (University College London)
Hosted by: Faculty of Humanities

Humans have long tried to make artificial versions of themselves. It is now well established that we attribute human-like states to artificial others. However, the effect of interacting with artificial minds and bodies on the human sense of self and self-identity is less understood. In this talk I will present theoretical and empirical work looking at embodied joint agency in human/ human versus human/ robotic and virtual agents. Specifically, I will outline the key role of the human embodiment and sense of self in establishing joint agency with artificial others. I will discuss key implications of these claims on recent efforts to design autonomous and interactive artificial others. I will introduce the notion of ‘hybrid agency’ to describe these new, technologically mediated ways to embody and control in tandem human and artificial minds and bodies in real and virtual environments.

Event date: 7/2/2024
Speaker: Prof. Anna CIAUNICA (University of Lisbon)

This talk will survey the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI), ethics, and the Humanities in the UK. It integrates insights from bibliometric analyses, interviews with various stakeholders, and reviews of existing research infrastructure and policies. The talk examines the current state of AI ethics research in the UK, identifying the contributions of the Arts and Humanities, the obstacles researchers face, and the potential impacts of their work. It also considers the international research environment and strategic investments made by other countries in AI and ethics, drawing comparisons with the UK's approach. Opportunities and threats are identified within the context of academia, public perception, and commerce, including the impacts of AI on diverse populations and industries. The talk will conclude by considering how the situation in the UK may compare with that in Hong Kong.

Event date: 30/04/2024
Speaker: Prof. Tony MCENERY (Lancaster University and Shanghai International Studies University)
Hosted by: Faculty of Humanities

In this lecture, Prof. Robin D.S. YATES will focus on a review of recent data concerning the military development of the Qin and early Han periods. This information is crucial as these empires were established through the use of armed force. The lecture aims to address several fundamental inquiries that have previously lacked sufficient evidence. For instance, it will explore the command structure of the Qin and early Han forces, the fate of soldiers in victorious Qin armies, the treatment of defeated enemy, the existence of resistance against the Qin conquerors, the deployment of weapons and other equipment, the different types of soldiers present, and the methods employed in treating their wounds.

Neuroemergentism, (NM) is a novel framework which has sought to consider language development as involving the organization and reorganization of cognition and its underlying neural substrate. Work to support this framework comes from studies of language and cognitive development. In this talk, I will focus on two separate levels, the sensorimotor plasticity needed to adjust to new input and the cognitive flexibility needed to select between these competing sources of information. This talk will discuss both these levels with regard to the neurocognitive adaptations seen in bilinguals. This will include structural brain differences in monolinguals and bilinguals that vary in the age of second language acquisition. In the second part, of the talk work that has focused on the cognitive flexibility will be presented. This will focus on the adaptations of the basal ganglia and frontostriatal tracts as a gating mechanism crucial for selecting the correct motor response. This includes newer work which links genes associated with dopamine to cognitive and language flexibility in bilinguals. The ways in which sensorimotor plasticity and cognitive flexibility represent accurate but incomplete conceptualizations of the competitive processes involved in language and cognitive processing will be discussed. The talk will conclude with potential future directions using an NM framework.

I will discuss how co-speech (i.e., speech-accompanying) gestures relate to language and conceptualisation underlying language. I will focus on “representational gestures”, which can depict motion, action, and shape or can indicate locations. I will provide evidence for the following two points. Various aspects of language shape co-speech gestures. Conversely, the way we produce co-speech gestures can shape language. I will discuss these issues in relation to manner and path in motion event descriptions, clause-linkage types in complex event descriptions, and metaphor. I will conclude that gesture and language are parts of a "conceptualisation engine”, which takes advantage of unique strengths of spatio-motoric representation and linguistic representation.

The relationship between language experience and cognitive control (e.g., working memory, inhibitory control, cognitive flexibility) could be very well illustrated by the cognitively demanding language experience of interpreting training. A series of our empirical studies with interpreting students (see DONG 2023 for a review), together with studies with professional interpreters in the literature, suggest that interpreting training may first enhance students’ working memory (WM) updating ability and then WM spans, with probable some decline of WM updating ability between the shift from the two WM abilities. Similar patterns may appear in other cognitive control functions, such as cognitive flexibility (first with switching cost reduced and then with mixing cost reduced) and multi-tasking coordination. These results could be explained by the task features of interpreting (including task schemas and their cognitive loads) (see DONG & LI 2020), suggesting a close and dynamic relationship between language experience and cognitive control.

Psychology, Computer Science and Neuroscience have a history of shared questions and inter-related advances. Recently, new technology has enabled those fields to move from “toy” small-scale approaches to the study of language learning from raw sensory input and to do so at a large scale that constitutes daily life. The three primary goals of my research are 1) to quantify the statistical regularities in the real world, 2) to examine the underlying computational mechanisms operated on the statistical data, and 3) to apply the findings from basic science to real-world applications. In this talk, I will present several projects in my research lab to show that the advances in human learning and machine learning fields place us at the tipping point for powerful and consequential new insights into mechanisms of (and algorithms for) learning.

Event Date: 28/06/2023
Speaker: Prof. Chen YU (University of Texas at Austin)
Hosted by: Faculty of Humanities