Thought Leadership

Purpose

The Pike Center Symposium Series on Language in Relation to Human Flourishing convenes scholars and other thought leaders in our movement to work on advancing knowledge in key problem areas and to set the agenda for further research.

The overall theme

The title for the Symposium Series, “Language in relation to ...”, is a nod to the title of Kenneth Pike’s magnum opus about “a unified theory of the structure of human behavior.” The overall theme of our series, “Language in relation to human flourishing,” flows from Pike’s even greater agenda to pursue scholarship that integrates with God and neighbor. In the words of SIL’s vision statement: “We long to see people flourishing in community using the languages they value most.” The purpose of the series is to foster new avenues of research about how language and language development contribute to human flourishing, affording opportunities to consider creative approaches to the disciplines we traditionally study.

See Events for details of upcoming and past symposia.

How it works

The symposium series works as follows:

• • A Fellow of the Pike Center formulates the idea for a symposium theme and functions as the organizer.

  • Investigation of the theme begins with an exploratory symposium in which interested scholars and practitioners discuss short concept papers they have contributed in response to an open Call for Participation.

  • The exploratory work results in a formal Call for Papers for a follow-up working symposium in which full working papers that are accepted by the organizing committee are presented and discussed.

• The authors submit their papers in advance of the event so that the Agile Publishing process can be used to produce proceedings that will be available at the symposium.

  • The papers undergo a process of peer review, revision, and editing to prepare final versions that are ready for presentation in a public symposium.

• Some symposia will be conducted online and others in person. In the case of the latter, the Pike Center assists the organizers in securing funding to host an event for a planned number of contributing scholars.

The output of the above process is a published volume of proceedings, which includes a synthetic introduction by the organizer, as well the results of discussions during the event of priorities for further research. The following are the examples to-date of Pike Center Symposium proceedings:

• Language and Identity in a Multilingual, Migrating World

• Exploring Language and Human Flourishing

To learn more

• Pike Center Symposium Series on Language in Relation to Human Flourishing: Call for Symposium Proposals

• Guide to organizing an Exploratory Symposium