PRESENTATION

The Summer School explores the complexity of a cultural environment in which texts, languages, and images are constantly recombined through practices of adaptation, rewriting, and new forms of textuality, thereby redefining the very concepts of context and originality.

Designed to enrich specialist training from the first year of the PhD programme onward, the Summer School offers opportunities for methodological reflection across the three main areas of English Studies: Linguistics, Literature, and Cultural Studies. The programme provides early-career scholars with the tools to analyse how contemporary English language, literature, and culture are shaped by new practices, through direct engagement with experts and targeted workshop activities.

In the field of Linguistics, particular attention will be devoted to language change and variation phenomena in both natural and mediated contexts. Special emphasis will be placed on fieldwork methodology and data collection, promoting a rigorous approach to the statistical and quantitative analysis of evidence.

In the areas of Literary and Cultural Studies, the AIA Summer School will explore the transmedial movement of genres, motifs, and narrative structures, examining how symbolic repertoires and collective memories are reinterpreted as they travel across media. Participants will analyse how texts respond to new interpretative contexts through rewriting and adaptation, opening up further critical reflections.

The programme is structured over three days and is characterised by a strong practical and hands-on approach.

Day 1: Language, Variation and Fieldwork

This day bridges the gap between language structure and social practice. We examine how remixing and recontextualization influence language, variation and reposition speakers in new communicative settings.

Day 2: Literature & Trans-medial Movement – Narrative Recombination

Day 2 explores the movement of motifs and narrative structures across highly permeable intertextual spaces.

Day 3: Culture & Symbolic Repertoires – Memory, Identity & Power

The final day takes a deep cultural angle, viewing "remix" not just as a technique, but as a site of ideological struggle and shared imaginaries.

Through this integrated approach, the Summer School provides a coherent analytical framework for understanding how contemporary cultures shape—and are shaped by—evolving practices of meaning-making.

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