Title: “Words Matter: Languages as key-disciplines to rebuild a more inclusive, diverse and gender sensitive post-pandemic world”  
Presenter: Francesca Calamita (Italian) 
Location: Zoom, Password: iwl

Abstract: 
The global health crisis has shown extreme inequalities across the continents, particularly in the USA, where the healthcare system and social injustices have taken center stage since the appearance of the virus. After the pandemic, many countries will need to recover not only financially but also socially. Learning a world language can have a predominant role in shaping globally-oriented generations willing to improve the current social scenario, pursuing gender equality, inclusion and diversity transversally and at all levels; therefore, language departments worldwide have an important card to play not only to recover from the decrease of enrolment numbers which has affected many institutions, but also to re-emerge from the global crisis as an essential humanities subject to shape a fairer world. Furthermore, world languages lie at the core of the study abroad experience and should prepare students to deal with any aspects of the country they wish to visit, including issues concerning race, gender and social class, to name just a few of them. In this roundtable I shall show that working on the evolution of a targeted language and being updated on how the socio-cultural context influences it and vice versa is an essential step to provide students with the appropriate tools to be successful in the discipline, not only as language learners, but as globally-oriented citizens of the post-pandemic world.