The annual International Conference on Integrationism (aka Integrational Linguistics) will be held at the Pennsylvania State University, August 30 to September 2, 2019, hosted by the Department of Applied Linguistics and the African Studies program. Integrationism is a theory of communication that emphasizes innovative participation within contexts and rejects rule-based models of language. Integrationism rejects the notion of distinctions between language and non-language. Ideas about integrationism have permeated substantial areas of language studies.

The main objective of the conference is to systematically explore the nature of the overlap and the disjunctures between core ideas about Integrationism and certain philosophies of language, including Socio-Cultural Theory, Critical Discourse Theory, Identity, Translanguaging, and Systemic Functional Theory, as well as Colonial and Postcolonial Theory.

Growing out of these disjunctures, we hope to contribute towards the development of scholarship in Applied Linguistics and African Studies from decidedly Global South perspectives, that is those regions of the world which have been the object of colonialism. These perspectives have also been labeled under the term Southern Theory. The Global South is also found in the Global North in regions and parts of cities occupied by immigrants and the socio-politically and economically vulnerable.