On October 15th, PhD (c) Cristina Chiusano, director of the Masters in English Language and Bilingual Intercultural Education (MELBE) at the UM, remotely attended the fifth edition of the InterCulturalia Symposium, organized by the Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iaᶊi.

The hybrid in-person/remote event brought together 50 advanced students, young researchers, and professors of Linguistics from the Faculty of Humanities. At this conference, Chiusano ran an online seminar titled “The construal of ‘otherness’ in postmodernism: Applying Halliday’s Systemic Functional (SFL) model in post-modern literary works”, where professors and students analyzed the construction of otherness and decolonization through Michael Halliday’s Linguistic Systemic Functional model and studied text excerpts of postmodern literature by Ray Bradbury, Isabel Allende, Nadine Gordimer, and Abdullah Shoaib.

“It was, overall, an enriching and challenging experience to present a topic as specific as Systemic Functional theory for literary analysis in a hybrid online seminar. To engage the in-person audience as well as those of us online, I used interactive applications such as Mentimeter and Padlet (which, to my surprise, the audience had never used before)”, the professor pointed out.

She also added: “It was a valuable exchange of ideas, exactly how it would have been as an entirely in-person event. Once again, I believe it is clear how technology has turned us professors into agents of change, creators of new pedagogies, that can create interactive, collaborative, and therefore impactful work”.