16th Linguistic Landscape conference, University of Duisburg-Essen (Germany)

3 -5 September 2025

The topic of the Essen conference was Spaces of Collapse and Transformation. The conference invited Linguistic Landscape researchers to present about transformative socio-spatial practices that push us to consider uncomfortable challenges facing humanity, opportunities for structural change, critical points where the survival of humanity is threatened, as well as new ideas, values, and technologies that potentially enable us to avoid variations of collapse.

Professor Tufi presented a paper entitled ‘Transformative Linguistic Landscapes and the power of recognition’, sharing findings about a transnational borderscape as it has been configured in an area in the centre of Genoa, a post-industrial coastal city in north-western Italy. Discursive practices have consolidated the status of permanent periphery of the area, in spite of its centrality in urban terms, thereby normalising forms of marginalisation and processes of erasure of the location as a microcosm of undesirability. The apparent collapse of infrastructures of sociability (e.g. sites of socialisation are sparse and precarious), however, is countered by forms of resistance enacted through the transformative power of LL and local practices constructing place-based forms belonging. The paper also proposed methodological contributions with respect to memorialisation processes and inspired by conversations with local residents with migrant backgrounds.