Background
The Federation Internationale des Langues et Litteratures Modernes (FILLM), a UNESCO affiliate in charge of promoting languages, literatures, and cultures organizes an International Congress every three years. The last two congresses were held in Ningbo, China and New Delhi, India. The next FILLM Congress, the 28th in the series, will be held in Europe at the University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria from 26th July to 29th July, 2020 under the theme of Linguistic, Literary, and Cultural Diversity in a Global Perspective.
Main theme
Diversity is a key concept in many academic disciplines and in our everyday life. We live in a more and more complex world that brings people from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds together in one place. Diversity implies understanding that each of the individuals from these different backgrounds are unique and different and these differences must be recognized, tolerated, and even celebrated. Diversity comes along various dimensions including language, culture, nationality, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age, socio-economic class, physical ability, religious belief, and political and ideological orientation, among many other differences.
Recognizing, understanding, tolerating, and even celebrating diversity is not just an end in itself; it can also be a means, a methodology to building, managing, and sustaining our common humanity, our common heritage in a global perspective. Diversity is essential if we are to achieve all-encompassing, global perspectives to addressing the problems that confront our common humanity. Globalization is truly global if it encompasses all these aspects of diversity mentioned above. As the time-honoured adage goes, there is Unity in Diversity. And this is especially so if we see diversity as a tool to helping us find solutions to the many global problems confronting us: socio-economic inequalities, terrorism leading to insecurities, upsurge in nationalism and populism leading to division and the erection of walls and other kinds strictures, and global warming, among a myriad of other problems.