Read the Participants’ feedback
Daniel Weiss <dweiss@slav.uzh.ch>, Professor Emeritus, University of Zürich, Switzerland
When I received the news that the next ESTIDIA conference would take place in Vilnius I was excited: for the first time since Soviet times when I had visited the Lithuanian capital, I would see this beautifully restored historical town again and come to know the impact of the Lithuanian independence on its outfit. Moreover, I was convinced that the conference would be held at the Vilnius University in the center of the old town, which would have meant a few minutes’ walk from my hotel. Founded by the Jesuits as an Academy in 1578, it represented the second oldest university in the Polish kingdom and the place where Piotr Skarga had preached his sermons against the Orthodox Church and where in the beginning of the nineteenth century the Polish national poet Adam Mickiewicz and more than a century later the future Nobel prize winner Czesław Miłosz had studied. So, one of the first things I did when I left for a stroll through the old town was to throw a look at this impressive complex of beautiful Renaissance buildings close to Vilnius’ most significant landmarks: the Town Hall, the Presidential Palace, and the Cathedral. Unfortunately, it turned out that this was by no means our conference venue: ESTIDIA 7 was located at the Mykolas Romeris University, far away from the center and in a modern complex of buildings embedded in a contemporary neighborhood. I had to google the name and found out that its owner was a professor of law and co-creator of the Lithuanian constitution in the 1930es with a multi-ethnical background: descendant of the Baltic German noble family Römer, which had become partly Polonized, he pursued his studies in St. Petersburg, Cracow, and Paris before acting as a judge and eventually obtaining the chair in the then Lithuanian capital of Kaunas and later in Vilnius. Therefore, he does not only ideally represents the multiethnic, multi-confessional, and multicultural town of Vilnius but also fits in the multilingual and multicultural profile of the ESTIDIA community much better than Vilnius University, which stands for the Polish catholic tradition. In choosing this venue, the organizers thus paid tribute to the small nation of Lithuania which has finally freed itself from the weight of its Polish (and also its more recent Russian) historical ties. Moreover, the discipline of law is intrinsically based on dialogue and debates “in utramque partem”, in other words: the very essence of this ESTIDIA conference. Needless to say, argumentation patterns and strategies belonged to the core of the program. But this program also encompassed a wealth of other types of dialogue, including real and fictional healthcare communication, humor in interaction, the war on Ukraine, and even human-robot relationships, not to mention the diversity of sources, such as AI-generated texts, Facebook and Reddit posts, real-life conversations, TV shows, YouTube comments, hip hop music, etc. All in all, it was this overwhelming multitude of topical themes, puzzling data, and cutting-edge methods that impressed me most. I am deeply grateful to the organizers who let me get acquainted with and immerse in this inspiring communicative universe, and I appreciate the excellent job done by the hosting university, which provided an impeccable organization of this conference.
