Workshop „Grounded Language, Situated Minds: Ecological Approaches to Saying, Doing and Feeling“
Date: 19th & 20th of February 2026
Room: H 2051, TU Berlin (Main Building, Straße des 17. Juni 135)
–Talks (without discussions) will be streamed online! –
Organizers: Adrian Wieczorek (TU Berlin), Penelope Freund (TU Berlin).
This workshop explores cognition, speech acts and feelings through the lenses of ecological psychology and phenomenology. Central themes of investigation include:
- the situatedness of action and cognition
- the affective disclosure of situations
- the evolution and use of language
The international workshop gathers leading researchers of their fields for in-depth discussion. It invites inquiry into questions such as: How do we come to know and inhabit places? What constitutes a situation? What makes an environment feel safe, threatening, or enabling? We will explore how our embeddedness shapes both perception and speech, and how place informs our knowledge of self and other.
Schedule
Day 1: Situated Mind
9:00-10:15 Erik Rietveld (University of Amsterdam), Saying, Doing and Feeling in the Skilled Intentionality Framework
10:15-10:45 Break
10:45-12:00 Laura Desirèe Di Paolo (University of Sussex), Schools, multi-technological ecologies, and the introduction of AI. Not business as usual
12:00-13:30 Lunch Break
13:30-14:45 Jan Slaby (FU Berlin), Affect and Sociality in Political Philosophy of Mind
14:45-15:00 Break
15:00-16:15 Adrian Wieczorek (TU Berlin), Significance as affective background. An outline of Situational Framework Analysis
16:15-16:30 Break
16:30-17:45 Axel Gelfert (TU Berlin), Epistemic Affordances
19:30 Dinner
Day 2: Grounded Language
9:00-10:15 Ludger van Dijk (Wageningen University & Research), Individualization without internalization
10:15-10:45 Break
10:45-12:00 Arianne Shahvisi (Brighton and Sussex Medical School), Can flags be slurs? A speech act analysis of ‘Operation Raise the Colours’
12:00-13:30 Lunch Break
13:30-14:45 Adrian Briciu (West University of Timișoara), Public Artifacts and Communicative Affordances
14:45-15:00 Break
15:00-16:15 Bert Hodges (University of Connecticut), Conversing as Perceiving, Acting, and Caring:
An Ecological Approach to Language [Online]
16:15-16:30 Break
16:30-17:45 Penelope Freund (TU Berlin), Hate Speech and Unsafe Spaces
For in-person participation or attendance via Zoom (only talks), please write to a [dot] wieczorek [at] tu-berlin [dot] de