Translations of the Mission Statement were published as the first Issue's Introduction.

The word colloquium is interpreted as “discussion, interview, meeting, parley, conversation”, and these terms already contain the essence of what this journal is about: We would like to provide a multilingual (virtual) space for academic voices from different backgrounds to encounter each other, exchange ideas and experiences, negotiate theories and critical approaches in a process of communication and transformation that extends beyond the immediate participants, and that reverberates in the groups and societies that form its context. As an Open Access journal, Colloquium: New Philologies is freely available to everyone, and this is also to be understood as a statement inviting and supporting a concept of open, participatory, and free science transcending the limits of disciplines, cultures, and languages.

Founded in the Alps-Adriatic region, gifted and haunted alike by its very special historical and sociocultural situation as the point of intersection between Germanic, Romance, and Slavic cultures, this mission is rooted in the experiences of generations of the local population that had to navigate between various linguistic, cultural, and political systems as part of their everyday lives. Meeting, conversation and fair exchange have been crucial to overcoming existing boundaries, and this is why Colloquium: New Philologies aims at promoting these experiences academically. The conversation facilitated by the journal takes place on three levels, that also serve as a structural principle: Perspectives, where essays and opinion pieces open up new points of view and approaches following the spirit of rethinking the traditional into new philologies; Discourses, which present and clarify positions in academic debate; and Results, a forum for professional, academic papers that are published in a double blind, peer-reviewed process.

All of this contributes to the endeavor of establishing Colloquium: New Philologies on the critical and scientific radar, bringing together the traditional disciplines of linguistics, literary studies, and cultural studies in a polymorphous and polyphonous school of thinking, acting, and doing as well as communicating research.

Within the traditional discipline of linguistics, contributions focusing mainly on sociolinguistics and critical analysis are invited. In particular, we encourage empirical research such as corpus-based studies, historical linguistics, and field linguistics contributions. In terms of the more applied branches of this traditional discipline, we welcome papers concentrating on language testing and teaching and innovative methodology in applied linguistics.

The traditional disciplines of literary studies, and cultural studies on a thematic level invite contributions that thematise and critically discuss border experiences and in-between states, including reflections on the nature and functions of frontiers and boundaries, third spaces, hybridity, the other, the self, and the opportunities they offer for the construction of identities as well as queer and transgender, trans- and posthumanist, inter- and transcultural discourses. Another focus of the journal seen through these two disciplines is on processes of disintegration and reconstitution, of emancipation and transformation. The dia- and plurilogical idea of the colloquium is understood by us to be a constructive and creative alternative to Empire and its destructive and restrictive hegemonial monologues. It is about speaking with each other, not at each other. It is about responsible, multilateral participation, not im- or explicitly violent, unilateral victimisation. This opens up the fields of Post-Colonial discourses, or even Post-Imperial ones, but also reaches beyond that towards new concepts of language, signification, and meaning-making in general.

Finally, as environments are linguistically classified in different ways, both culturally and cognitively, understanding the various experiences that influence these classifications is crucial for us to be able to account for the different modes of the human condition expressed by language that socially constructs us. The focus on different voices we speak in, different discourses formed by our cultural environments, and expanding into all possible experiences we are privileged to live through, will give us a unique insight into the language properties defining each of the codes we possess and use.

As an online Open Access journal, we take our mission from the conceptual and thematic even into the formal dimension of media. We invite contributions not only as texts, but also audio, video, or multimedial artefacts to open up new spaces of experience on an intellectual as well as sensual level. While language is an essential tool for conversation, cultural and technological changes have affected the ways we connect to each other and how we develop and transform ideas, as new channels have been added to the creation and exchange of meaning.