Wellington in New Zealand is leveraging its academic strengths, recently winning three international conferences in conjunction with bid champions from Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington.
Local CVB Business Events Wellington, in partnership with Tourism New Zealand’s Business Events team, secured the conference wins in collaboration with Victoria University of Wellington’s (VUW) School of Design Innovation, Museum & Heritage Studies, and School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies.
“Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington is a key driver of Wellington’s knowledge economy,” says Business Events Wellington manager Irette Ferreira.
“The internationally recognised expertise of the faculty plays a major role in attracting international conferences to the capital. These conferences boost local knowledge by bringing global thought leaders to the city, while simultaneously showcasing Wellington’s knowledge strengths and creating opportunities for collaboration. They’re a win for the university, for Wellington, and New Zealand.”
The conference wins include OzCHI in 2023, the International Annual Conference on Computer Human Interaction. The Australasian event will bring together a broad international community of interaction designers, user experience (UX) practitioners, information architects, software engineers, human factors experts, information systems analysts and social scientists to boost Wellington’s growing Human Computer Interaction knowledge hub.
“This is an opportunity to bring people over and showcase the excellent and diverse research we do in the area of Human Computer Interaction, as well as what Aotearoa New Zealand and specifically Wellington has to offer across several industries such as gaming, film, fine arts and tech startups,” says VUW senior lecturer of interaction design and chair of the NZ ACM SIGCHI Chapter, Dr Nadia Pantidi.
The 15th Linguistic Landscapes Workshop will follow in 2024 and will attract researchers come from a wide range of language-related disciplines.
“Wellington was unanimously voted as the desired place to hold the 15th Linguistic Landscapes conference during this year’s AGM,” says VUW senior lecturer of applied linguistics Dr Corinne Seals. “This is the first time that this conference will be held in the Australasia region, and Wellington was selected for its lively atmosphere as well as Aotearoa New Zealand’s active support for multilingualism in the public sphere. Future delegates are excited to engage with what Wellington has to offer.”
A third conference win has yet to be announced publicly.
Victoria University of Wellington is the highest-ranking research university in New Zealand. In 2021/2022 it was ranked 236 in the QS World University Rankings.
