I would like to express my gratitude to ENEOLI for the wonderful opportunity to take part in BASEES Conference – one of the most important international forums in the field of Slavistics, connecting researchers concerned with cultural, historical, political and linguistic studies of the region. It was not only my first international conference, but also my first academic visit to the United Kingdom, as the event was organized at the University of Birmingham’s beautiful Edgbaston campus.

The conference took place from April 10 to 12, 2026. On Saturday, during the ENEOLI WG 3.6.3-led panel “Gender, Power, and Lexical Innovation in the 21st century Slavic Languages”, The Grantee presented the paper titled “Public Discourse on the Sex Industry in Poland: Lexical Innovations Around Gender and Power”, co-authored by Anna Jamka. This research addressed a gap in research on Polish sex industry discourse and a conflict between traditional terms and neologisms like “praca/pracownica seksualna” (sex work/er).

The session featured the results of a lexicographic and corpus-assisted analysis, utilizing traditional and neology dictionaries alongside official reference and monitoring corpora. The authors also introduced a preliminary proposal for a Corpus-Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis, comparing the ideological framing of “praca seksualna” and “prostytucja”. The study concluded that this model is highly scalable, offering a methodological blueprint for mapping sex industry discourse across other Slavonic nations to distinguish universal effects of globalization from local socio-political circumstances.

Thanks to the conference Anna Obłękowska was able to discuss her work with more experienced scholars across the Slavonic linguistic field. These conversations opened doors to new collaborations at the intersection of gender, languages, and lexical innovation. She also could meet my ENEOLI task group members in person for the first time; their guidance and support throughout and in-between the sessions were truly invaluable. 

Moreover, the conference proved to be the perfect setting to ground the Grantee’s research within a broader context of Slavonic Studies, as a significant number of the panels and papers applied a very culturally and historically conscious approach. As an Applied Linguistics student, this significantly broadened her academic horizons and encouraged her to integrate more interdisciplinary methodologies into the work on neology.

I am grateful for the support I received from the ENEOLI COST Action. I look forward to developing this research into a comprehensive manuscript for publication in an academic journal.