Ben Calman is a master’s student in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education (DISE) at McGill University. His current research focuses on linguistic inclusion of international students in Canadian higher education. Ben was born in New York and spent his formative years there and in Washington D.C. He has a B.A. from Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. He lives in Montreal with his wife Michelle and their cat Louise.

My friend Austin, a fellow student in my cohort at McGill, refers to us fondly as baby scholars. As a baby scholar, entering the field of sociolinguistics in what McGill still refers to as the Second Language Education concentration is a daunting task.

Sifting through what Marshall and Moore (2018) call the “panoply of lingualisms” (p. 1) often feels less like sifting and more like hacking through a dense jungle of wonderful, intriguing ideas.

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