Welcome back to BILD! Welcome also to a new academic year of blogging on critical sociolinguistics issues by contributors in Montreal, and, increasingly, contributors all over the world. New guest bloggers are always welcome.

In our first regular post, BILD member Susan Ballinger will start off the 2021-2022 year with a retrospective on (among other things) a conference some of you may know, called ACPI (L’Association canadienne des professionnels de l’immersion).

On the subject of another conference, BILD’s international network expanded exponentially at the end of August, 2021, when BILD members helped to organize the Multidisciplinary Approaches in Language Policy and Planning conference (LPP2021). You can download the program and learn many other details here.

This year for the first time LPP was completely online, hosted through McGill University. LPP co-chairs Amir Kalan and Mela Sarkar were ably supported by a team of over two dozen volunteers, including many past and present members of BILD. We couldn’t have done it without them!

LPP2021 plenary speakers Patricia Lamarre and Nancy Hornberger have graciously allowed us to post links to the video-recordings of their memorable presentations. Each is about an hour.

The talks are entitled, respectively, Language policy in the everyday: the challenges and contradictions of policing language in Montréal (Lamarre) and Ideological and implementational spaces in Covid-era language policy and planning: Perspectives from Indigenous communities in the Global South (Hornberger).

If you missed them at the conference, catch them here.

Papers from the LPP2021 conference will be featured in the next two issues of our journal, J-BILD—watch out for them in November 2021 and February 2022.

November 2021 will also see the opening of the LPP2022 Call for Papers. We plan to hold next year’s conference on a hybrid model, allowing for both in-person and online participation. The live presentation structure of this year’s conference turned out to be popular with conference attendees. Let’s hope we can make that work for you next year, whether you are in the room with us or not.

As we debrief from LPP2021 and head into a new year of blogging, journal-publishing and LPP2022-organizing, all of us wish all of you an academic year a little less fraught than the all-online, pandemic-permeated eighteen months we have just lived through, in the hopes that you and your families will do what you need to do to stay safe.