One of the highlights of our academic August here in the critical sociolinguistics world in Montreal was the LPP2022 (Language Policy and Planning) conference, hosted in hybrid mode at the Faculty of Education, McGill University. BILD readers had a foretaste of that last week, when we started posting again for the 2022-2023 academic year,

The full name of the conference is of course the Multidisciplinary Approaches in Language Policy and Planning conference; we have been telling you about it in this space for a while. Co-chairs Amir Kalan & Mela Sarkar—and their team of enthusiastic helpers—hosted it from McGill last year as well, but at that point, pandemic restrictions here (and in many places) meant that we had to learn to run an all-online conference. We managed it! You can see last year’s program here.

This year, we somewhat rashly decided that we would learn to run a HYBRID conference.

We managed that too! Flying by the seat of our pants much of the time, not to mention by the skin of our teeth. Here’s this year’s program.

What does it mean to attend a hybrid conference? For the LPP organizing team (many of whom are staunch BILD members), it meant that we engaged with conference registrants to offer them a full-on conference experience, with five parallel sessions and over a hundred papers being presented in real time, whether they came to Montreal in person, or attended virtually through Zoom.

We hoped it would not make much difference which mode people chose—except of course that people not physically present didn’t get their lunches thrown in.

They were also not able to attend the unusual in-person event that team member and former BILD guest blogger Édouard Laniel-Tremblay organized and led, the Alternative Campus Tour.

This unique tour of the campus exposed to public view some of the less well-known and less praiseworthy facets of McGill’s long history as a Montreal institution.

Other special events included three remarkable plenary speakers and a Round Table about language policy in Quebec—a topic which, as readers may know, continues to get more and more interesting as the years roll on.

This year marks the 45th anniversary of the enactment of Quebec’s Charter of the French Language (popularly known as “Bill 101”); LPP team member and BILD guest blogger Andréanne Langevin took advantage of the opportunity to organize our widely publicized and well-attended Table ronde on the very day of the anniversary. The event was recorded; the recording is publicly available, here.

As you can see, in the oral presentation rooms, the Zoom attendees and the in-person attendees were able to interact in a manner that came to seem more and more natural as the three days flew by.

There were technical problems. Of course there were technical problems. Agonizing ones (for which we apologize, again). The take-home message is: have a large budget for your tech team and equipment; train everybody several months ahead.

We didn’t, and we couldn’t. But we made it work anyway, and we’re very glad we did. When it was all over, we felt pretty ecstatic. As LPP/BILD member Rhonda Chung said:

LPP matters because it explores how language & power interact to endanger (often Indigenous) languages. Patterns can be noticed and strategies can be exchanged. Critical conversations happen—this is really important for junior scholars who will continue these conversations in their own work and in their classrooms.

We did need to recruit twice the usual number of session chairs, fairly last-minute—future organizers take heed! Ideally, sessions had a Zoom chair as well as an in-person chair. Hence the difficulty of training the whole team well ahead of time. But one of our session chairs still thought that:

Presenters and attendees both online and in person were able to connect and discuss despite the distance. The hybrid mode was fabulous!

And now it’s well and truly OVER for another year, or, quite possibly, another two years. As yet, we do not have a confirmed organizing team or location for the next LPP. It seems likely that there will be a two-year wait. Stay tuned for updates.

Wherever and whenever the next LPP turns out to be—because we are confident that there will be more iterations—we encourage the organizers to boldly go forward in hybrid mode. Gatherings that combine physical and virtual presence in real time are no longer the stuff of science fiction. In many ways—not in all; never, we trust, in all!—virtual is coming to seem like the new real.