applied linguistics

The International Doctoral Summer School in TESOL and Applied Linguistics in Malta (by Jennifer Burton)

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Welcome back BILDers! This year, I’m excited to join the BILD community as an Affiliate Member and kick off the new school year with a post about how I spent (some of) my summer.

The Mediterranean Sea from the coastline of Malta 

A large part of my work as a critical language researcher and educator results from the accumulation of my personal experiences abroad that have called me to question taken-for-granted assumptions about particular ways of being in the world. So, when my former supervisor sent me a link to the Doctoral Summer School in Malta, I did not hesitate to take part in this adventure. I booked a (one-way!) ticket to this Southern European island country–located South of Italy and East of Tunisia–in the Mediterranean Sea, with a population of 450,000.

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Heroes, fools and scholarly publishing (by Dr. Mela Sarkar)

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The editors of scholarly journals have one hell of a hard row to hoe. I say this in sympathy, never having had the courage to take on the job myself. Note that “job” in this context carries no expectation of remuneration. Editors spend hours, days and years reading manuscripts, sending them out to equally-unpaid reviewers they have to cajole into keeping to deadline, and dealing with authors along a spectrum of angelically cooperative to diabolically recalcitrant. I make no mention of the quality of the scholarship being written about, which is, as we say, “orthogonal” to the issues above. Editors then have to put all the pieces together into journal issue after journal issue. Continue reading →

Road trips; or, On being an outsider, or not (#2) (by Dr. Mela Sarkar)

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It’s late July. Our short and splendid Canadian summer is at its height; I have not been home in Montreal for nearly a month and won’t be for ne20Chi-CheemaunWake_Flagarly another. As I write this, the car ferry called the Chi-Cheemaun (“big canoe” in Ojibway) is taking me from Manitoulin (“of the Great Spirit”) Island, at the top of Lake Huron, to Tobermory, ON (a transplanted place name from Scotland). My sister and I are driving back east in the general direction of Toronto, for her, and Montreal, for me, from a family reunion in southern Manitoba.
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On being an outsider, or not (by Dr. Mela Sarkar)

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The Canadian Anthropology Society / Société canadienne de l’anthropologie (known to its members as CASCA) had its annual conference a few days ago at Université Laval in Quebec City, and although I am not usually a member of CASCA or a presenter at this conference, it happened that this year I got asked to be on not one but two panels, so off I went. My research energy over the past few years has gone into into two main projects, one still funded (on Indigenous language revitalization), the other not any more (on Hip-Hop language in Montreal), and I got to talk about both. In the unfunded category, I was part of a panel on multilingualism as play, which is (as it should be!) such a fun idea. In academic-ese, people say “ludic” instead of “playful”, quite a lot. And sometimes they say “carnavalesque”. But this was a very relaxed panel where people did feel free to say they were being playful.
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A thumbnail sketch of an academic event (by Mehdi Babaei)

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Today, I’m posting an overview of my sojourn at the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) and the Canadian Association of Applied Linguistics (CAAL) 2015 joint conference. The conference was held at the Fairmount Royal York Hotel in Toronto, a flashy, swanky hotel, with beautiful architecture, fancy rugs and chandeliers, and historical pictures, which to me, looked like the Grand Budapest Hotel– which hosted those interested in language-related issues. These people include top-notch scholars, editors, faculty members, new and senior researchers, and graduate students, who were congregated to discuss, share, or brainstorm ideas in the field of Applied Linguistics. What struck me was the diverse ways these scholars positioned themselves in the field and how they wanted to be identified. As I’m delving into my recollections of the conference, I will take you through the floors, hallways, rooms and tables of the conference venue, in which one or more people were either looking back at the history of applied linguistics, talking enthusiastically about their findings, or politely criticizing others’ ideas.
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