critical sociolinguistics

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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Sociotechnically, with love (by Dr Mela Sarkar)

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The past calendar year, BILD’s fourth of active blogging, saw our small group of mostly Montreal-based members grow by more than 50%. The original core group of BILDers were all attached to Montreal-area universities in 2014 and were able to commit to being physically present at our biweekly meetings. Only when graduate student members one by one finished their degrees and moved away did we feel the need to create an “affiliate” category of member. Active members are, for us, still members who can come together in the flesh. For a long time the active membership increased very slowly, with the gradual arrival in Montreal of new graduate students or faculty members interested in questions of belonging, identity, language and diversity from a critical sociolinguistic perspective.

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When BILD takes the stage: Reflections on a recent BILD conference talk

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~ by Mela Sarkar, Stephen Davis, Kathleen Green, Emmanouela Tisizi, and Alison Crump

On Thursday, May 11, several members of the BILD group (Mela Sarkar, Stephen Davis, Kathleen Green(Apple), Emmanouela Tisizi) gave a boundary-breaking group presentation at the ACFAS (Association francophone pour le savoir) congress, in a conference organized by the QUESCREN (Réseau de recherche sur les communautés québécoises d’expression anglaise) called “Les 40 ans de la loi 101 : la Charte de la langue française et les communautés québécoises d’expression anglaise, 1977-2017.”

The original title for the talk was:

Critical sociolinguistic research in post-Bill-101 Quebec: mixage & métissage as the new normal

The title that appeared on the program was:

La recherche sociolinguistique critique dans le Québec de l’après-loi 101 : le mixage et le métissage comme nouvelle norme

And, the title we ended up using was:

Critical Sociolinguistic Research dans le Québec de l’après-bill 101 : le mixage et le métissage comme new normal

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All in a term’s work (by Dr. Mela Sarkar)

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It was a good fall. But it was a full fall. We have heard from all our BILD members since the last time I wrote in midsummer — and then some! Having guest bloggers has been enriching beyond all measure. Among all of us, though, I seem to be the only full-time faculty BILD member (for now!), so I thought that as term starts to wind down, I would add the faculty member point of view to all the other perspectives we have heard. Continue reading →