J-BILD

Hors série: Language in Ukraine

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From Ukrains’ka mova, May 30, 2019 (Nedashkivska, 2021)

Like so many others this week, we here at BILD are deeply shocked and saddened by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. We take this opportunity to remind BILD readers that nearly a year ago, in April 2021, our J-BILD journal published a special issue entitled “Boundaries and Belonging: Language, Diaspora, and Motherland” (v5n1), guest-edited by Alla Nedashkivska and Holger Kusse. Four of the articles in the special issue discuss language issues in contemporary Ukraine: “Native Language Activism: Exploring Language Ideologies in Ukraine,” by Alla Nedashkivska; “The Instrumentalization of the Language Issue in Ukraine,” by Marianna Novosolova; “Bloggers as Social Actors in Language Policy Debates in Ukraine,” by Nadiya Kiss; and “Language Tenacity of Ukrainians in the 20th Century as a Means of National Self-Assertion,” by Liudmyla Pidkuimukha. The abstracts are below. We encourage our readers to find out more about the linguistic resilience of the Ukrainian people through these articles, and to support their struggle by spreading the word about their extraordinary courage under fire.

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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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Reflections on a year of building community through J-BILD (by Alison Crump – J-BILD Senior Managing Editor & Lauren Halcomb-Smith -J-BILD Managing Editor)

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We’re happy to be back to the BILD blog. It has been a year since we wrote our last post (Q&A with J-BILD Editorial Team). That was as J-BILD, the open source, collaborative peer mentoring journal that we are managing together, was just getting off the ground. Here we are a year later, with two solid issues under our belt. Take a look! We thought we’d end this academic year of BILD blog posts with some reflections on the journal processes—what has worked well; some challenges we’ve encountered; and our hopes for the future of J-BILD.

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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 →

Q&A with J-BILD editorial team

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You may have heard that the BILD Research Community has a new and exciting initiative!  It’s called J-BILD (Journal of Belonging, Identity, Language, and Diversity).

We are still accepting submissions for our July 31 deadline (see the Call for Papers) and aim to publish the inaugural issue in November 2017. We thought it would be helpful to provide answers to some of the questions you may have about J-BILD.

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