Dr April Baker-Bell (University of Michigan)
Transformative to Whom? Black Linguistic Futures and a Freedom School Paradigm for Applied Linguistics
As the field of applied linguistics addresses the challenges posed by social injustices and artificial intelligence, and has made calls for transformation in methods and paradigms, we must urgently ask: transformative to whom? Historically, broader visions of linguistic progress have routinely modernized the field while leaving the most vulnerable linguistic communities on the margins. Reflecting on over twenty years of research situated at the intersections of language, antiblackness, and justice, this plenary breaks down academic silos to interrogate what happens when we center those margins. By looking toward community-rooted models like Freedom Schools, this address introduces a vision for Black linguistic futures and charts new directions for transforming research in Applied Linguistics.
Dr Sharese King (University of Chicago)
Harnessing Sociolinguistic Approaches for Criminal Legal Reform
Scholars of African American Language have been at the forefront of social justice efforts within sociolinguistics since the inception of the dialect’s documentation (Labov, Cohen, Robins, Lewis 1968). We’ve progressed to articulate the harms and resulting protections speakers who produce stigmatized speech forms need. However, such social consequences for speakers of stigmatized varieties still include housing discrimination, being passed up for promotions, making less money than their Mainstream American English-speaking peers, having a less accessible and culturally-sensitive education, and impaired doctor-patient communication. Recognizing these kinds of injustices, I turn a lens to examine how such linguistic prejudice extends further to criminal legal contexts, with a lens on Black speech or speech directed toward Black defendants and witnesses in legal cases in the United States.
This talk asks: How can sociolinguists utilize a range of theories and tools at our disposal to address and challenge unfair treatment of minoritized communities across the legal system? Through a multidisciplinary approach drawing on discourse analytic, experimental, and computational methods, I illuminate how language scholars can contribute to both criminal justice reform and theorizations of race with a lens on courtroom language practices which reinforce Blackness as other or criminal, and Black language as inherently unclear, inarticulate, and incomprehensible.
Prof Sarah Mercer (University of Graz) (Pit Corder Lecture)
The learner-centred discourse in applied linguistics: At what cost for teachers?
To be teacher-centred in your pedagogy and didactics remains a damning critique. Indeed, few would dispute the benefits a learner-centred approach brings to classroom life and learning. However, in this talk, I would like to reflect on the possible consequences of this discourse in the wider community and research. It is apparent that research has tended to focus largely on the language learner in the teaching-learning interface with the teacher, at best, often seen merely as a static background variable. I believe this creates not only a research imbalance, but it also means we do not fully understand what is happening at the nexus of teaching-learning. Without also a person-centred focus on the needs, profiles, and experiences of language teachers in diverse settings and at different career stages, our understandings of language education processes remain detrimentally partial. This imbalance overlooks that teaching can never be reduced to method, it is person-mediated and happens in interpersonal, relational spaces. Additionally, when the learner-centred discourse is enacted in policy and planning, it can lead to the neglect of teachers threatening their wellbeing and contributing to the increasing rates of attrition and burnout across the globe. I conclude that there is a need for applied linguistics to become more teacher-centred to ensure that our appreciation of what is happening in the teaching-learning nexus is comprehensive, to advocate for teachers so they are supported to teach to the best of their abilities, and so that learners subsequently get the best possible language teaching.
Prof Jannis Androutsopoulos (University of Hamburg)
Scaled entanglements: towards understanding online/offline (inter)action
The notion that offline action, online action, and digital media affordances interweave and reinforce each other originates in early Internet research and gained momentum across disciplines during the 2010s, finding expression in terms such as ‘online-offline nexus’ (Blommaert 2019, Blitvich 2022), ‘hybrid space’ (de Souza e Silva and Sheller 2015), ‘entanglement’ (Darvin 2025), and others (Bolander and Locher 2020). But interdisciplinary awareness for related concepts across different fields is still lacking, as is an attempt to pull together different instances of online/offline interplay into a larger, coherent picture. Drawing inspiration from the current research landscape, my talk outlines a tentative framework for ‘nexus’ phenomena (Androutsopoulos 2026). It builds on the assumption that contemporary online/offline interplays extend earlier practices of human-media coordination and constitute a basic condition of communication in postdigital societies (Tagg and Lyons 2022). I propose to view the online/offline relationship as scaled, i.e. involving different degrees of immediacy, participation frameworks, and spatial configurations. Using examples from published research, personal experience, media reports, and fiction, I illustrate how online/offline dimensions of action come together (a) in the ‘here and now’ of coordinated physical and virtual action; (b) recursive ‘back and forth’ sequences of mediated messages and on-site activities; and (c) ‘call and response’ patterns where mediatized messages are taken up and re-enacted by audiences in multi-sited synchronization. Understanding how scaled entanglements, and their consequences for subsequent action, are experienced in everyday life may offer new insights into processes of linguistic and cultural differentiation and change.
Androutsopoulos, Jannis. 2026. Online–offline nexus: Genealogies and trajectories, scales and sites. In Alexandra Georgakopoulou & Tereza Spilioti (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Language and Digital Communication, 2nd edn. (In press). Routledge.
Blitvich, Pilar Garcés-Conejos. 2022. Karen: Stigmatized social identity and face-threat in the on/offline nexus. Journal of Pragmatics 188, 14-30.
Blommaert, Jan. 2019. Political Discourse in Post-Digital Societies. Tilburg Papers in Cultural Studies, 236.
Bolander, Brook and Miriam A. Locher. 2020. Beyond the online offline distinction: Entry points to digital discourse. Discourse, Context & Media 35.
Darvin, Ron. 2025. English online/offline: Disentangling material and materialist perspectives of language. In: Jerry Won Lee and Sofia Rüdiger (eds.) Entangled Englishes, 181-197. Abingdon: Routledge.
de Souza e Silva, Adriana and Mimi Sheller (eds.). 2015. Mobility and Locative Media: Mobile Communication in Hybrid Spaces. Abingdon: Routledge.
Tagg, Caroline and Agnieszka Lyons. 2022. Mobile Messaging and Resourcefulness: A Post-Digital Ethnography. New York: Routledge.
BAAL 2026 