On being an outsider, or not (by Dr. Mela Sarkar)

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.

Sociolinguistic Noticing: On Being a Sociolinguist among Normal People (by Dr. Alison Crump)

Sociolinguistic noticing is something I do pretty much all the time. It is something that I encouraged my recent cohort of grad students to do as well. On our online discussion board, they shared reflections related to topics and ideas we were covering in the course, and made connections between their own (and others’) language teaching and learning experiences and sociolinguistic issues (e.g., identity, social status, place, race, gender, language variation, language ideologies, multilingualism, language policy, etc.). I was also an active participant in the online conversations and now that the course is over, I find that I’m missing that forum for exploring rich, insightful, and often puzzling ideas. This blog is a perfect place to continue to write down some of my ongoing noticing.

A weekend of not learning language (by Michaela Salmon)

I drove down to New York City with four friends last weekend to bike the 5 Boro Bike Tour. When we crossed into the United States, the border official asked us where we were all from. Without hesitation we unanimously replied “Montreal”, but our origins are a bit more disparate than that. Packed tightly into my little blue sedan were: a West-Coast Canadian, a Franco-Ontarian, an Ohioan with a mixed-up-anything-but-Midwest accent, a Spaniard, and me, an Australian.