AAAL Leadership Updates
June 2024 AAALetter
Table of Contents
- Celebrating our AAAL Members | Peter De Costa
- AAAL Conference Updates | Ryuko Kubota & Manka Varghese
Celebrating our AAAL Members
Peter De Costa, Michigan State University
AAAL President
As I pen this message, I hope that your academic year has started to wind down. For those of us in the northern hemisphere, you probably will have started on your much-awaited and well-deserved summer vacation. Having said that, I hope that you will continue to keep AAAL on your radar.
Thank you to those of you who identified colleagues for the slew of awards for 2025. The call for award nominations closed on June 1. As an organization, we always make it a point to celebrate the achievements of our peers. In this issue, I am delighted to see several recent award winners share their thoughts about their accomplishments: Jerry Won Lee (2024 AAAL Book Award Recipient); Katie Bernstein, Yalda Kaveh, and Claudia Cervantes-Soon (2024 AAAL Research Article Award Recipients); and Christian Fallas Escobar (2024 AAAL Dissertation Award Recipient). Indeed, identifying award winners is no easy task, and our awards committee members will be busy in the coming months shortlisting and subsequently identifying the winners for 2025. Do join me in extending my appreciation to this group of amazing volunteers.
As an organization, we are reliant on the volunteerism of our members who are willing to step up to serve AAAL. For that reason, please think about nominating yourself or your colleagues who are prepared to serve in leadership roles in the coming years. The call for nominations will go out by the end of June with a deadline of September 15. On a separate but related note, please remember to vote for the members who agreed to be on this year’s election slate. Election voting began on May 31 and will go on for one month.
Key committees—such as the Public Affairs and Engagement Committee (see Anwar Ahmed’s & Uju Anya’s message, this issue) and Conference Connections (see Dustin Crowther’s message, this issue)—keep our members actively engaged in our field. Their work exists in valuable conjunction with our annual conference. Many of us left Houston in March revitalized by the vibrant academic exchanges we had at AAAL 2024 and the opportunity to reconnect with old friends as well as to make new ones (see Ryuko Kubota’s message, this issue). An impressive 1840 people registered for the conference, where the efforts of our numerous committees were on full display. Notably present were new initiatives such an anti-harassment policy and new inclusive presenter guidelines that were spearheaded by the JEDI ad hoc committee.
But as many of you also realize, our committees work throughout the year, not just during our four-day annual conference. Since our last newsletter in December 2023, for instance, the Graduate Student Council organized a webinar titled, “Do’s and Don’ts in Job Searching For Faculty Positions” (in January 2024). Some of you also attended another webinar in mid May, “AI in Applied Linguistics: Research & Assessment Strategies,” that was organized by the Online Education and Outreach Committee (OEOC). And might I remind you that this June issue of the AAALetter would not have materialized had it not been for the hard work of Sarah Hercula, our AAALetter Editor, and her team.
To add value to your membership, AAAL continues to explore ways to build on our relationships with our peer organizations, such as the Center for Applied Linguistics (see Liying Cheng’s message, this issue), the Linguistic Society of America (see Marlyse Baptista’s message, this issue), and TESOL (see my other message, this issue). These are but some of the many things AAAL is attempting to do to ensure that our members’ needs and interests are met. And since 2024 marks four years since a membership survey was last administered, we think that a new membership survey is due. Much has changed since 2020, when we were in the thick of COVID, and so the AAAL leadership would like to hear what we can do better in the next four years. Do look out for a membership survey that will go out in the second half of this year.
At the risk of overwhelming you with a litany of things to keep your eye on in the coming months, I would like to draw your attention to the Denver 2025 conference call for proposals that opens on June 3 and closes on July 15. Please do not overlook the proposal submission deadline. Next year’s conference, with the theme of “Relational Accountability in Applied Linguistics,” promises to be as stimulating as those of years past (see Manka Varghese’s message, this issue). So please add submitting your conference proposal to your to-do list.
As I have reiterated throughout this brief message, our committees are committed to enriching your membership experience. I would like to close by giving a shout out to an upcoming professional development workshop to be held on Friday, June 21. Titled “Media Communication: Engaging the Public with Your Work in Applied Linguistics,” this OEOC event will feature two speakers: James Coda (University of Tennessee) and Judith Kroll (University of California, Irvine). Don’t forget to add this timely workshop to your calendar as you continue to immerse yourself in summer revelry.
AAAL Conference Updates
Ryuko Kubota, University of British Columbia, and Manka Varghese, University of Washington
AAAL President Elect and AAAL First Vice President
Reflecting on the 2024 AAAL conference in Houston (from Ryuko Kubota)
In March 2024, AAAL annual conference was held in person in Houston, TX. The 2024 conference was one of the largest ones in AAAL history—over 1,800 people registered. I hope those who attended the conference explored the theme “Thinking Otherwise, Acting for Change” in engaging ways with their fellow participants, old and new. The program included six plenary speakers (one delivered online on March 1), seven invited colloquia, two pre-conference workshops, and many special sessions. I hope the program offered new ideas and stimulating discussions.
This year’s conference included various new initiatives—multilingual policies for proposal submissions and presentations, a new format for roundtable discussions, more robust forms of accommodation to support participants with special needs, and increased partnership with Indigenous language scholars and local Indigenous communities. We are reviewing the valuable feedback that you have provided on the post-conference survey; AAAL will seriously consider your recommendations to make future conferences even better.
As the 2024 Conference Chair, I cannot express my deep appreciation to the conference planning team enough, including the eight University of British Columbia graduate students, Robert Randez, and Eunjeong Lee, as well as our amazing AAAL business office staff. My big thanks also go to the strand coordinators, proposal reviewers, standing committee chairs and members, Graduate Student Council (GSC) co-chairs and members, as well as the JEDI ad-hoc committee chairs and members for their dedication and tireless work.
Next year, the AAAL conference will be chaired by Manka Varghese and will be planned and coordinated by her and her team at the University of Washington. The event will be held at the Sheraton Denver Downtown Hotel, Colorado. I am excited to see you all to reunite and make new connections!
Join us for the 2025 AAAL conference in Denver (from Manka Varghese)
I am looking forward to welcoming and connecting with you for the 2025 AAAL conference, for which the theme is “Relational Accountability” (see the call for proposals). This theme as well as the five plenaries and seven invited colloquia were chosen by a conference planning team, acting with the intention of upholding and centering this theme throughout our work. Moreover, a suggestion had been made to ensure that most (five) of the invited colloquia are connected thematically to the plenaries and to ask the plenary speakers to be discussants for these invited colloquia, so as to continue the conversation that they initiate during their plenaries. We hope that everyone from all subdisciplines of applied linguistics will appreciate this format, which we are trying out for the 2025 conference, and will engage with the overall conference theme to propose and engage with the many interesting sessions that will be included as a part of our program.
I want to take this opportunity to thank Dr. Ryuko Kubota, her conference planning team, and the AAAL business office, not only for such a rich and stimulating 2024 conference but also for their contributions to a number of positive changes for the 2024 conference, which Ryuko has noted above. These will be carried forth for the 2025 conference, along with concerted efforts to keep improving, especially regarding matters related to JEDI. Two of these need to be noted. One is that similar actions and spaces will be taken and created to acknowledge Ramadan, which again falls during the conference in 2025. The other is an invitation for Indigenous communities (mainly Cheyenne, Arapaho, Ute, and Apache) in Denver to partner with the AAAL association and the 2025 conference.
In terms of acting on the feedback from the survey for the 2024 conference, which Ryuko also mentions above, we will attempt to respond to and enact what we are able to, but because many of the decisions for the 2025 conference had been made a while back (there is always a time lag for conference planning, including the choice of venue), some of the feedback will be challenging to be responsive to immediately.
Last, I believe that downtown Denver will be a fun location with plenty of good eats and spaces for continued learning. We hope to provide a list of more specific suggestions for these kinds of engagements as you begin planning for your arrival and stay in Denver.
In the meantime, I welcome you to connect with me directly to provide input or feedback, whether in my capacity as Conference Chair or as First Vice President and member of the Executive Committee.
