March draws to an end (how fast has the month slipped through my fingers!), and I find myself writing this post at the final days of the month-long LocalLing meeting that I convened in Volos. For most of the last four weeks, my life has been organised around this one event — perhaps the most ambitious and most important thing I’ve done in my career — and this has dominated much of my recent writing.

However, around this focal point, academic life went on, as it does, in a relentless succession of teaching commitments, writing projects, conversations with students and colleagues, and the ongoing effort to make sense of it all. What I will try to do, at the close of the month, is try to bring all these different strands into view. I do this in the hope that placing these parallel commitments, some planned, some more contingent, side-by-side, I can perhaps capture how meaning in academic life emerges not from any particular accomplishment (even an ambitious one, like LocalLing), but from the confluence of multiple engagements and from their alignment to context.

Project updates

LocalLing

Of course, the bulk of my energy this month went to organising the kick-off meeting of the Horizon-funded Revitalising Linguistic Diversity and Cultural Heritage project, which we hosted in Volos.

As the meeting draws to a conclusion, I am left with a feeling of satisfaction: Partly, this comes from knowing that we set the foundation for several important collaborations, including an edited volume, a special issue and a position paper. It also comes from something less easily articulated and very easily forgotten: the feeling of being –at least temporarily– among people with similar orientations to social life and academic work. And partly it comes from the mixture of tiredness and pride you often feel after an intense workout: coordinating a complex prolonged event has extended my understanding of what it means to work (and occasionally, lead¹) in academia.

In previous posts, I have documented the first and second weeks of more structured activities, as well as one of my personal highlights, the day I presented a book on language ideological debates (Helal & Lo Bianco, 2025). I also shared updates on events as they unfolded, such as the linguistic landscape tour organised by the Volos Linguistic Landscape Research Group, our forward-planning and our evolving collaborations. It also pleased me a lot to see that the event generated some attention in the local and national press – we all deserve fifteen minutes of fame, after all.

Some highlights

Such posts and social media activity are an important part of modern research dissemination; but by nature they are selective in the way they showcase success. Other sides of the story, such the rooms promised on paper and taken away in practice, or the petty sabotage by colleagues who scheduled classes to coincide with our work so that my student assistants would be unavailable, are better left unsaid, except as reminders that academic work on linguistic and justice will never be uncomplicated.

---

AI Lang

While the LocalLing meeting took up most of my energy, progress in the ECML-funded Artificial Intelligence in Language Education project has also been steady.

Our team has been working hard towards preparing one of the main outputs of the project, a Moodle course that will help language teachers develop competences and confidence in using artificial intelligence in their practice. Following a recent restructuring, the course consists of three parts: foundational knowledge, tools and resources, and practices. While not quite ready yet, it’s gradually getting into shape and promises to become a valuable resource for teachers.

At the same time, we have been refining our other main deliverable: the framework of guidelines for the use of AI in language education. This is still not ready to share in its final form, but the following interactive overview² may give you some idea of where we are heading. Whether a framework of guidelines can actually shift practice, rather than just describe it, is a broader question to which I keep returning.

Both these outputs, the course and the guidelines, are now a priority, as we are looking forward to presenting them in our upcoming network meeting in Graz. On the 9th and 10th of April, we will be convening a panel of AI experts at the ECML headquarters, where we will work together to improve and expand these resources. These meetings, which function more like shared collaboration spaces rather than places where one performs success by showcasing ready work, are one of the most intellectually rewarding aspects of collaborating with the ECML.

---

ReaLiTea

The third of my projects, Research Literacy of Teachers, is in its final phase now: refinement and dissemination. For this reason, having 40 colleagues from all over the world in Volos seemed like too good an opportunity to miss.

On 23rd and 24th March, we held a mini-dissemination event where we shared our research literacy materials with of our LocalLing visitors, and worked together towards developing what we call research literacy for local heritage language education.

While the relatively tight time-frame meant that it was difficult to balance input (presenting the ReaLiTea materials) and new generation, I was left with the strong feeling that there is a lot of potential here for developing a set of guidelines and good practices for teachers working at the periphery of education systems – not with mainstream student populations but with the minoritized learners. Such teachers, who are less constrained by normative pressures but also less well supported, need research literacy to develop an empirically informed methodological repertoire. But even more than that, they need the skills and confidence to share the good work they do.

An article in the making? Perhaps…

Publications

With my focus on networking and administration, I had little time to devote to academic writing. I am now in that awkward place academics often find themselves, constantly apologizing to collaborators for missed deadlines.

Even so, some progress is taking place on multiple fronts. People are still sending in revised chapters for the Empowering Language Teachers volume, which I am co-editing with Christina Ringel and Kenan Dikilitaş. Despite setbacks, I still think we will meet our deadline for this, and I believe it will be a useful contribution to scholarship about teacher research literacy.

I am also looking forward to receiving a revised draft for an article I have been preparing with one of my students. I have often taken the lead in revising papers, maybe because I felt that doing so protected junior colleagues from the frustrations of peer review. Out of necessity, I have not been able to do this on this occasion. Maybe it’s not such a bad thing after all, though: students grow when you give them space, and so do we.

Readings

No matter how busy things are, I have made a point to read at least a little every day. This month challenged my commitment, I will admit, but I did come across a few interesting reads, that I’d like to share:

Language Politics in Tunisia

I have already blogged about Helal’s and Lo Bianco’s (2025) Language Politics in Tunisia. As I said when presenting the book, the title is somewhat deceptive: although the book describes language ideological debates in Tunisia – the conflict between Arabisation, Francophonie, Anglocentric pragmatism and Tunisian nationalism – it’s really about how people can synthesise richness. The solution Helal and Lo Bianco offer, the Tunisian Language Compact, is a roadmap that is relevant to a much wider audience, and I think deserves careful reading.

Constrained Multilingualism

A second book that recently came to my attention is Marco Sentello’s (2026) Constrained Multilingualism.³ In this compact little book (a Cambridge Element), Sentello presents his research among Gambian migrants to Italy. He describes their multilingual practices as taking place in a set of systemic constraints and ‘tactics’ that the migrants use to exploit gaps that appear in these constraints. Although not explicitly framed in these terms, this description aligns closely with affordances and constraints as they appear in ecological and complexity-informed theories (such as my own monograph, A language school as a complex system, or the book that Juup Stelma and I wrote, The intentional dynamics of TESOL). Sentello (p. 41) calls for attention to what Suresh Canagarajah called ‘relational ethics’; this is a reminder that agency is exercised in the interstices of systems.

Placed alongside the conversations we have been having in Volos, this book adds a useful layer of nuance. It reminds us that linguistic diversity is not simply something to be celebrated or preserved. Rather, it’s something that is under continuous negotiation under conditions that are not of one’s own choosing.

Second Language Phonology

Considering my background in TESOL, it’s somewhat embarrassing that phonology is not one of my strengths.⁴ This is the reason why I was especially happy to receive, between other LocalLing activities, a copy of Nadia Bouchhioua’s monograph, Second Language Phonology: Acquisition and use. Reading it has been a useful corrective, as it prompted me to revisit aspects of my own teaching practice that I may have taken for granted. If nothing else, it is a timely reminder that areas we consider peripheral to our expertise often have the most to teach us.

Metaphors on rights

Earlier today, I also came across a really interesting publication on how people conceptualise human rights. In a publication at the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, Anna Irene Baka⁵ (2025) points out that in western societies, we often talk about rights using ‘property’ and ‘container’ metaphors: she writes that “One ‘has’ a right, ‘holds’ it, or is its ‘bearer’; rights have ‘scope,’  ‘limits,’ an ‘essence,’ a ‘core,’ and a ‘periphery.’”. But in oriental discourses about rights, metaphors foreground what someone is. For instance, “Rights [are] metaphorically described as branches growing from the root (ben本) of personality”.

I would venture that, in addition to the direct relevance to the way we conceptualise rights, there are important implications about how meaning emerges and (if one combines it with Searle’s thinking about ‘derived’ intentionality) how it becomes ‘sedimented’ into words.⁶ It’s not just ‘difference’, I think, in the sense we sometimes see it in intercultural studies. There seems to be an insight lurking somewhere here about how meaning is generated, stabilised and reworked in language, in an almost morphogenetic cycle. This is very generative conceptual work.

Calls for papers

One of the tangible outcomes of the LocalLing kick-off meeting was the decision to produce a special issue for the journal Philologia Estonica Tallinnensis, entitled “Local Languages in Dialogue: Power, Identity, and Transmission in Contemporary Societies”. The guest editors, Prof. Yamina El Kirat El Allame (Mohammed V University in Rabat, Morocco) and Prof. Merilyn Meristo (Tallinn University, Estonia) invite contributions that discuss the revitalisation, maintenance and promotion of local languages. Submissions should be 6,000 words max., including abstracts and references and should also include a summary in German, French, Spanish, Arabic or Greek. If your work is a good fit for this collection, you can send your abstract to the editors (yelkirat [at] gmail.com and merilyn.meristo [at] tlu.ee) by 1 September 2026.

 In addition to that, let me take the opportunity to remind you of the open invitation to contribute to the European Journal of Education and Language Review, which I co-edit. We are an open-access journal, operating on a diamond model (which means that we do not charge article processing fees). Our focus is on work at the intersection of language education, power, and identity, and we are especially keen to support work that is methodologically innovative.

Behind the scenes

Behind the scenes, the work of the past month has been less linear than the narrative above might suggest. Coordinating a prolonged and multi-layered event such as LocalLing involves a constant recalibration of priorities: documents that need to be ready sooner than expected, payments that are made later than promised, communications that do not always align as neatly as one would hope, and a steady stream of small decisions that accumulate into something resembling direction.

This was a month that sometimes tested my commitment to academia, and it tested my loyalty to my department and university much more strongly. When thinking about the time I left Graz, I struggle to pinpoint specific frustrating and hurtful incidents, which were powerful enough shaped my decision to continue my career elsewhere. In this sense, the space I am occupying now is different. My frustration does not stem from the cumulative effect of minor misalignments; it’s the sudden awareness of a major mismatch, repeatedly and powerfully restated, between my values and those around me, a misalignment that remains hidden in rhetoric but is apparent in actions.

In such moments, the question is not whether difficulties arise (they do, inevitably), but how one chooses to respond to them. The challenge is how to continue to act in ways consistent with the standards I set for my work, and whether the surrounding conditions align with these standards. If there is a lesson I learnt this month, it is perhaps that institutional belonging is not a static condition but an ongoing negotiation, one that takes shape by friendship and loyalty and by responses to strain. And while such strain unsettles,⁷ it can also clarify what one values, and what one is prepared to invest in sustaining.

Looking ahead

Looking towards the future, my main commitment will be to convene the ECML network meeting in Graz (9-10 April). I am always fond of visiting Graz, and reconnecting with friends there, so this is something I am looking forward to. Later in April, I will be joining Francesca Raffi and a panel of experts at the University of Macerata in Italy for a panel discussion entitled Artificial Intelligence in English Language and Translation: Bridging Research and Practice. As always, if you happen to be able to join, please do!

Footnotes

1. About twenty years ago, I was at the University of Athens, delivering my first ever presentation to a lecture hall full of students. I was as scared as you might imagine, barely able to lift my eyes from my notes. But when I eventually did, I saw a room full of students taking notes of what I was saying. It was hard to believe that they were listening to me. Academic leadership still feels very much like this. ↩︎
2. I created this interactive dashboard with help from Claude. It turned out pretty, I think. But I am also conscious of the irony about developing AI literacy resources during a month when my own use of AI has been mostly confined to formatting documents and building interactive widgets: useful stuff, but a long way from the thoughtful pedagogical integration I would hope we are encouraging. ↩︎
3. This, by the way, is free to read for a few weeks. You may want to visit the Cambridge Elements website and download your copy before it’s paywalled. ↩︎
4. The first university lecture I ever attended was an introduction to phonology. I was one of the 2-3 students who got a 10/10 grade. Perhaps that gave me the impression that I had mastered everything there was to know about the topic, because that was the last time I opened a phonology textbook. ↩︎
5. Still on track to receive the Nobel prize she deserves. ↩︎
6. Very briefly, Searle suggests that we ‘deposit’ meaning in words, and that repeated usage loads this meaning onto them. The meaning does not come from the word; it’s a reflection of what users meant (‘intended’) when their conscious minds deployed it in communication. ↩︎
7. Rather: “…because such strain unsettles…” ↩︎

---