July 2026: Notes on Becoming, and Other Unfinished Business

It’s been a while since I’ve written one of these updates, I realise, and the realisation comes with an amount of guilt. I am not sure why: I have not been busier in the last two months than I normally am, and, at any rate, busyness has never been a particularly good predictor of whether I write. So the guilt is really about having let a conversation go quiet without meaning to, and then not knowing how to resume it without accounting for the silence. Which is, I suppose, exactly what I am doing now.

Publications

Earlier in my career, I used to do one writing project at a time: I’d finish one chapter before I even began thinking about the next one. I don’t really know how or when that changed — it was probably not deliberate, and I don’t think it was something of which I have been very conscious. It was only when I began thinking about how to write this post that I realised how being involved in four book projects at the same time involves living in several states of becoming.

Being and Becoming
a Plurilingual Academic

One project that is very close to my heart is Be(co)ming a multilingual academic, an edited collection that I’ve been putting together with Richard Fay.¹ Perhaps it’s not evident in its title, but this is a book about the contradictions in academic life: becoming fluent in the English lingua academica while retaining one’s linguistic identity, balancing epistemic flows between the Global North and South, finding (or creating) one’s place among local and global ways of being an academic. I have written somewhere that every book, read properly, tells its author’s story, and I think that this is –again– an attempt to figure myself out through the narratives of people whose experiences resonate with mine – perhaps even with yours, too.

Linguistic Ecologies

In a different mode, I spent a lot of enjoyable time last month reading descriptions of linguistic ecologies from several countries, ranging from Colombia to Sri Lanka, sent in by our LocalLing colleagues for an upcoming book on linguistic diversity. What is interesting about this project is that, although each chapter gives readers information about local linguistic realities, they also deliver a number of important theoretical points that transcend specific places. Putting all these thoughts together in the editorial introduction will be a challenge I am very much looking forward to engaging with.

Empowering Language Teachers

A third project, the Empowering Language Teachers through Research Literacy volume, which I am editing with Kenan Dikilitaş and Christina Ringel, is nearing completion. With the submission deadline looming at the end of November, we have now received 16 out of the 17 chapters in the collection in their revised form —and, if I were not writing this post, I would be drafting the introduction chapter now. The research literacy community is not my natural academic home: it’s a home I discovered more recently, and one in which I’ve found myself comfortable.² As the book comes closer to completion, I find myself closer to this discourse and this community in ways that I had not expected, and that is giving me a sense of accomplishment.

Research Literacy at Schools

More distantly in the publication horizon, a new collaboration is beginning to take shape, this time with my colleague Sofia Tsioli. This will be an edited book, in Modern Greek, in which we will bring together the perspectives of several experts in the Greek context about the ways in which research literacy can contribute to better practice in school. The tensions I wrote about above, between thinking in English and writing in Greek, and about being aware both of the foreignness of ‘research literacy’ to Greek professional discourse and of its usefulness, are relevant here too – this is a problem to tackle as we move ahead with the project.

Research updates

Books have a shape: they have a beginning, an end, and even multi-authored works with dozens of contributors can fit into a nicely formatted file. Research projects are more diffuse, more unwieldy, but rewarding in similar ways.

ReaLitea

The highlight of the Research Literacy of Teachers (ReaLiTea) project was our recent transnational meeting in Bergen, hosted by Kenan Dikilitaş. These meetings are important for project coordination, especially as we move towards the end of the project, because they help us tie up loose ends and make sure all the components fit together. One development we are quite proud of is our new podcast series, curated by Raul Garcia. Also, by the end of the summer, we expect to have the various materials that already exist in draft form on our website finalised, also taking into account the feedback from our expert critical friends. We are also revising our Research Literacy Framework by adding descriptors that are more relevant to novice teacher-researchers, such as students at the start of their initial teacher training.

LocalLing

After our initial meeting in Volos in March 2026, most LocalLing members have been actively deepening our collaboration. In July, Caroline Calvet, from the University of Montpellier, visited the University of Zaragoza for work focusing on the revitalisation of Aragonese and Occitan. At the same time, the ITQAN Foundation in Morocco hosted a three-day programme on language revitalisation, with the participation of our Tunisian partner Nadia Bouchhioua from the University of Manouba. And later in the month, I was delighted to host our Spanish partners Iris Orosia Campos Bandres and Daniel Laliena Cantero, who braved the heatwave and returned to Volos to continue work on the Linguistic Ecologies book.

AI Lang

In parallel, the AI Lang project has been making progress, as we continue to finalise the Moodle course and the guidelines. This is the kind of work that seems to resist narration: no headline news, just content getting iteratively sharper every time we return to it, and work that keeps resurfacing the same question, of how to help teachers make sense of artificial intelligence in ways that neither trust the technology nor distrust the teacher.

Readings

One of the things I like most about the summer is that it gives me more freedom to read. Not that I’d ever be able to catch up with the growing stack of books and PDFs that I gather throughout the academic year, but still enough to keep one’s intellectual curiosity from starving.

Decolonising Research Practices in Education

A book I particularly enjoyed was Paul Meighan’s (2026) Decolonising Research Practices in Education. In this fairly compact book, Meighan introduces the idea of Dùthchas, a concept borrowed from Indigenous Gaelic thinking, intertwining kinship, responsibility to land, and place-based belonging. In the book, Meighan goes on to show how to implement this onto-epistemic positioning at various stages of research, such as data generation and analysis (reframed as ‘knowledge gathering’ and ‘generation’, respectively), alternating explanation with practical tips (e.g., “Work as a cycle, not a checklist: Design and Engagement → Knowledge Gathering → Knowledge Generation → Knowledge Sharing → Return and Sustain”, p. 85). It’s a small, dense book, and I suspect I’ll be returning to it as I think about synthesising the various contributions in the books I edit.

Unfinished:
The Anthropology of Becoming

A somewhat more challenging book I’ve come across is an edited collection by João Biehl and Peter Locke, entitled Unfinished: The Anthropology of Becoming (2017). The central premise of the book is that human lives should not be understood as incomplete versions of ‘finished’ selves; they are intrinsically unfinished, in a perpetual process of becoming. This kind of unfinishedness is, the editors argue, “both [a] precondition and [a] product of becoming”, and the contributions that make up the volume (ranging from imagining possible futures even amid severe suffering to decision making under radical uncertainty) explore what this condition involves and how it might be studied.

We tell stories that are as much material and political-economic as personal and ethical. We are always working outward: pulling into line with our subjects, moving sideways to follow them, getting out of their way, returning and sitting with them, drawing out characters, probing philosophical questions, bringing certain concepts into focus, and letting others emerge only partially, but meaningfully so.

Our storytelling destabilizes hierarchies of expertise and confuses the distinction between the finished and the unfinished, illuminating the ethnographic open systems in which anthropologists and subjects are entangled, folded into lives, transformations, and thinking across time and space. (Biehl & Locke, 2017, p. xii)

From my own epistemological starting point, complexity thinking, this is an intuitively appealing perspective, even though the book’s anchoring in Deleuze and Foucault stubbornly resists formal theoretical integration even when the vocabulary overlaps.

From the Journal

July also marked the publication of the second issue of the European Journal of Education and Language Review (EJELR). I have blogged about this earlier in the month, so I will not reiterate the points I’ve made there. However, I do want to use this space to say a few words of appreciation for everyone who has invested time in writing, reviewing, and reading the articles that we have published.

When I was invited to take charge of this project, I was conscious of the challenges involved in soliciting content and arranging peer review. These are not trivial, and the journal does require a substantial investment in time. But we now have a steady flow of articles coming in, peer review is reasonably efficient,³ and we seem to be achieving our publication targets without having to compromise in quality. This would not have been possible without the support from friends and colleagues, for which I am most grateful.

Calls for papers

As always, there is a standing invitation for papers in the EJELR, so if you are working on projects that focus on the intersections between language, education, power, and identity, we would love to hear from you.

Drawing the Language Teacher

Some of you may also be interested in a call for papers for an edited volume, provisionally titled Drawing the Language Teacher: Visual Stories of Becoming and Unbecoming in ELT. This collection, edited by Nurdan Kavakli Ulutas, Sezen Arslan, Ufuk Keleş, and Maria Nayr de Pinho Correia Ibrahim, will be submitted to Multilingual Matters in the first instance. Chapters will run to 3,000 to 5,000 words with one to three original drawings or artefacts, and will focus on topics such as (a) Becoming, first shaping(s) of a professional self; (b) Unbecoming, attrition, loss, and drift; (c) Carrying, labour, care, and life alongside scholarship; and (d) Facing, relational portraits, in which teacher educators draw the teachers they trained, and teachers draw those who taught them. If this appeals, let me know, and I will happily put you in touch with the editors.

Digital approaches to teaching less common languages

Elsewhere, the Linguistics Department at Ohio University (OU) will be holding a two-day conference on 17–18 October, entitled Digital approaches to teaching less commonly taught and Indigenous languages. The conference organisers welcome a variety of submissions, such as research papers, classroom reports, poster presentations, technology reviews, and workshops. Abstracts can be submitted through the conference website by 16th August.

From the blog

At about this time last year, I started publishing in this blog at a relatively regular rhythm: once a week, give or take. I managed to keep up at this rate for months, until May. I am not sure what happened then… There were several draft posts ready to publish in my queue, and even more ideas in various states of readiness, but I suddenly felt completely demotivated to even reload the publishing queue. I came out of this state of mind earlier this month and have published several posts since then, ranging from publication announcements to reflections on the use of AI. If you missed these, you can read them by clicking below.

Behind the scenes

Not everything landed this month: First, an editorial post for which I had applied went to someone else, slightly bruising my ego. Then, a funding bid into which I had put real effort didn’t make it through. But these things don’t matter much: I don’t think people will remember me for editing a journal section, and there will be other project calls.

However, I had an opportunity to remember what matters in our graduation ceremony. The truth is, I don’t particularly enjoy graduation ceremonies: I find them noisy and tiring; they make me sad because the better students move on, and they make me angry and frustrated when others graduate before they have learnt all that they should.⁴ At the same time, watching a cohort of students cross a stage from which there was no coming back reminded me that this is the actual work. It reminded me that I wanted to be more present in their studies, and that if –for most of them– I will only be a small part of their becoming, I will at least be a part that deserves remembering.

Looking ahead

As for what comes next: the deadlines are the same ones I’ve been circling for months, and while September will bring a number of meetings that will move all the projects forward, I don’t think this is the time to think about them. Sometimes, it’s OK for things to be unfinished.

Notes

1. Incidentally, Richard and I have also co-edited Doctoral Study and Getting Published (Fay & Kostoulas, 2025), a book where we use ecological and narrative approaches to follow the trajectories of several early-career academics. ↩︎
2. In the sense that you might find yourself awkwardly comfortable when sitting on a nice couch in a house where you’ve not been formally invited ↩︎
3. We have consistently met our target of a maximum of two days for initial editorial screening (and we make a point of keeping our desk rejections helpful), and although finding reviewers can sometimes take a while, our average processing time for an initial decision is less than eight weeks, which is (much) less than what I experience as an author. ↩︎
4. They also remind me of my own BA graduation, and the very unresolved feelings I have about my time at the University of Athens. ↩︎

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