AILA 2024 in Kuala Lumpur: Day 1 Highlights

International Association of Applied Linguistics (AILA) 60th Anniversary World Congress, themed to linguistic diversity, equity, inclusion, and sustainability, has brought over 1,600 delegates from nearly 70 countries together in the vibrant and diverse metropolis of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Members of the Next Generation Literacies Network at AILA 2024

For me, the highlight of Day 1 was the keynote by Ingrid Piller, who spoke about “How can we make our research diverse, inclusive, and sustainable?”

Ingrid shared her thoughts on the following critical issues:

1. The diversity problem in Applied Linguistics with peripheral multilingual scholars confronting epistemic exclusion in global academic knowledge production
2. The looming textocalypse, a crisis of reception and degradation of knowledge
3. The open research lifecycle
4. The FAIR principles in open data
5. Life in a New Language as a working model for data-sharing and community building

I was most impressed by two aspects of her speech. First, Ingrid’s discussion of the textpocalypse struck a chord. She illustrated this with a poignant image of a woman collecting a brick from the Berlin Wall—a relic filled with personal meaning, as the Wall once separated her from her brother. Although Ingrid took copious notes on that rainy day, she found it almost impossible to capture and convey the subtle emotions and lived experiences that the scene evoked. This raises profound questions about how we can achieve the embodiment of research and ensure that the depth of human experience is retained in our digital assets.

Ingrid also shared the story behind Life in a New Language, a group ethnography project that explores the language learning and settlement experiences of 130 migrants to Australia from 34 countries over 20 years. The project underscores the benefits and challenges of data-sharing and reuse, aiming to inspire more collaborative research.

This reminded me of the unbooking project I’m involved in, which uses a collective group name instead of listing individual authors for the book as a whole. Through our relationships with one another as well as with the concepts that shape our scholarship, we hold one another accountable to building interdependent, sustainable relations around data creation and interpretation across our multiple continental locations.

Ingrid concluded with a quote by Alexander von Humboldt:

Ideas can only be useful if they come alive in many minds.

This powerful reminder calls us back to our core as researchers: to make meaningful connections through our work. It’s why we gather at conferences like AILA—to exchange knowledge in ways that are impactful, to carry forward our collective understanding across diverse geographic, linguistic, and epistemic landscapes, to question and reflect on making writing meaningful, and to reimagine knowledge-making by redefining researcher responsibility and productivity in diverse, inclusive, and sustainable academic practices.