Professor Suresh Canagarajah
Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Applied Linguistics, English, and Asian Studies,
Pennsylvania State University, USA
Professor Suresh Canagarajah, a Sri Lankan Tamil scholar in the fields of sociolinguistics, literacy, and English language teaching, is currently the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Applied Linguistics, English, and Asian Studies at Pennsylvania State University. He is best known for introducing orientations to language and education from traditions and practices in the Global South to diversify dominant norms and policies in higher education and academia. He has played a leading role in empirically studying, theorizing, and defining the notion of translingual practice, which introduces a way of looking at communication as exceeding bounded languages and involving a negotiation of diverse semiotic repertoires, including words, multimodal resources, objects and artifacts, and material structures. He treats this ecological, ethical, and inclusive orientation to speaking and writing as part of his South Asian heritage and ancient practices in the Global South, which were later suppressed by European colonization.
Professor Stephen May
Professor Stephen May, School of Māori and Indigenous Education, Faculty of Education and Social Work, University of Auckland, New Zealand
Professor Stephen May is a Professor in Te Puna Wānanga (School of Māori and Indigenous Education) in the Faculty of Education and Social Work and the Director of the cross-faculty and interdisciplinary Master of Regional Development program at the University of Auckland. He is also an Honorary Professor at the University of Tartu, Estonia, and at Taiyuan University of Technology, China.
He is an international authority on language rights, language policy, language revitalisation, language education (especially, Indigenous, bilingual, and multilingual education), critical multiculturalism, and the "multilingual turn". To date, he has published 27 books and over 100 articles and chapters in these areas and since 2022 has been named in the top two percent of scientists globally in the field of language education in Stanford University's citation index. He is the Editor in Chief of the 10-volume Encyclopedia of Language and Education (3rd ed. Springer, 2017) and a Founding Editor of the international, interdisciplinary journal, Ethnicities.
In 2023, Professor May received the Royal Society of New Zealand, Te Apārangi, Mason Durie Medal awarded to New Zealand's pre-eminent social scientist and in 2018, he was awarded the McKenzie Award by the New Zealand Association of Educational Research (NZARE), the preeminent award for educational research in New Zealand. In 2015 he became an American Educational Research Association (AERA) fellow and was elected a Te Apārangi/Royal Society of New Zealand Fellow (FRSNZ) in 2016.
In 2008, Professor May was a Fulbright Senior Scholar, based at Arizona State University and City University New York, and in 2016 he was a Visiting Scholar at the University of the Basque Country, San Sebastian. From 2005 to 2015, he was an Associate Editor of Language Policy. He began his professional career as a secondary teacher of English and ESL in New Zealand and has subsequently taught in universities in New Zealand, Britain, USA and Canada. The latter include the Sociology Department of the University of Bristol, UK, where he remains affiliated with the Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship, and the University of Waikato, where he was Foundation Professor of Language and Literacy Education.
Professor Sender Dovchin
Senior Principal Research Fellow, Curtin University, Australia
Professor Sender Dovchin is a Senior Principal Research Fellow and an Australian Research Council Fellow. Her Australian Research Council DECRA (Discovery Early Career Researcher Award) project focuses on empowering vulnerable youth in Australia by combatting linguistic racism. The project aims to investigate how culturally and linguistically diverse young Australians experience discrimination in their daily lives because of how they speak. Previously, she was an Associate Professor at the Centre for Language Research, The University of Aizu, Japan and was awarded Young Scientist (Kakenhi) by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.
Professor Dovchin is also an Editor-in-Chief of the Australian Review of Applied Linguistics. She was identified as “Top Researcher in the field of Language & Linguistics” under The Humanities, Arts & Literature of The Australian's 2021 Research Magazine and Top 250 Researchers in Australia in 2021. Her research pragmatically contributes to the second language education of the young generation living in the peripheries, providing a pedagogical view to accommodate the multiple co-existences of linguistic diversity in a globalized world. She has authored articles in top-tier international peer-reviewed journals, such as Applied Linguistics, Journal of Sociolinguistics, System, TESOL Quarterly, International Journal of Multilingualism, World Englishes, Asian Englishes, English Today, International Journal Bilingualism and Bilingual Education, International Journal of Multilingual Research, Journal of Multicultural Discourses, International Journal Bilingualism, Ethnicities, Multilingua, Linguistics and Education, among others. She has authored six books with international publishers such as Routledge, Springer, Palgrave Macmillan and Multilingual Matters. Dr. Dovchin has had notable research funding success, including four external international and national research grants as the lead and co-investigator.