KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
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Suresh Canagarajah
Pennsylvania State University
Suresh Canagarajah is the Evan Pugh University Professor at Pennsylvania State University. He teaches courses in Global Englishes, Multilingual Academic Writing, Disability Studies, and Decolonizing Theories. He was formerly the editor of the TESOL Quarterly and President of the American Association of Applied Linguistics. His Routledge Handbook on Language and Migration (Routledge 2017) won the 2020 best book award from the American Association of Applied Linguistics. He’s the founding director of the Consortium for Democratizing Academic Publishing and Knowledge which mentors multilingual and minoritized scholars into research publishing.
Julia Molinari
Open University (OU) Graduate School
Julia Molinari holds several academic roles. She is Academic Literacies Lead and Lecturer in Professional Academic Communication in English (PACE) at the Open University (OU) Graduate School in the UK, an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the History Department of University College London (UCL), and an Academic Mentor. She is also a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (SFHEA) and holds a PhD on Academic Writing jointly awarded by the School of Education and the Department of Philosophy at the University of Nottingham, UK. Most notably, Julia has authored What Makes Writing Academic: Re-thinking Theory for Practice (Bloomsbury, 2022), a book that argues for diversifying and re-imagining academic texts and practices in the interests of knowledge. Julia is bilingual in English and Italian and fluent in French.
Federico navarro
Universidad de O’Higgin
Federico Navarro holds a B.A. from the Universidad de Buenos Aires and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the Universidad de Valladolid. He is a full professor at the Universidad de O’Higgins, where he has also served as the Dean of the School of Education. He has been the founding chair of the Latin American Association of Writing Studies in Higher Education and Professional Contexts (ALES). He has been the principal investigator on eight research projects in Chile and Argentina. He has produced numerous publications on language and education in 12 countries, including 13 books and journal special issues, 45 articles in scientific journals, and 36 book chapters. Until recently, he served as the Editor-in-Chief of International Exchanges: Latin America Section at The WAC Clearinghouse. His topics of interest include reading and writing at the university, writing and disciplinarity, and educational linguistics. His most recent project explored the connections between writing and academic achievement.
CONFERENCES
Multilingual Academic Literacies: An Assemblage of Technological, Social, and Semiotic Resources
Suresh Canagarajah
This presentation is an embodied and personal rendition, situated in the author’s South Asian literacies as illustrative of decolonial orientations. The presentation highlights the principles of embodiment and relationality as significant for Southern communities, and contrasts them with texts being treated as autonomous, individual, and instrumental in the European tradition. The difference will be illustrated through the author’s study of scientific research writing to demonstrate how its entextualization involves the distributed practice of diverse social networks, teachnological resources, and semiotic repertoires across expansive space and time.
AI Realism: Reclaiming the Human in AI-enhanced Academic Literacies
Julia Molinari
Language technologies (LTs) are not new and a life without them means many things to many people: unimaginable, impractical, unavoidable, undesirable, undemocratic, maybe even a welcome relief. LTs include the familiar (dictionaries, machine translators, spellcheckers) and now the unfamiliar, which is rapidly becoming the new normal: LLMs (Large Language Models) powered by GenAI (GenerativeAI) and, apparently, AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) are automating writing in unprecedented ways.
I wish to use this talk to press pause, just for a moment, to catch our collective breaths.
I would like to halt the dizzying speed at which these technologies are affecting our professional and personal existence by sharing a critical realist perspective (Archer & Maccarini, 2023) on LTs and what it means to be human (Molinari, 2025). This includes reflecting on LTs’ implications for academic literacies broadly understood as multisemiotic modes of communication, which include multilingualism (Lillis & Tuck, 2025). AI Realism entails neither techno-determinism nor techno-enthusiasm nor luddism. Rather, it provides a critical space in which to interrogate why AI has so abruptly irrupted into everyday life and how we might want to respond as educators. For example, it’s no coincidence that ChatGPT was released in the wake of the COVID19 pandemic (Hussain et al., 2024), with significant implications for the development of proctoring and surveillance technologies (McKenna, 2022). It’s also no coincidence that AI is associated with fascist ideologies (McQuillan, 2022). That it remains a black box in terms of how it is trained and by whom also raises concerns for academic writing (Gallagher, 2020). All this presents ideological challenges and opportunities for academic literacies that include, for example, re-visiting what we mean by criticality and agency if these foundational tenets of academic writing theory and practice are being deferred to GenAI.
References
Archer, M. S., & Maccarini, A. M. (Eds.). (2023). What is Essential to Being Human? Can AI Robots Not Share It? Routledge.
Gallagher, J. R. (2020). The Ethics of Writing for Algorithmic Audiences. Computers and Composition, 57, 102583. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2020.102583
Hussain, T., Wang, D., & Li, B. (2024). The influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on the adoption and impact of AI ChatGPT: Challenges, applications, and ethical considerations. Acta Psychologica, 246, 104264. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2024.104264
Lillis, T., & Tuck, J. (2025). Academic literacies: a critical lens for a global academy.
McKenna, S. (2022). Neoliberalism’s conditioning effects on the university and the example of proctoring during COVID-19 and since. Journal of Critical Realism, 21(5), 502-515. https://doi.org/10.1080/14767430.2022.2100612
McQuillan, D. (2022). Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence. Bristol University Press.
Molinari, J. (2025). What Makes Academic Writing Human(e): a Critical Realist Response. In J. Bouchard & K. Zotzmann (Eds.), Critical Realism in Applied Linguistics. Cambridge University Press forthcoming.
“Writing poems and songs has also helped me”: Unpacking the Relationship Between Literacy Practices and Academic Achievement
Frederico Navarro
It is often assumed that reading and writing play a fundamental role in learning gains, success in assessments, and overall academic achievement in higher education. This assumption underpins most academic writing instruction and support initiatives implemented globally. However, evidence supporting this link remains fragmented and usually lacks ecological validity; the specific impact of reading and writing traits is unclear; and self-directed or community-based literacy practices are frequently overlooked.
Adopting a sociocultural perspective and drawing on data collected in the Global South, this presentation investigates what high-performing university students do with reading and writing in contrast to students who consistently struggle to pass their courses. Findings indicate that only high-performing students consult external sources and engage in independent research, although all undergraduates report using common strategies such as underlining, note-taking, and planning. Furthermore, while all students describe engaging in a wide range of complex and empowering vernacular literacy practices, high-performing students identify significantly more continuities—characterized by greater rhetorical complexity—between academic and non-academic domains. Finally, high-performing students frequently engage in collaborative reading and writing as a self-directed learning strategy, whereas low-performing students tend to work alone unless collaboration is explicitly required by instructors.
This study broadens our understanding on literacy and academic achievement by foregrounding the role of private and community-based literacy practices in educational trajectories, while also acknowledging the complex literacy lives of students regardless of their presumed “academic success.” Moreover, the findings support the development of an evidence-based literacy pedagogy that engages with the languages, cultures, and worldviews of new student populations.