Keynote Speakers
Prof Lourdes ORTEGA
Professor & Faculty Director of Georgetown’s Initiative for Multilingual Studies,
Department of Linguistics
Georgetown University, USA
Biography
Lourdes Ortega is Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University, USA, where she carries out research on multilingualism and education and mentors doctoral students. She is the author of a best-seller textbook Understanding Second Language Acquisition (Routledge 2009) which was translated into Mandarin in 2016. She is currently spending a year-long sabbatical as Distinguished HaBilNet Fellow, furthering the scientific understanding of harmonious bilingualism and language-related well-being. She is recipient of the 2026 AAAL Distinguished Scholarship and Service Award.
Keynote Title
“Flourishing in Many Tongues: Multilingualism and Well-Being”
In this talk I introduce the construct of language-related well-being, and I sketch a potential research program for investigating equitable multilingualism through the research lens of well-being. I also note affinities and dissonances between the psychological frame of well-being and imagined disciplinary futures of decolonial and other social justice projects in applied linguistics and second language acquisition.
