September 7, 2018. The summer of 2018 was really busy, especially with various conferences that I attended. Really enjoyed the wonderful conversations with colleagues and friends from Canada, US, Estonia and more. Meeting new people, dicsussing exciting future projects helps to charge the batteries for the next academic year. I attended the following conferences:

1) CSSHE and CSSE in Regina, SK. Congress is always wonderful and the host city of Regina really surpassed our expectations. Everybody was so friendly, welcoming. They had even organized golf carts to take the tired participants around the campus... As a Board member of CSSHE I have the opportunity to follow how the conference comes alive from the early program planning stages to the actual presentations. Together with Roopa Desai Trilokear (York University) and Kumari Beck (Simon Frazer University), we presented our paper titled “Wicked problems” in Equity, Diversity and Inclusivity Policy Agendas – The Missing Discourse of Internationalization'. Publication to be followed, hopefully :)

2) AABS (Association for the Advancement of the Baltic Studies) in Stanford, California, US. What a campus and how well-organized conference! Kudos to Liisi Esse, who was the main powerhouse behind putting the whole conference together. Cngratulations also to the new AABS President - Andres Kasekamp who recently took a professor position at the University of Toronto. It was great to connect with many academics from the University of Tartu as well as many from Latvia and Lithuania. My presentation was titled 'The ‘Hot Button’ Issue of Language in the Higher Education Administration of the Baltic States'. Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies (AABS), and it triggered quite an interesting response from the audience. This was my first ever AABS confernce and definitely will not be the last. 

3) LPP (Language Policy and Planning Conference) in Toronto/OISE. Another first for me to attend a conference meant for linguists! Another fantastic experience. I was presenting with Soon Young Jang, a doctoral student at OISE. The title of our paper was "Governing Language Policies:Universities as Makers or Breakers of Linguistic Diversity". The presentation is based on the publication that you can access HERE.

4) ECSA-Canada (European Community Studies Association) - Conference was held in Toronto, Canada and my presentation was focusing on internationalizaiton and was titled "International Education as Public Policy – Comparing Policy Approaches in Canada & EU”.