January 2013

This may not be true in less Nordic areas, but with us in Scandinavia ‘hope is light green’. Whether this idea is generally rooted in associations with the coming of spring, I don’t know, but in my head it has always been. Please receive a couple of good reasons for thinking of SLICE in a light green glow here at the end of January:

Status of our HERA application

We received 4 assessments of our HERA JRP Full Proposal. The assessments are fairly good and leave the door ajar for beams of light green. However, we have learned not to be dazzled. We are cautiously optimistic.

We received the assessments in the late afternoon of December 19… and were allowed a ‘rebuttal’ of 1200 words to be submitted by January 2. The rebuttal was delivered on Christmas Eve! Let me reassure you that it was not delivered by Rudolf and his fellow reindeers, which would have been the only airborne way of delivering from the Norwegian mountain hut where votre vieux rédacteur found himself.  It was uploaded from Cardiff, and I trust Chris Moose was not involved in the delivery, as the picture of him that was  sent to me from Cardiff just before I went north strongly indicated that Chris was even less fit for flying than his alter ego, the Norwegian elg outside my hut door.

We will be informed of the outcome of the selection process in March (not in February, as previously announced).

Whereabouts of Nik Coupland

No matter what happens to our HERA application, light green rays are shed on the future of SLICE by the fact that Nik Coupland since December 1, 2012, is half-time professor of sociolinguistics in Copenhagen, at the Department of Scandinavian Research where many other Danish slicers work. When he is not in Cardiff, which will remain his main domicile, Nik will ‘commute to work’ between Copenhagen and Sydney, where he also has a part-time professorship.

Good news from Sweden

While waiting for the big money to come our way, we have been witnessing many attempts, some of them successful, at establishing local funding of SLICE-related research activities. The latest of such attempts was reported to me a couple of days ago from Sweden, where an application for funding of SLICE/experimental-strand type of research has just been submitted. Involved are SLICE veterans Lena Wenner and Mats Thelander, as well as SLICE new-comer Therese Leinonen.

Big welcome to you Therese!

Let me also express – on behalf of the whole SLICE network, I am sure – delight that you, Mats, continue supporting SLICE activities although you are now on pension.  Such encouragement is invaluable (in many ways more important than funding, which often feels to be just haphazardly distributed money – so let’s all remember to be only cautiously optimistic in that regard).