The Department of Social Anthropology and History of the University of the Aegean has announced the development of The Laboratory for Ethnographic Approaches to the Study of Language (LESoL). The goal of LESoL is to support linguistic research in a social science environment through cultivation of an ethnographic orientation in data collection and analysis. LESoL aims at supporting teaching and research at undergraduate, graduate, doctoral, and post-doctoral level through the publication of working papers (in English and Greek), a specialized library, collaborations with other research centers and academic institutions at home and abroad, seminars, symposia, and a summer school. We hope to attract collaborators who focus on fields such as pragmatics, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, conversation analysis and take a keen interest in contemporary linguistic landscape research.

The inaugural projects of the Lab are:

• the launching of «Aegean Working Papers in Anthropological Linguistics», an online, free-access publication to appear in January 2017. We hope to be in a position to publish the journal twice a year (January and July) and we welcome suggestions for special issues and guest editors in the immediate future
• a two-day symposium on the linguistic landscape in Greece and the Balkans (TBA)
• the exhaustive investigation of the changing Linguistic Landscape of Lesvos, starting with the town of Mytilene and progressively moving towards other areas
• a series of seminars entitled “Language, Society, and Ethnography” to be held on Tuesday evenings in Spring 2017.