JALT2024 Plenary Speakers: The Complexities of Diversity: Personal Journeys Across Time and Space

As the title and theme for JALT2024 is Moving JALT into the Future: Opportunity, Diversity, and Excellence, this short piece focuses on the challenges and benefits of diversity that we have experienced throughout our personal and professional lives. Based on a combined total of more than 75 years living as “visible minorities” in England, the USA, Canada, Hong Kong, mainland China and elsewhere, we briefly discuss what it has meant for us to be such minorities over all those decades in all of those places, while acknowledging that not all differences are visible. We also distinguish between academic expertise in diversity versus decades of lived experience, as we believe that the most positive and impactful work in this area needs to be able to draw on and combine both.