Massimiliano Spotti is assistant professor at the Department of Cultural Studies at Tilburg University, The Netherlands. He is also deputy director of Babylon – Centre for the Study of Superdiversity at the same institution. His research tackles the theme of asylum seeking and identity construction through the analysis of social media influence on the doings of asylum seekers. He has published his work in several peer-reviewed journals including Linguistics and Education, Diversities, Journal of Language, Identity and Education, Applied Linguistics Review as well as co-editor of the Volume Language and Superdiversity (Routledge 2016).

Jan Blommaert is Professor of Language, Culture and Globalization and Director of the Babylon Center at Tilburg University, The Netherlands, and Professor of African Linguistics and Sociolinguistics at Ghent University, Belgium. He holds honorary appointments at University of the Western Cape (South Africa) and Beijing Language and Culture University (China) and is group leader of the Max Planck Sociolinguistic Diversity Working Group. He has published widely on language ideologies and language inequality in the context of globalization. Publications include Ethnography, Superdiversity and Linguistic Landscapes: Chronicles of Complexity (Multilingual Matters 2013), The Sociolinguistics of Globalization (Cambridge University Press, 2010), Ethnographic Fieldwork: A Beginner’s Guide (Multilingual Matters 2010), Grassroots Literacy (Routledge, 2008), Discourse: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2005), and Language Ideological Debates (Mouton de Gruyter, 1999).