March 13-16, 2027
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Things to do/ Attractions / Itineraries
Conference Host Hotel:
Renissance Atlanta Waverly Hotel
2450 Galleria Parkway | Atlanta, GA 30339
Things to Do in Atlanta During AAAL 2027:
Welcome to Georgia! If you have some free time during the conference, here are several opportunities to explore Atlanta and its surrounding area. Some activities can be done independently, while others may be especially appealing as optional AAAL group experiences. Several have particularly strong connections to language, culture, education, storytelling, and communication.
⚾ Explore Truist Park and The Battery Atlanta
For a distinctly Atlanta experience close to the conference area, consider a behind-the-scenes tour of Truist Park, home of the Atlanta Braves. Tours typically include areas such as the dugout, press box, Monument Garden, and other spaces not normally accessible to visitors.
Individual participants can book a tour directly, or AAAL could potentially arrange a group tour.
More information:
Truist Park Tours
The adjacent Battery Atlanta offers restaurants, shops, entertainment, and places to gather before or after a tour.
✊ Explore Atlanta's Civil Rights History
Atlanta is an important center for the history of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement and offers several ways to explore this history.
Civil Rights Tours Atlanta offers guided tours of Atlanta's civil rights sites and historic neighborhoods. This is an especially interesting option for AAAL participants because the history of the movement provides opportunities to think about rhetoric, public discourse, language and identity, race and language, literacy, and language as a tool for social change.
More information:
Civil Rights Tours Atlanta
Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park
Another option is to visit the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park, which includes the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church area, King's birth-home neighborhood, and other sites connected with his life and work.
More information:
Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park
National Center for Civil and Human Rights
Located downtown near Centennial Olympic Park, the National Center for Civil and Human Rights connects the U.S. Civil Rights Movement with contemporary human-rights issues around the world. It can be visited independently and works well as a relatively short cultural excursion.
More information:
National Center for Civil and Human Rights
🧸 Center for Puppetry Arts: Puppetry, Storytelling, and Language Education
The Center for Puppetry Arts is an especially good option for educators and scholars interested in language, literacy, storytelling, multimodality, and children's education.
The Center houses the Jim Henson Collection, featuring puppets and artifacts from productions including Sesame Street, The Muppet Show, Fraggle Rock, The Dark Crystal, and Labyrinth. It also offers performances, museum exhibitions, and hands-on puppet-making workshops.
For AAAL participants, a workshop focused on using puppets for language teaching could be an especially interesting optional activity. A standard workshop includes puppet-making and participants may consider applications related to L2 teaching.
More information:
Center for Puppetry Arts
Make a Puppet! Workshop
The Center is also presenting Penguin in My Pocket during the AAAL conference period (March 10–21, 2027), providing another possible option for participants interested in performance, storytelling, and children's theater.
🎭 Alice, Wonderland, and Translation
The Alliance Theatre is presenting Alice in Neverland during the conference period. For AAAL participants, this could provide a particularly interesting cultural and linguistic experience given the possibilities for discussing translation, adaptation, wordplay, nonsense language, children's literature, and the movement of texts across languages and cultures.
More information:
Alliance Theatre – Alice in Neverland
🥤 World of Coca-Cola
For a more traditional Atlanta tourist experience, World of Coca-Cola offers an interactive history of one of Atlanta's most famous companies and global brands.
For applied linguists, there are also interesting connections to globalization, advertising discourse, multilingual marketing, translation/localization, cultural adaptation, and the use of language in constructing global brands.
The attraction is located downtown near the Georgia Aquarium, Centennial Olympic Park, and the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, making it easy to combine several attractions in one outing.
More information:
World of Coca-Cola
🚶 Ponce City Market + Atlanta BeltLine
For participants who want to experience contemporary Atlanta, Ponce City Market and the Atlanta BeltLine Eastside Trail make a particularly good combination.
Ponce City Market occupies a historic Sears building and includes restaurants, shops, and gathering spaces. From there, visitors can walk along the BeltLine, a major urban redevelopment and public-space project.
This could be an especially interesting informal field experience for applied linguists: participants can observe linguistic landscapes, multilingual signage, advertising, public art, neighborhood identities, and everyday language practices while walking through a changing part of Atlanta.
More information:
Ponce City Market
Atlanta BeltLine
🏛️ Atlanta History Center
The Atlanta History Center in Buckhead offers a broader introduction to Atlanta and Georgia history, with museum exhibitions, historic houses, gardens, and extensive grounds.
This is a good option for participants interested in understanding Atlanta beyond the downtown tourist sites. It can also be combined with other activities in Buckhead.
More information:
Atlanta History Center
Reservations and Transportation:
Advance reservations would be advisable for those who wish to attend in groups. Transportation may also be needed for activities outside the immediate conference area. We regret we do not offer comprehensive public transportation in our area. Participants can use ride applications (e.g. Uber, Lyft) or hire a transportation service such as:
https://andystransportservices.com/
Air Travel & Transportation Information:
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https://www.lyft.com/ | |
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https://www.uber.com/ | |
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(link to plan your trip with Marta - this will be real time for guests that want to use it) |
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