This year, we asked participants to reflect on the terms Margins and Mergence. Linguistic anthropology has a robust tradition of studying the central place of language in social processes of marginalization, with work considering the role of language in constructing, maintaining, and refiguring social categories such as race, gender, class, age, nation, etc. We invited participants to explore the kind of ideologizing work (Gal and Irvine 2019) in which differentiations and contrasts are made, boundaries are drawn, and hierarchies are imposed. To think about margins is to think of edges, borders, peripheries and centers, perspectives, positionings, and frames of reference. How are such coordinates drawn?  How are axes, directionality, and movement accomplished or imagined? What are the backgrounds against which margins are foregrounded? Reflecting on mergence allows us to consider movement and tensions. Do moments of mergence consistently result in unity, oneness, and cooperation? How do processes of blending, fusing, or juxtaposing become semiotically constituted? And what can emerge from acts of merging?