Writing with co-author Dr. Elise Berman (UNC-Charlotte), Dr. Ben Smith, Associate Professor of Human Development, published an article in the flagship disciplinary journal American Anthropologist. The title of the piece is "De-Naturalizing the Novice: A Critique of the Theory of Language Socialization." This is a theoretical piece that aims to inject a concern with social justice into anthropological theories of socialization. In particular, the goal of the paper is to reformulate the concept "novice" away from a more psychological rendering; we argue that the best way to think of "novicehood" is as an ideological construct that is made sense of in local terms and is implicated in producing trajectories of socialization that are rendered, ideologically, as forms of growth, stagnation, and regression. Dr. Berman and Dr. Smith anticipate being able to elaborate this theoretical account in subsequent empirical and theoretical work.