This is the opening chapter to The Oxford Handbook of Language Policy and Planning, a project that aims to go beyond just providing a set of summaries of specific sub-fields within Language policy and planning studies (although some will be provided as needed, or can be found elsewhere; e.g., Ricento, 2016; Spolsky, 2012). In this chapter, we address many of the current questions that researchers face under contemporary conditions of change tied to so-called Late Modernity, with an ambition to better understand the current period in which the field of language policy and planning (LPP) operates. Against the background of our particular academic journey as editors of the Handbook, we first provide an overview of the foundations of the field of LPP. After this, we detail the specific questions that have guided the organization of this volume. In the final part, we try to map out some of the different threads of recent LPP research evident in this Handbook, highlighting the issues that scholarly analysis seeks to understand and the approaches to research used in the investigation, and to anticipate some of the generalizations that emerge.