When thinking about a role for linguists in promoting social justice, it is tempting to focus our attention solely on what we can contribute to the world “out there.” Indeed, in light of the many struggles for justice and liberation throughout the world, it is easy to see the urgency in wanting linguistics to contribute to social transformation. Equally important, however, is to recognize that the study of language has been shaped by the world and that oppression doesn't simply exist “out there” but also in research and practice in higher education. Both of us have been actively engaged in a conversation about these oppressive dynamics for the better part of a decade that has carried Anne across three institutions and her associate professor years into being a full professor and across Nelson's assistant professor years into being an associate professor. We have presented together at the American Education Research Association Conference and prepared work geared to an education audience. We have presented together at the Linguistic Society of America's Annual Meeting and prepared materials for the 2019 LSA Statement on Race. Throughout those experiences and conversations, we have constantly come back to the reality that the agendas of linguistics and applied linguistics were set by white and mostly male scholars long before we were professors, yet their ramifications impact us and disproportionately impact the communities that we belong to and do research with.
One effect of the Western European, colonial white male agenda of linguistics has been gatekeeping what counts as linguistics. This gatekeeping is fueled by a need to serve white male-dominated industrial interests in the study of language and the white supremacy of the State (Hutton, Reference Hutton2019). As generative linguistics became the dominant paradigm in linguistics and questions about language below the level of the sentence became the focus in a rush to frame linguistics as a science, questions of power and oppression were pushed out and to the side of linguistics departments under the guise of wanting to create an objective science of language. The major assumption of this theoretical move has been that language has been described as a disembodied set of linguistic features—an assumption that can only be made by white male scholars whose bodies have been framed as the unmarked norm that others are expected to emulate. The result is to frame those of us who refuse to separate our language from our bodies and refuse to study language outside of an analysis of power as not engaged in real linguistics. This disciplinary gatekeeping keeps many scholars from marginalized backgrounds out of the field and ensures that the field remains predominantly white. Indeed, when thinking of the multiple meanings of the term discipline, it should be no surprise that this is the case since the creation of a discipline requires punishing those who refuse to conform to the rules, which is typically those who are members of marginalized groups.
Both of us have seen the effects of this disciplinary prioritizing and gatekeeping in our careers. For example, Nelson once tweeted about the ways that disembodied views of language ensured that linguistics stayed very white and received a barrage of replies that insisted that his refusal to adopt such a view meant that he was not a linguist. Yet, he also received many replies from well-meaning linguists who insisted that this type of gatekeeping actually didn't happen, and that linguistics is an inclusive field that welcomes multiple perspectives. This has not been our experience with the field. For example, Anne still contends with linguistics departments that insist that while they do sociolinguistics, they do not do applied linguistics. This results in a troubling dynamic where there is limited space for discussions of Blackness within the context of the long-standing sociolinguistic study of African American language and culture while the linguistic and cultural interests of many Latinx, Asian, and often Indigenous scholars are swept away under this rhetoric of “we don't do applied linguistics.” In a similar vein, there is often little attention brought to the specific needs of Black language learners within the context of applied linguistics, with the assumptions perhaps being that those interested in Black communities should only do work in sociolinguistics. The ramifications of this disciplinary rigidity can be profound. After all, marginalized scholars are typically not able to fit their marginalization nor their intellectual and social values into one disciplinary perspective and, as a result, often have a harder time getting published because their work is not seen to be a “good fit” for journals and funding sources invested in rigid disciplinary perspectives.
It might be tempting to abandon linguistics completely and do critical work in other areas that encourage focusing our language research agendas on issues of power and oppression. But to not contend with linguistics means shutting this line of scholarship and inquiry out of the arts and sciences areas of the academy; in the U.S., that means keeping this teaching and research away from a great number of undergraduates and from the structurally situated conversations that being in arts and sciences provides researchers at all stages of education. So, for us, the answer isn't to try to escape linguistics but rather to broaden what counts as linguistics in an effort to bring more diverse perspectives into linguistics research and practice. For us, anybody who studies issues of language is a linguist and there are multiple intellectual trajectories that scholars from marginalized backgrounds take in becoming linguists. Indeed, both of us are examples of some of these different trajectories. Having a strong interest in developing a research agenda focused on advocacy work within the Latinx community, Nelson struggled to find a voice for himself within linguistics as traditionally defined, which he felt asked very narrow questions removed from the daily oppression he was interested in working to dismantle. As a result, he decided to pursue a degree in education. In contrast, Anne was greatly dissuaded from pursuing a Ph.D. in education or a position in a school of education because mentors warned about the professional limits that are placed on Black women in the academy and the limits that placed on having the important messages of linguistic and cultural justice restricted to mostly graduate students in schools of education.
Within our different institutional positions, we have spent our entire academic careers critically interrogating the relationship between race and language and working to use our scholarship as a point of entry for challenging racial inequities. It was this shared political commitment that eventually connected us. Anne was warned over and over again in linguistics that focusing on issues of Black linguistic justice—those issues that most impact Black people—would disqualify her from jobs in the highest-ranking linguistics departments. Her insistence on the topic and linguistics for Black people cost her summa cum laude honors as an undergraduate. It also cost her faculty positions at several institutions where, after having been brought in as a target of opportunity candidate, she was told to focus on the linguistic and not the educational aspects of her work (she refused all of those positions) and easy entrée into many journals in linguistics—even in sociolinguistics. She even had NSF-funded work turned away from a linguistics conference for not being “real linguistics”—work that was subsequently welcomed and accepted in the highest-ranking education publications and was eventually able to find a home and a life in a school of education. Nelson never really thought of himself as a linguist until he was offered a position at the University of Pennsylvania in educational linguistics, an interdisciplinary program that seeks to bring attention to issues of language in education from a range of different theoretical and methodological perspectives. It was through the networks he built in this program as well as via ongoing conversations that he was engaged in with Jonathan Rosa, a linguistic anthropologist and longtime friend, related to issues of language and race in education that he began to see the implications of his work outside of education and within linguistics. We may come from different (inter)disciplinary perspectives and take different kinds of literature as our point of entry into the questions we ask, but we share the same political commitment to being anti-racist linguists who want to promote racial equity through our scholarship and through our efforts to broaden what counts as linguistics to diversify an unbearably white field.
This desire to challenge the unbearable whiteness of the field guided Anne through her most recent work on the Talking College Project (Charity Hudley et al., Reference Charity Hudley, Mallinson and Bucholtz2020). Charity Hudley, Mallinson, and Bucholtz present fundamental linguistic principles related to AAE, written for Black students from a Black-centered framework, that are grounded in the empirical literature in linguistics and the lived experiences of the project participants.
The Talking College Project's Black-centered model prepares students to be leaders of a linguistic New School, where their thoughts, insights, and interests are at the heart of socially relevant, community-centered, participatory teaching and research on language, culture, and education. They call this model liberatory linguistics—linguistics that is intentionally designed by Black people (as well as people from other communities in solidarity) and that is expressly focused on Black languages, language varieties, linguistic expression, and communicative practices within the ongoing struggle for Black liberation. The components of linguistic liberation include (a) self-determination—in how Black language is used and how it is studied; (b) action and resistance—as both practical and aspirational strategies; and (c) humanization—fully recognizing Black people's humanity in the ways they connect to each other linguistically, culturally, socially, emotionally, and spiritually. We focus our model on linguistics and Black students in particular, but it is relevant to applied linguistics and higher education as a whole.
This desire to challenge the whiteness of the field is also what motivated Nelson to develop a raciolinguistic perspective with Jonathan Rosa as a way of foregrounding issues of race in discussions about language and language education (Rosa & Flores, Reference Rosa and Flores2017). While both he and Jonathan developed this perspective as a way of speaking back to their own experiences of oppression, they never anticipated how much it would resonate with others in the field—most notably emerging scholars of color seeking to find a place for themselves in applied linguistics. More recently, he has sought to use a raciolinguistic perspective to envision classrooms that reject a dichotomous view of language that serves to reinforce deficit perspectives of racialized students in favor of a non-dichotomous view that recognizes and builds on all students’ cultural and linguistic practices. In conversations with Anne and others who have sought to bring attention to the specificity of anti-Black linguistic racism (Baker-Bell, Reference Baker-Bell2020), he has also sought to bring attention to anti-Blackness in language education more explicitly. He recently co-organized a conference with Uju Anya and Tia Madkins that sought to highlight manifestations of anti-Blackness across ESL, dual language, and world language education models. They have since developed a policy brief that details the heterogeneity of Blackness that includes people from across the world alongside the homogeneity of anti-Blackness that frames Black students as inherently linguistically deficient and in need of remediation. The synergies between this work and the liberatory linguistics that Anne is working on with colleagues offer a glimpse into a new vision for linguistics that not only invites but, by necessity, requires the incorporation of diverse voices.
We see this volume as also contributing to the political project of developing a liberatory linguistics that will help to diversify the field. This volume actively works toward this goal in at least two different ways. For one, it centers the voices of emerging scholars from a range of different racial and ethnic backgrounds, geographic areas, research backgrounds, and institution types, offering each of them the opportunity to lay out their vision for what the field's agenda should be. It also points to a new model of peer review where senior scholars serve in the role of mentor rather than evaluator so that emerging scholars receive the benefit from interacting and receiving feedback from senior scholars while having the ultimate authority over their own arguments without the pressure of having to satisfy an anonymous reviewer. We hope this is the start of a new model of justice in scholarly publishing in linguistics where the conversations between emerging and more established scholars are active and integrated into our scholarly model. In this way, the innovative thick, rich description that emerging scholars are adding to our understanding of language in various applied contexts will more quickly become part of the policies and practices that we need in order to position our field as part of the struggle for social transformation. This volume builds on an emerging tradition that adopts this social justice mentoring model that has also been implemented in several projects that Anne is currently working on, including The Oxford Collections on inclusion and decolonization in Linguistics and The American Academy of Arts and Sciences' Daedalus Collection on Language and Social Justice in the United States of America.
The Volume: A Recap
As a way of framing the entire volume, Habibie provides a point of entry for imagining the role of social justice in supporting and disseminating the work of emerging scholars. He illustrates the importance of developing a mentoring model for scholarly engagement with emerging scholars that center our actions on promoting their work rather than relying on traditional hierarchical models that demand their deference to the existing canon. By centering the voices of those who have been most marginalized in academia, this social justice mentoring model is an important step in leading to a fundamental shift in the way that scholars are approaching the study of language and education in schools and communities.
An important component of this mentoring model is developing innovative modes of dissemination of the work of emerging scholars. This can be seen in the work of Figueroa, who underscores the need for organized action across scholars and disciplinary foci so that we can wage better scholarly campaigns against particularly damaging logistic models. She shares the public dissemination model that she has been creating through a freely available podcast and really challenges us to think about where else our message doesn't just hit financial but fully academic paywalls—that is, who reads academic journals and books and who needs the message delivered in other forms. Using debates around the so-called “word gap” that has no basis in linguistics, Figueroa makes a strong case for the important role that applied linguists can, and must, play in shaping public debates focused on language.
In line with this call, Barko-Alva examines the vital role that applied linguistics has and can continue to play in the struggle toward social justice in education. In particular, she makes a strong case for the applied part of applied linguistics by calling on us to work with preservice and in-service dual language teachers to create classrooms where teachers and students are able to: (a) use their linguistic repertoires to acquire and demonstrate knowledge; (b) envision meaningful translanguaging practices; (c) increase their own metalinguistic awareness across both languages; and (d) critically analyze texts and materials presented to them. She argues that in order for this vision to be enacted in classrooms, teachers must develop their own ideological clarity as they negotiate the sociolinguistic and political implications of what it means to teach and learn in multilingual classrooms.
Rajendram further elaborates on the critical role that linguists can play in working to enact this vision in the classroom through her description of collaborative translanguaging pedagogy. This entails the development of a teacher-researcher collaboration that seeks to critically reflect on translanguaging as a decolonial pedagogy in the teaching of English that centers the learners’ lived experiences and knowledge systems while encouraging them to use their entire cultural and linguistic repertoire. She makes the important point that this type of collaborative translanguaging pedagogy can only be decolonial if it is localized to its specific context and is in tune with the knowledge systems within which it is being implemented.
Syed examines his own journey toward this localized approach toward the development of a translanguaging pedagogy through an examination of the transformative effect that translanguaging has had on his own language educator in Pakistan. He describes how engaging with the concept of translanguaging encouraged him to incorporate Pakistani and Indian writers who strategically used their entire linguistic repertoires into his curriculum as a point of entry for affirming, building on, and extending his students’ existing cultural and linguistic practices. While he acknowledges the transformative effect this has had on him and his students, he also points to the limits of translanguaging in combating the neoliberal structures of higher education in Pakistan and around the world, suggesting the need for applied linguistics to more seriously grapple with and develop solutions to broader political and economic questions.
Cui seeks to bring attention to these broader political and economic questions, though her conclusions point to the linguistic contradictions of our current neoliberal moment. Through examining the case of one Uyghur youth in China, Cui brings attention to the ways that ethnic minorities navigate the increasingly neo-liberalization of language learning through the development of elite multilingual identities through the development of English. Complicating analyses of the spread of global English, she points to the ways that, in this particular case, efforts to learn English simultaneously work to diminish the status of the Uyghur language while increasing the status of the Uyghur people in relation to the Han ethnic majority.
Scholars in this volume also seek to bring attention to the broader political and economic context through building on the raciolinguistic perspective that Nelson first introduced in his collaborative work with Jonathan Rosa. In line with this work, Ramjattan explores what he refers to as the “accenting” of race. This accenting of race recruits racialized speakers to approximate whiteness through the shifting of one's accent in ways that reinforces a meritocratic myth that individuals can pull themselves up by their bootstraps if only they are enabled to embody whiteness—something that many racialized speakers can never fully do. He concludes by calling for less focus on modifying the accents of racialized speakers and more on shifting institutional listening practices that have often been actively promoted within applied linguistics under efforts at accent reduction and other linguistic interventions.
Also adopting a raciolinguistic perspective, Frieson examines the racialization of English within the context of dual language education in the United States. In particular, she brings attention to the anti-Blackness that undergirds the binary of “English speaker” and “English learner” that shapes mainstream discussions of dual language education, pointing to the ways that this simplistic categorization misrepresents the experiences of Black American students who participate in these programs. Adopting critical race theory counterstories as her methodological approach, she points to the ways that this binary works to marginalize Black language practices in dual language classrooms and calls for the adoption of race-radical literacies that center Blackness as an alternative framing of dual language education.
Arango also uses critical race theory and counterstories as a point of entry to reconceptualize dominant language conceptualizations in applied linguistics. In particular, he uses the experiences of Latinx immigrants as a point of entry for theorizing la villa inmigrante—the space created by immigrant communities where new social identities are able to emerge that are at best misrecognized and at worst criminalized by state institutions. In a time where critical race theory has become the new boogeyman of white supremacist identity politics, Arango compellingly shows that the real danger of critical race theory is its political commitment to decentering the white gaze in the representation of the cultural and linguistic practices of communities of color. Indeed, it is this political commitment that has often served to marginalize critical race perspectives within applied linguistics—a field that, while ostensibly liberal, has often centered whiteness.
Bringing an intersectional perspective, Cioè-Peña introduces a Critical Dis/abilities Raciolinguistic (CDR) perspective that examines the ways that language is used to both racialize and pathologize populations. She uses this framework as a point of entry for examining the settler-colonial roots of contemporary framings of students simultaneously classified as special education and as English learners. In particular, she points to the ways that reliance on linguistic standards that have inherited these colonial logics, including within applied linguistics, serves to reify the white normative gaze and ends with a call for decolonizing applied linguistics by shifting our perspective toward one that privileges the meaning-making of racialized communities.
In line with the centering of the meaning-making of racialized communities, Jung's piece centers the language practices of students in a South Korean high school as a starting point for theorizing cosmopolitanism, which she defined as working toward becoming a global citizen through participation in meaningful dialogue across racial, cultural, and linguistic differences. This model complements the intersectional perspective advocated by Cioè-Peña by embracing a world-inclusive frame that places Western hegemony front and center and works to challenge it in conjunction with other forms of oppression.
Smith makes a similar theoretical move by using the linguistic and literacy practices of Black immigrants in the U.S. as the inspiration for her discussion of transraciolinguistics. By centering their knowledge as part of her theory-building, she is able to propose a vision for transraciolinguistic justice that works to transcend existing racial and language categories, thereby disrupting existing raciolinguistic hierarchies connected to anti-Blackness. She points to the implications of this promotion of transraciolinguistic justice within the context of contemporary racial reckonings alongside the increasing technology that shapes modern society, pointing to a future for applied linguistics that is both explicitly anti-racist and immersed in discussions of how to ensure that new technologies reflect these anti-racist commitments.
While theoretically and methodologically distinct, this transraciolinguistic perspective on technology development can be supported through the incorporation of insights of the social justice lens to the study of socio-cognitive processes that Weissler lays out in her article. She uses this social justice lens as a point of departure for developing a research agenda that seeks to bring attention to the role of power in shaping perceptions of foreignness and difference. She compels us to think about the implications of these biases for assessment and measurement, in addition to understanding how bias plays into our more general cognitive processes. This transdisciplinary work offers an important point of entry for breaking the hegemony of educational psychology over assessment models that often have deep roots in eugenics.
Bringing more concerted efforts to bias must also entail critically interrogating the biases of our own field. Shin offers a piece on thinking through the ethical stance that we take as applied linguists in doing this important self-reflection. She calls for the field to move beyond the rhetoric of inclusion, social transformation, and justice through an engagement with Foucault's often overlooked later work on ethics. The ethical subject that she calls for is not one who is critical of ideologies out in the world while leaving the ideologies of academics unexamined, but is rather one who is critical and reflects on the ways that they are complicit in hegemonic discourses. It is also not one that engages in critique simply for the sake of critique but rather as a vehicle for bringing alternative ways of being into practice.
We can see elements of this ethical subject in McKenzie's encouragement to bring our full selves, including our traumas, into our scholarship. In a context like academia, where the mind-body split remains hegemonic, and competition is typically favored over collaboration, McKenzie offers a community-specific approach to supporting one another as we work toward healing from our trauma. By centering indigenous ways of knowing, he illustrates the ways that intergenerational methods of sharing knowledge and practices for healing offer new tools for working in the area of language revitalization and reclamation. He also offers an important reminder that our emotions and full being are not separated from this work, especially when the language being discussed is our community language.
Thomas illustrates this point perfectly through her efforts to bring multiple linguistic practices into her first-person accounts of multilingual work—reminding us that personal narrative is at the center of humanized linguistic justice. As an African American woman in linguistics, Thomas consciously brings inspiration from Black scholarly and community traditions into her writing. By doing so, she is able to decenter white male knowledges, methods, and linguistic practices and pave the way toward an anti-racist approach to linguistics that works to actively dismantle colonial logics.
Finally, Shah shifts the ethical stance of applied linguistic researchers away from a colonial frame focused simply on documenting and extracting toward one that welcomes collaboration with community members. This can include inviting community members as co-authors on publications but, perhaps even more importantly, includes supporting community members in their efforts to promote social change. As she notes, while linguists can assist in community-driven language documentation efforts, efforts at reclaiming a language must be led by community members themselves.
As you can see, this volume includes a series of articles with a range of theoretical and methodological approaches that incorporate insights from a range of disciplinary perspectives. But this diversity of perspectives in no way needs to be understood as a zero-sum game. Contrary to what has typically been considered the norm in academia, the prominence of other disciplinary perspectives in the field do not need to be seen as a threat to our preferred disciplinary perspective. The relationship between language and power is multifaceted and marginalized scholars have often had to strategically position ourselves in relation to existing disciplinary perspectives in order to successfully survive academia. What unites these articles is a strong political commitment to researching the relationship between language and power with the hopes of positioning this research within broader efforts to dismantle oppression. What also unites these articles is that all of these emerging scholars are linguists and are paving the way for a more inclusive field.
In sum, this volume allows us to recreate ways and models to do our work and allows us to directly ask each other: Going forward, how can we support one another and amplify our work? The answers we're focusing on in this essay isn't for others to do—it truly is for ourselves. As you read and reflect on these articles, ask yourself, your colleagues, your departments and your universities: What do we actively do next?
Immediate actions
We encourage you to read these essays and reach out to some of these junior scholars and see how you can actively support them. Table 1 below lays out some immediate actions many readers could work to take.
Table 1 Immediate Actions
Given our privilege and fortune, we really do see these actions in Table 1 as the responsibilities of people in positions similar to ours in particular. We call for an explicit discussion of the responsibilities of faculty and students at high-resource universities, given the institutional role(s) our universities play. Without these discussions, our presence at these institutions with our commands of standardized English and our proximally white skin belies the very messages we say we are working to promote.
So, our next step is to actively engage in ways to keep the conversation going so that the full range of approaches to linguistic justice is manifested in schools and communities.
In the Black Southern tradition, justice is love out loud. So how we choose to do that sets a lot of the frame for Anne—as applied linguistics research as an act of direct and visceral love.
Part of this type of intellectual and scholarly justice will have to be more explicit and frank conversations about what people want and how they want change to happen across our areas of research and the systems and institutions we find ourselves in. Others know what they'd like to do or are starting to figure it out but feel trapped by the white supremacy of the academic professional process. Or they are actually trapped because of the requirements of their discipline or university. In other cases, it's the rules of the publishers that limit the full expression of our linguistic and intellectual identities. For example, we still have a direct and dire need for these particular papers to appear in multiple languages where people across the world can access them.
This collection has started this work by connecting emerging scholars doing thick, rich work with academically established mentors who have wide views of applied linguistics and academia as a whole so that the emerging scholars are supported against re-writing the academic wheel or working in silos. We encourage conversation within AND across applied linguistics and other language-studying communities. From these papers, we can gain priorities for applied linguistics from the actual voices of the scholars leading the way.
We want to encourage a focus on the following themes in future work, detailed below in Table 2.
Table 2 Foci Moving Forward
We are fortunate to be at universities with resources working towards greater inclusion and collaboration. We are well aware that our positions at the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford University, respectively, are testaments to that long tradition. Anne's courses are now fully integrated across departments at Stanford with Stanford Linguistics establishing an “E” (or “education”) track within the linguistics department to structurally register and draw attention to the value and the theme.
In addition, despite the array of methods and themes present in this volume, much of this work hasn't reached teachers or curriculum in many parts of the world. And there is no one way to make that happen. We need to use all our resources and methods and really think about how we reach ALL of our respective students and educators. We won't all be using the same tools or be focusing in on the same messages, so, in that context, it is important to once again revisit what unites us. As we do so, we can follow the model of this volume. These papers set a strong example: we don't need to focus on just one agenda, one method, or one theory. It is through the variety of perspectives and places that we get a schema for something seriously important: scholarly inclusion. Following the model of Audre Lorde's (1983) The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house, the papers in this volume restate and reclaim the actual linguistic justice we are seeking through the work. The decolonization of the editing process from an objective, disembodied, and disengaged process to one of collective support allows us to actively resist against white and colonial norms of the scholarly process.
Our next task is to think about how we help each other both in our scholarly development and in our local context across experiences. If we don't do so, we truly risk re-inventing and re-writing the wheel in our scholarship, even with the nuances of local realities and nuanced solutions that undergird this new work. At the end of the day, this work is meant to sustain and support learners the world over. Being explicit about that mission in the work and who the audiences we need to reach to actually make that happen should be our guiding principle as we go forward with the work of this tremendous volume to inspire us.
Open access
