Activism has for long received scholarly attention in the language disciplines, particularly in the subfields of language revitalization and language policy. Linked to traditions interested in advocacy, language maintenance and language rights, activist approaches have often been characterized as key in the shaping of linguistics-based ethics and methods of data collection via participatory research interested in bottom-up, grass-roots, local and practice-based perspectives. More recently, activism has resurged vigorously in socio- and applied linguistics, in line with contemporary attempts to bring about a social justice agenda more centrally into mainstream research (Buzholtz et al., 2016; Piller, 2016; Avineri et al., forthcoming), this resulting in greater attention to language-mediated actions of self-determination by subordinated individuals and groups involved in socio-political struggles. Drawing on this latest turn, and aiming to go beyond celebratory approaches, this colloquium aims to study activism more closely as a “discursive space” (Heller, 2007) where social actors engage in discursive and ideological production of knowledge, social categories and identities vis-à-vis wider socioeconomic, socio-political, institutional and sociolinguistic processes of change. Contributors will examine their own research with/on actors involved in projects of activism, with attention to who says/does what about activism, where, when, how, and with what consequences for whom. In so doing, analysis will focus on the enactment of stances with regard to definitions of language, cultural boundaries and different prescriptions for action and change, with special interest in the impact that these have on our theoretical understandings of (and epistemological approaches to) language and society in contemporary life.
References
Avineri, N., Graham, L.R., Johnson, E., Riner, R. & Rosa, J. (Eds.) (forthcoming), Case Studies in Language and Social Justice. New York: Routledge.
Bucholtz, M., Casillas, I., & Lee, J.S. (2016). Beyond Empowerment: Accompaniment and Sociolinguistic Justice in a Youth Research Program. In R. Lawson and D. Sawyers (Eds), Sociolinguistic Research: Application and Impact (pp. 25-44). NY: Routledge.
Heller, M. (2007). Distributed knowledge, distributed power: A sociolinguistics of structuration. Text & Talk 27 (5/6), 633–653.
Piller, I. (2016). Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice: An Introduction to Applied Sociolinguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
