Netta Avineri – Associate Professor, Language Teacher Education & Intercultural Communication, Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey
Patricia Baquedano-López – Associate Professor, Berkeley School of Education
‘Applied Linguistic Anthropology’ in Action: Language & Social Justice Projects and Praxis
Over the past 15 years in the U.S. we have seen an exciting and promising concerted effort to examine, question, and interrupt practices where language is used to create contexts and situations of social inequities. Anthropologists, applied linguists, and scholars in related language disciplines have come together joining interest groups and supporting task force agendas to raise awareness of issues at the nexus of language and social justice (Avineri, Graham, Johnson, Conley Riner & Rosa 2019; Motha, 2020; Riley, Garcia-Sanchez, & Perley, forthcoming). In this talk, we will introduce the iterative applied linguistic anthropological (ALA) framework that includes the following components: centering language, reflection, noticing/observation, narrative, positionalities and commitments, critique, awareness-raising, and coalition-building processes for social change. We will then apply the framework to specific language and social justice issues (LSJI’s) (e.g., sports team mascot names, the “language gap”, US Census categories, immigration discourses, anti-Blackness, language access in health care). We will conclude the talk by collectively exploring specific ways that educators across the language disciplines can cultivate their praxis, highlighting how language is implicated in justice and can be used to mobilize towards justice in their classroom contexts.
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