Contemporary Perspectives on Language Research

Narrative inquiry is now a well-established methodological approach in applied linguistics, especially within the domain of language learning and teaching. As a result, a growing body of literature has grappled with several epistemological and methodological issues related to narrative perspectives in the field (e.g., Barkhuizen, 2013; Bell, 2002, 2011; Benson, 2018). In this talk, I will extend the epistemological and methodological debates which have characterised narrative inquiry in language education over the past decade. In particular, I will put the spotlight on a specific method, narrative analysis, i.e., the process of writing stories as an approach to data analysis and representation of research findings. To do so, I will unpack my experience of doing narrative analysis through MAXQDA, a Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis (CAQDAS) Software which may help researchers manage a large dataset. Crucially, the use of this software does not only facilitate systematic narrative analysis whilst dealing with a large amount of data from several sources, but also supports researchers’ engagement with methodological reflexivity. Ultimately, the practice of reflexivity is presented as an essential hallmark of sound and meaningful narrative analysis. The steps and processes I will discuss in this talk will therefore legitimize further the rigour of this narrative methodology.

What is involved in language, who constructs it, where it derives from, and how it is (re)formed have long been questions in the fields of socio- and applied linguistics. And yet, the dominant epistemologies in the framing of languages is drawn from Western and/or Northern theoretical and epistemological frameworks.

This, we argue, is immensely problematic, as what is absent in this Western/Northern focus are the linguistic practices and language-centered frameworks of knowledges that have existed and continue to emerge outside Euro-America, namely the Global South/s (Makoni et al., 2022). The objective of this presentation is to rectify philosophically this situation by framing language studies through Theory of the South (Comaroff & Comaroff ,2012) and Southern Theory (Connell, 2007, 2019) and to draw on Epistemologies of the South by (de Sousa Santos & Meneses, 2020), extended through L. Gordon’s (2021) ‘Shifting the Geography of Reason’ and J. Gordon’s (2014) Creolizing Political Theory expanded through decolonial sociolinguistics.

In this presentation, we address the following three questions that emerge in language research when framed through Southern and Southernizing epistemologies, waterscape epistemologies, and decolonial sociolinguistics.

1. What does an interactional sociolinguistics from the Global Souths, predicated on the African axioms of opaqueness, obscurity, ambiguity, long windedness, and circuitousness, look like (Ameka & Terkourafi, 2019)?
What does sociolinguistics from the Global Souths look like when we take into consideration the heterogeneity and complexity of the urban centers (Amin & Thrift, 2017).
2. How do we go beyond a study of languages, which is human centered, by challenging the human/nonhuman distinction that forms the basis of modern linguistics and is one of the devastating consequences of modernity?
3. How does water shape our conceptual images of language practices? We argue that
“waterscape” or “wet” epistemology, bottled water, rain and floods and “liquid materiality” (Peters & Steinberg, 2019) mark a dramatic shift from perceiving language practices as a single rootedness of a monolingual native speaker to a mobile multilingual migrant (Guildin, 2020).

We conclude the presentation by illustrating how living in a pandemic has had an impact on our theorization of language practices in the Global Souths by creating “new temporalities, blurring the boundary between normalcy and emergency” (Deumert & Makoni, 2023,), and we outline what a decolonial perspective of sociolinguistics looks like and how it shapes our framing of Southern epistemologies in Language research. We conclude the presentation by analyzing the complex and labile relationships between decolonial and southernizing sociolinguistics (Antia & Makoni 2022)