Collaborative Practice, Linguistic Anthropological Enquiry and the Mediation between Researcher and Practitioner Discourses

Abstract

This chapter explores what it means to take a critical ethnographic approach to language, culture and identity within an applied anthropology framework, and considers the unique purchase on an applied agenda o ered by linguistic anthropological perspectives and tools. At the foundation of this kind of applied linguistic anthropology is collaboration between researcher and practitioners; collaboration which implies the development of some shared (rather than researcher-imposed) goals and methods, the reduction of hierarchies between researcher and researched, an appreciation for multiple types of expertise, and, potentially, some form of joint authorship. In this chapter, I refl ect on the complexities and potentials of this process through the lens of my own collaborative experiences with Corsican bilingual teachers and other language activists. Drawing on linguistic anthropological perspectives on talk as joint action, I argue that what is at issue in these forms of collaboration is creating a nexus of practice (see Scollon, 2001) and discourse that mediates, in some productive way, di erences between researchers’ and practitioners’ respective professional Discourses or habituses. This is no easy task, but I will argue that this process: (a) helps to create the conditions in which local actors will use linguistic anthropological perspectives/data, and (b) is itself a form of ethnographic enquiry that has rich implications for building linguistic anthropological knowledge.

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