Moving aside: positioning sociolinguistics in a political economy of expertise

Abstract

In this article, we document and critique our involvement in a Participatory Action Research (PAR) project in which we collaborated with a non-academic organisation. Our project involved co-designing and monitoring a campaign to teach Catalan to immigrants with volunteer tutors. We focus not on the campaign's outcomes, but on our practice, relationships with co-participants, and the negotiation of sociolinguistic expertise as multiple categories of actors and experts became involved in the campaign as it grew. We examine our attempts to provide relevant critical sociolinguistic expertise in contexts where ethics, politics, and interdisciplinary competition intersected. We focus on how we developed three specific contributions: our input to the campaign's design, to a training programme for volunteers, and to an evaluation procedure for the campaign. We analyse these contributions within the critical lens of the growing literature on the social and political uses of expertise. We engage with PAR literature, decolonial perspectives, and other approaches to science and society to complexify ideas on the power effects of knowledge. We use Rose's [1993. “Government, Authority and Expertise in Advanced Liberalism.” Economy and Society 22 (3): 283-299] concept of “advanced liberal rule” to reflect on how sociolinguists can position themselves ethically and politically.

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