32.2941, Review: Applied Linguistics: Burkette, Warhol (2021)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-32-2941. Wed Sep 15 2021. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 32.2941, Review: Applied Linguistics: Burkette, Warhol (2021)

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Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2021 22:40:50
From: Laura Álvarez López [laura.alvarez at su.se]
Subject: Crossing Borders, Making Connections

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36718917


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/32/32-679.html

EDITOR: Allison  Burkette
EDITOR: Tamara  Warhol
TITLE: Crossing Borders, Making Connections
SUBTITLE: Interdisciplinarity in Linguistics
SERIES TITLE: Interdisciplinary Linguistics [INTLING]
PUBLISHER: De Gruyter Mouton
YEAR: 2021

REVIEWER: Laura Álvarez López, Stockholm University

SUMMARY

Current societal challenges have led to an increased number of
interdisciplinary initiatives within the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Interdisciplinarity basically involves the exploration of research questions
through different levels of integration of theoretical and/or methodological
perspectives from more than one discipline. Such approaches have proved to be
relevant and productive to the work of scholars in various subdisciplines
within the field of Linguistics (such as Historical Sociolinguistics; see for
example Chapter 14 in the book). 

This edited collection constitutes the first volume in the new series
“Interdisciplinary Linguistics” by de Gruyter Mouton. The volume covers topics
related to linguistic research outside the traditional boundaries of Applied
Linguistics and Sociolinguistics, i.e., in the intersection of Humanities and
the Social Sciences. In that sense, the book aims to fill an unnoticed gap:
there are linguistic journals that publish interdisciplinary work, but no
recognized journals of “interdisciplinary linguistics”. 

This volume includes 18 chapters that bring together texts authored by
researchers within the areas of Humanities and Social Sciences. The
contributions are organized into 3 sections: Perspectives, Connections, and
Applications. The first section on Perspectives includes 7 chapters. Those
texts problematize concepts such as multi-, trans-, and interdisciplinarity in
linguistic research. The authors address the need for crossing disciplinary
boundaries for different purposes and identify possible challenges and
prospects. The second section, Connections, comprises 6 chapters in which
scholars of different disciplines debate the same concepts or ideas from
different perspectives. Three of those texts deal with the notion of
“assemblage” and the remaining three focus on “materiality” (or “materials”).
The third and last section, Applications, contains 5 chapters that offer a
deeper insight into how strong interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity
(including stakeholder involvement) can be achieved within different research
initiatives. Altogether, the 18 chapters represent a flourishing variety of
scholarly work, discussing or applying theoretical and methodological
interdisciplinary approaches to language, culture, and communication. 

Chapter 1 is Allison Burkette’s introduction, “Why interdisciplinarity?”,
which offers an outline of the sections and chapters of the book. The author,
who is also a co-editor of the volume, explains that the book aims at
inspiring interdisciplinarity by discussing approaches which have the
potential to bring fields such as Sociolinguistics or Applied Linguistics to
new dimensions – i.e., beyond their traditional boundaries. 

Chapter 2, “The value of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary linguistic
research” by Becky Childs, presents an overview of how linguists have been
moving toward methodological and applicational interdisciplinarity and
collaborations beyond the academic setting. Moreover, the author points out
how interdisciplinarity brings added value to new studies and promotes
research that displays how linguistic research can address problems concerning
not only academia, but also society in general. In a long-term perspective,
Childs argues, such initiatives are likely to lead to new theoretical models
for research as well as to improved practices for dissemination of research
findings. 

Stephany Brett Dunstan and Sonja Ardoin are the authors of Chapter 3, with the
title “Faculty and student affairs partnerships: Creating inclusive campus
environments for students of diverse linguistic backgrounds”. Dunstan and
Ardoin bring forward examples of partnerships between faculty and student
affairs professionals. Their paper illustrates how critically addressing
issues of language diversity in higher education – a subject directly linked
to cultural and ethnic diversity among speakers – can be a way to open
discussions about identities, stereotypes, and racial injustice. By extension,
the authors reason, such debates will result in a more inclusive campus
environment that attracts and retains students from diverse backgrounds. 

Jessica A. Grieser’s Chapter 4 is titled “Critical race theory and the new
sociolinguistics”. The author argues that power dynamics and structural racism
are underexplored in sociolinguistic research. Grieser therefore calls for
renewed approaches “that challenge the notion of the social construct of race,
acknowledge the root of that construct in racism, and seek to change the
structures of power that perpetuate racism.” According to her, such
perspectives are informed by critical race theory and related theories – and
have already been adopted within the disciplines of sociology, education, and
law. Grieser finally argues that a refreshing perspective of
“raciolinguistics” would, among other things, focus on power and include
racism as part of the explaining factors in linguistic variation, consider the
subjects’ explanations of variation, and contemplate intersection of social
factors. 

In Chapter 5, “You don’t even try to understand!: Interdisciplinarity in
language and gender studies”, Rusty Barrett applies a very thought-provoking
approach to interdisciplinarity by reviewing research that has gone wrong. The
paper reviews a set of studies that fail to fulfill their aims due to a lack
of linguistic expertise and adequate tools for obtaining reliable results.
Instead, those research findings reproduce myths and stereotypes: “The paper
[…] tells us nothing about language and nothing about gender, but it
definitely concludes that English is among the most progressive languages in
terms of sexism.” Barrett’s line of reasoning highlights the weight of
involving trained experts across different fields of study, in this case
linguists, when adopting interdisciplinary approaches.

Through a personal narrative with the title “Ecolinguistics as a
transdisciplinary movement and a way of life”, Arran Stibbe describes the
field of Ecolinguistics in Chapter 6. The author perceives his discipline as a
transdisciplinary movement, implying engagement with the real world. In that
sense, Ecolinguistics also has practical and ethical dimensions. The task of
an ecolinguist is understood as to critically analyze language and
communication (for example discourses of agricultural industries, weather
forecasting, or men’s health magazines) to reveal the underlying stories that
support inequalities and unsustainability in contemporary societies. 

To close this first section, the co-editor of the book, Tamara Warhol, brings
forward a detailed illustration of interdisciplinarity in chapter 7, titled
“Ethnography in interdisciplinary research in linguistics”. In her study,
ethnographic methods and a combination of educational and linguistic analysis
of speech transcripts are successfully applied to answer research questions
concerning students’ academic language socialization during a course in
religious studies.

Allison Burkette’s Chapter 8, “Connections and interdisciplinarity: Linguistic
Atlas Project data from an assemblage perspective”, opens Section 2 by
clarifying how the concept of “assemblage”, from the field of Archeology, can
help structure data from the Linguistic Atlas Project (see
http://www.lap.uga.edu/). In Archeology, she explains, assemblage means
“artifacts that are found near each other” and, in Linguistics, it can be used
to conceptualize and contextualize data. Burkette maintains that this notion
has the potential to broaden the field of vision if applied as a tool to offer
users of the atlas access to assemblages of linguistic data. In other words,
the interdisciplinary perspective provides the option of searching for
linguistic data from a diversity of connection points that were previously
unconnected. 

The two following chapters also deal with “assemblages”. In Chapter 9,
Alastair Pennycook presents his text “Reassembling linguistics: Semiotic and
epistemic assemblages”. The author encourages scholars in the field of
Linguistics to make the way for renewal. According to him, this can be done by
breaking disciplinary constraints and questioning the notions of language and
languages. Instead, he suggests, linguists should apply concepts such as
semiotic assemblages (“the momentary material and semiotic resources that
intersect at a given place and time”) and epistemic assemblages
(“epistemological resources that we draw on to engage in certain
language-related concerns”). Apart from renewal via interdisciplinarity,
Pennycook advocates for the incorporation of alternative forms of knowledge
from the Global South. 

“Ideological assemblage” is the concept introduced by Linguistic
Anthropologist Paul Kroskrity in Chapter 10, titled “Language ideological
assemblages within linguistic anthropology”. As claimed by the author, this
notion can be applied in countless settings as a resource to approach and
study “dynamic configurations of human actors and their beliefs, feelings, and
conceptions about language(s) and communication”. The concept of assemblages
is presented as “an extension of language ideological theory” because it is
likely to establish an extensive framework for exploring complex settings of
contact and change by reaching beyond the view of a single ideology, for
example, one linked to language standardization or purism.

The three last texts in this section center on the notions of materiality and
materials. First is Amy J. Hirshman’s Chapter 11, with the title “A case of
archeological classification”.  The paper makes a bridge between assemblages
and materiality, describing the challenges of systematically classifying
archeological artifacts in a way that enables chronology building and regional
comparisons, among others. The author concludes that, to be useful, any
classification system must primarily “make sense of the complexity and then
bend itself to an array of questions and yield useful results.” 

In Chapter 12, “Language and materiality in global capitalism”, Jillian R.
Cavanaugh and Shalini Shankar explain how the joint focus on language and
materiality characterizes an emerging scholarly field. The paper shows how the
aim of bringing language and materiality together is to shed light on, among
other aspects, the material dimensions of meaning making in technologically
mediated communication and the way in which material conditions influence
language use and linguistic ideologies. 

To conclude Section 2, in Chapter 13 architectural historian Carl Lounsbury
addresses the vocabulary of building in the American colonies of the South ,
with the title “The language of building in the southern American colonies”.
Although specialized dictionaries usually represent a “universal language of
building”, the author’s interdisciplinary examination of the language of
vernacular architecture in colonial America demonstrates, for example, that
words and expressions used to name building types and features – as well as
construction practices and materials – reflect variation in English as well as
the emergence of regional dialects.

Chapter 14, “Historical sociolinguistics and the necessity of
interdisciplinary collaboration” by Mark Lauersdorf, opens Section 3 of the
book. The author outlines historical sociolinguistics as a field that involves
at least Historical Linguistics and Sociolinguistics, as well as Social
History, and discusses different ways of articulating multiple disciplines,
such as borrowing, multidisciplinarity, and interdisciplinarity. Subsequently,
Lauersdorf calls for interdisciplinary collaboration in research practices,
including student training, through the constitution of teams of experts from
different research areas. 

Jiyoon Lee and Matthew Schreibeis are the authors of Chapter 15,
“Comprehensive review of the effect of using music in second language
learning”. This text critically reviews 10 relatively recent (2014-2018)
empirical studies concerning the effect of music on second language learning.
The authors, a composer and a linguist, conclude that there is “a clear
positive potential for using music as part of L2 teaching” to enhance language
learning. Summing up their findings, Lee and Schreibeis suggest future studies
of several unexplored aspects by experts in language and music to further
explore which musical structures can be used to highlight specific linguistic
features. 

In Chapter 16, “Trashing the Bible”, K. Jason Coker brings the fields of
Critical White Studies and Biblical Studies into dialogue. This essay
exemplifies how scholars may engage in anti-racist biblical studies. Coker
takes the “inter-white racial and class friction” evidenced in the category of
“Poor White Trash” (hybrid of poor and white) as a point of departure to
understand ancient identity negotiation in Judaism/early Christianity as it
appears in a conflict between Paul and James in The New Testament. 

Economist Jason M. Thomas’s Chapter 17, “Towards a post-structuralist
economics”, explains how new technologies have made it possible to perform
textual and narrative analyses in Economics to explore how discourses
influence economic outcomes. Recent approaches from the perspective of
narrative economics also sustain that “discourses not only capture but also
constitute economic reality”. Taking the same line of argument further, this
view can weaken the predictive value of the existing models that have
generally ignored the possible effect of such discourses. 

The final chapter is number 18, “Life as a linguist among clinicians:
Learnings from interdisciplinary collaborations on language and health”, by
Heidi E. Hamilton. It brings together various ideas for linguists who would
like to establish cross-disciplinary collaborations with clinicians in the
health sector. The author shares concrete experiences of several collaborative
projects in which she has participated. Hamilton offers professional guidance
on how to proceed successfully, for example, in building mutual frames of
reference and shared knowledge with clinical researchers, but also on how to
engage students in such initiatives.

EVALUATION

A variety of thoughtful viewpoints and informative texts make this book a very
welcome and inspiring contribution to studies about language, culture, and
communication. This series is likely to be valuable for many readers, and
especially for researchers and students in Linguistics who are interested in
developing collaborative work across disciplines and with stakeholders. The 18
chapters in this first volume embrace a wide array of linguistic approaches as
well as providing insight into disciplines other than Linguistics, such as
Architectural History (see Chapter 13), Archeology (see Chapter 11), and
Economics (see Chapter 17). All authors are experts engaged in
interdisciplinary initiatives who participate in theoretical debates and who
discuss methodological approaches – some of them also provide considerations
on practical issues. Contributors generously offer numerous concrete examples
and detailed illustrations of how inter- and transdisciplinary approaches to
language and communication have been developed within different research
fields. Additionally, Section 3 offers suggestions for future collaborative
research in disciplines such as music as a tool for L2 learning, narrative
analysis in Economics, and communication within Health Care (see Chapters 15,
17, and 18). 

One weakness is that the reader will probably find it hard to grasp the
structure or idea of the three sections – those sections are not graphically
marked at all, which makes them almost disappear. However, they are introduced
by the editor in Chapter 1, and both authors and editors have done an
excellent job in advancing a very interesting and articulate collection.
Regardless of the sections, each chapter still has its clear focus, and the
whole book is coherent; the ideas and theoretical concepts are repeatedly
interconnected – as in the case of the stylish linking between assemblages and
materiality (see Chapter 11). Another minor shortcoming is that the volume
lacks a list of contributors which would describe their background, as well as
their regional and disciplinary affiliations. Some of the authors, for
example, seem to be employed outside of academia, a fact that would highlight
the transdisciplinarity of the book itself. Information about the contributors
would also confirm that, although one of the papers calls for alternative
knowledge from the Global South (see Chapter 9), this volume fails to fulfill
that request.

Summing up, the overall level of fresh thinking in this collection sets high
standards for those to come in this new series. It is also a remarkably
readable book and has undoubtedly been carefully copy-edited. Chapters are
rather short (less than 20 pages) and well-written. Moreover, some of the
authors use unexpected strategies or genres – such as sharing personal
narratives and critical reviews of research gone wrong – without losing
professionality or focus (see, for example, Chapters 5 and 6).


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Laura Álvarez López is a full professor of Portuguese Linguistics at Stockholm
University. Her research focuses on the social factors and linguistic
mechanisms behind variation and change, mainly in multilingual settings. She
is especially interested in transdisciplinary approaches to studying the
interrelationships between language, culture and society in Afro-Latin
American and Afro-Iberian settings.





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