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9 - Critical Language Ethnography as a Community-Centered Research Paradigm

from Part II - Research, Assessment, and Program Evaluation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2021

By
Ariana Mangual Figueroa  and
Meredith McConnochie
Edited by
Caroline S. Clauss-Ehlers
Caroline S. Clauss-Ehlers
Affiliation:
Long Island University, New York
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Summary

This chapter develops a critical language ethnography approach to community-based research. The authors propose that this approach can offer rich qualitative insights into those everyday interactions through which children and adults acquire and impart locally accepted norms for language use in their communities while also co-constructing social identities and collective practices that can resist and change oppressive structures. The chapter reviews ethnographic projects that work not only to depict the cultural underpinnings of community life but that also seek to disrupt those structural forces that produce inequities across communities. By integrating insights from the fields of Language Socialization (LS) and Critical Ethnography (CE), the authors seek to bring into conversation complementary subfields within anthropology, sociolinguistics, and education that share a commitment to community-centered research. The chapter is organized thematically around three themes of power, praxis, and positionality and it provides a critical case analysis to illustrate the ways in which a critical language ethnography can be used to analyze everyday interaction in communities.

Keywords

Language socializationcritical ethnographypowerpraxispositionality
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Community Psychology
Interdisciplinary and Contextual Perspectives
 , pp. 175 - 196
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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