Voicing solidarity: linguistic hospitality and poststructuralism in the real world

Abstract

Structuralism has dominated the field of applied linguistics, which has consequences for the positioning of applied linguistics vis-a-vis policy makers, educational practice, and also theoretical and methodological innovations. These consequences pertain to how the field advocates, takes sides, balances its descriptive modes with its discursive affections, and how it allows the ‘real world’ which Applied Linguistics claims as its territory. Poststructuralism, with its intensely moral claims, its playful, often dense discursive style, its plural forms and puns, and its mood of critical scepticism allows the structuralist foundations of applied linguistics and their violence or potential violence, to be seen from different vantage points. This article explores the relationship between solidarity, linguistic hospitality, poststructuralism, and a particularly real aspect of the world. It does so through a performative discussion of a case study relating to a changing auto-ethnographic research project and the sudden appearance of intimate pain and political imperative in a project which began with structuralist intent and moved through experience and practice into poststructuralist narrative. As such, the article performs a narrative and poetic commentary on the contested place accorded affect in scholarship and how these relate to questions of linguistic hospitality, solidarity, and poststructuralism when faced with real-world questions and survival of their contradictions