Habitus and imagined ideals: Attending to (un)consciousness in discourses of (non)nativeness

This study responds to scholarship that has examined “folk concepts” of (non)nativeness through the lens of imagined ideals of the native speaker, by proposing a framework that integrates both ideals and habits. We operationalize these concepts by drawing from the theoretical notions of chronotope, scale, and habitus. Using data from interviews with Central Asian transnational migrants, we demonstrate how attending to both the habitual and idealized aspects of speakers’ metalinguistic commentary offers a more holistic approach to the study of multilingual repertoires and speakers’ social positionings in relationship to (non)nativeness. Our findings demonstrate how identification as a “(non)native” speaker may become more or less important to participants depending on whether they orient to habits or ideals. We also show that speakers’ use of “discourses of habit”, which emphasize their less conscious linguistic behaviors, may lead to a blurring of the lines between nativeness and non-nativeness. This in turn has implications for theories of agency as resistance to linguistic marginalization, and contributes to applied issues related to language education

Language ideologies and (im)moral images of personhood in multilingual family language planning

Scholars have demonstrated that small-scale relatively private family decisions about language are intertwined with parental language ideologies. Using data from the context of multilingual Central Asian families—including those living in Central Asia and those living abroad—this study employs socially situated analysis of discourse and narrative inquiry to show how parents invoke language ideologies in justifying their decisions about their children’s education and linguistic exposure. The notion of “chronotope” is used to demonstrate how parental ideologies are embedded in images of space, time and moral personhood. Focusing on these images, rather than only on language ideologies, allows an incorporation of the many social factors—both linguistic and non-linguistic—involved in bottom-up language planning, and facilitates increased attention to emic perspectives. This focus also illustrates how state discourses are internalized by participants through their understandings of morality relative to other issues such as language education

Whose Voice Matters? Chronotopic Position(ing)s and the Dialogic Inclusion of Marginalized Stakeholders in Critical Applied Linguistics

In this paper, we argue that critical applied linguists must work towards the materially transformative, dialogic inclusion of marginalized voices in order to create more just social relations. We show how a spatiotemporal theorization of voice as materially situated and discursively imaginative can enable a more holistic approach to including such voices. Illustrative data come from the experiences of migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong and includes their discourses, those of their employers, and those of domestic worker-led grassroots organizations. We use these data to demonstrate how different stakeholders have unequal abilities to materialize the spatiotemporal imaginaries they voice out, how academic (re)theorizations of language may not always bring about changes to the material spatiotemporal conditions of marginalized stakeholders, and why the collective voices of marginalized groups should be taken into account alongside individual voices. Implications are discussed in terms of action-oriented work that critical applied linguists can engage in to support the inclusion of migrant domestic workers’ voices in particular, and the voices of marginalized stakeholders in our field more generally

Discursive (in)stability: Moral subjectivities and global hierarchies in transnational migrant women’s narratives

My dissertation considers the role of discourse in transnational migrants’ construction of moral and national identities for themselves, focusing on the case of women from Uzbekistan living in the United States. While research has highlighted how transnational movement destabilizes identity and communicative practice, I focus on the ways in which migrant women use discursive moves to (re)organize their social imaginary and to claim stability for themselves. I demonstrate that although migrants occupy a tenuous position in relation to the gendered and moral images of “ideal citizenship” promoted by both their country of residence and their country of origin, they continue to claim national morality and belonging for themselves – albeit often through language that reifies the same national ideologies that exclude them. As a secondary focus of this dissertation, I investigate the impact of the discursive (re)organization of the social imaginary on migrant bilingualism. I show how migrants at times represent their different bilingual and cross-cultural communicative competencies as operating in discrete and opposing social spheres, while at other times they represent these competencies as more hybrid and overlapping across the transnational contexts in which they reside. This work is ethnographic and my data come from participant observation at Uzbek American community events, the collection of public discourses and images circulating via Uzbek cultural groups on social media, and 47 hours of audio recordings of semi-structured interviews and casual conversations between Uzbek women living in the United States. Across these different contexts, I examine the use of evaluative language, voicing, deictics, various narrative structures, and code-switching between Uzbek, Russian and English to show how these women discursively (re)imagine the relationships between time-space configurations, national images of citizenship, moral norms for behavior, categories of immigrants, and their own migration trajectories and identities. In chapter 5, I demonstrate how the discursive construction of gendered images of citizenship and their relation to linguistic competence allows participants to claim belonging for themselves and others – in relation to both Uzbekistan and to Uzbek communities abroad. In chapter 6, I show how these women use linguistic practices to designate different scopes of generalizability, i.e. scale, to moral norms for speech associated with the U.S. and Uzbekistan, respectively, in order to bring coherence to their personal narratives and moral justification to their linguistic behaviors. In chapter 7, I show how the women I spoke with engage multilingual practices in order to rebrand themselves as more compatible with images of citizenship in both Uzbekistan and the United States, while differentiating themselves from the semiotics of “dangerous Islam.” In addition to describing the linguistic situation of an understudied community, this work informs a sociolinguistics of globalization through its attention to the polycentric nature of moral demands on the discursive representation of individual subjectivity, and the discursive strategies used to resist misrecognition as one moves across national boundaries. Further, by emphasizing the agentive potential of discursive (re)imagination for claiming national belonging, while also being attentive to how this imagination is constrained by and reinforces national ideologies of exclusion, this work engages with larger questions about the limits and possibilities of discursive action for reconfiguring social life. With respect to bilingualism, this dissertation examines the discursive links between multiple languages and national spheres that are both created and erased by migrants in order to show how debates about language hybridity vs. language discreteness might be informed by an understanding of the hybridity vs. discreteness of images of citizenship and their various component parts. Finally, this work is timely in addressing the experiences of Muslim migrant women, given the widespread misinformation about these communities in contemporary political discourse, particularly in the United States.LimitedAuthor requested closed access (OA after 2yrs) in Vireo ETD syste