Calls for a more explicitly politicised teacher education sit alongside a wider push for socially transformative engagement within language research (Bucholtz, 2018; Ladegaard and Phipps, 2020) that have emerged in response to the increasing dispossession, marginalisation and inequality that we are witnessing across the globe. Teachers are often identified as having a key role to play in these processes, and much current research declares a commitment to the incorporation of social justice into the classroom (Avineri et al., 2019) At the same time, critical scholars have warned us of the inadvertent harm that can be enacted through well-meaning attempts to 'give voice' or 'empower' students, which often reinscribe unequal power dynamics and reproduce the structures they purport to disavow (Kraft and Flubacher, 2020).
What this draws attention to is the need for critical reflection on the politics and ethics of engagement between researchers and educators. In this paper, I draw on a collaborative project with teachers in an English-teaching NGO in Delhi, India, in order to raise several challenges that emerge when engaging in practices that are undergirded by a will to transform. I take as my point of departure data from a series of workshops that I conducted with teachers at the NGO in which we discussed and analysed the findings from my ethnographic study undertaken in 2018-2019 at the same NGO in order to reflect upon potential implications for NGO policy and their practice. Grounded in the framework of generative critique – that is, "an analytical project that aims to be generative of potentially transformative thought, affect, and action" (Urla, 2021) – I demonstrate the tensions that we had to navigate when attempting to explicitly politicise their roles and their practice, and how this was rendered particularly challenging by the competing ideological and political economic interests and agendas at play between myself, the teachers, management and students. Laying bare the anxieties and discomfort that emerged through this project, I trace the ethical and political contours of these encounters, asking what this can tell us about the (tense) relationship between education, research and activism, and the consequences of this for how we, as researchers, design and understand our engagement with teachers and educational institutions for the purposes of social transformation.
Avineri, N. et al. (eds) (2019) Language and social justice in practice. New York, NY: Routledge.
Bucholtz, M. (2018) 'White affects and sociolinguistic activism', Language in Society, 47(3), pp. 350–354. doi:10.1017/S0047404518000271.
Kraft, K. and Flubacher, M.-C. (2020) 'The promise of language: Betwixt empowerment and the reproduction of inequality', International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2020(264), pp. 1–23. doi:10.1515/ijsl-2020-2091.
Ladegaard, H.J. and Phipps, A. (2020) 'Intercultural research and social activism', Language and Intercultural Communication, 20(2), pp. 67–80. doi:10.1080/14708477.2020.1729786.
Urla, J. (2021) 'Una crítica generativa de la gubernamentalidad lingüística', Anuario de Glotopolítica, 4, pp. 15–51.
