Beyond Multilingual Advocacy: Subjectivity and Affect as Method

This paper considers how Claire Kramsch’s work on subjectivity and language learning contributes to a critique of multilingual advocacy, in which linguistics’ efforts of social engagement tend to focus on sites of inequality characterized by structural linguistic difference ideologically attributed to racialized and minoritized communities. While much criticism has been raised against this tendency, this paper argues that Kramsch’s focus on multilingualism as subjective experience not only offers a resource for undoing dominant language ideologies of the discipline, but also provides a concrete alternative basis for the field’s social engagement, via the way it foregrounds the affective, material, and political realities of being a multilingual speaker. Drawing upon recent works in other disciplines that have been actively turning to affect as a way of rethinking hegemonic epistemologies, this paper suggests considering affect as method, which allows our affects, particularly those of discomfort, anxiety, and unease, to guide us in our engagement with injustices, inequalities, and oppressive relations that are deeply embedded within and shaped by our subjectivities.