Transposition as activism: Toward a public‐facing linguistic anthropology

Abstract In 2023, the Demystifying Language Project (DLP) held a 3‐day writing workshop that brought together 12 scholars, paired with 11 undergraduates and 15 high schoolers, to collaboratively recompose their own peer‐reviewed articles into a genre legible to those without specialized training in language‐related disciplines. This was done through transposition as activism , or the process by which participants undermine, transcend, or defect from highly regimented boundaries of academic writing genres and their entailed participant roles. In particular, transposition as activism seeks to dismantle the hierarchical arrangement of conventionalized “expert/non‐expert” academic positionalities (i.e., author/reader, professor/student, instructor/learner, etc.) and their assumed reading/writing practices (i.e., the consumption of academic/non‐academic genres, the use of academic/everyday language). In this article, we offer transposition as an activist approach to confront the raciolinguistic hierarchies endemic to knowledge production. As of 2026, there are 12 transposed academic publications on the Demystifying Language Project website.