Accompaniment, Sociolinguistic Justice, and Youth Agency

• In Event: 75.026 - Beyond Empowerment: Accompaniment and Sociolinguistic Justice Through Youth Research

Abstract

In education, the notion of empowerment, which builds on the similar concepts of conscientization and critical or liberatory pedagogy (Freire, 1970), emerged alongside a range of critical perspectives on race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, social class, and other structures of inequality. However, the idea of empowerment has also met with extensive critique (e.g., Cheater, 1999; Cruikshank, 1999; Troyna, 1994). For such critics, both the macropolitics and the micropolitics of empowerment discourse are deeply problematic. The macropolitical critique maintains that such discourse does nothing to dismantle systems of power but merely produces good neoliberal subjects, who are imagined to be self-empowered to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps with minimal governmental intervention (Calvès, 2009). The micropolitical critique focuses on language, arguing that the very term empowerment often carries self-aggrandizing and patronizing overtones (Gore, 1993). A second language-related concern is that the concept of empowerment is frequently elaborated through speech-centered metaphors, such as “giving a voice” to disempowered groups or engaging in “dialogue” with them (Ellsworth, 1989). Critics note that these metaphors erase the diversity of participants’ perspectives (Cook-Sather, 2007) as well as social actors’ decidedly nonmetaphorical and profoundly material experience as producers of discourse in social settings (Weidman, 2003). Such discourse may thus imply that sociopolitically marginalized groups lack the capacity to speak, let alone act, on their own behalf without expert assistance, or that members of such groups speak with a single voice.

Given these problems with the concept of empowerment, we find a useful alternative in the work of Tomlinson and Lipsitz (2013). These authors suggest that in working toward social justice, academic acts of accompaniment necessarily involve collaboration across both scholarly and social boundaries, with researchers engaging substantively with perspectives quite different from their own within as well as beyond the academy. In this paper, we argue for the concept of accompaniment and illustrate how it has guided our efforts to forge university collaborations with public school students and teachers in California (Bucholtz, Casillas, & Lee, forthcoming; Lee & Bucholtz, forthcoming). Whereas the idea of empowerment implies an endpoint to politically engaged activities (i.e., when a group has “become empowered”), accompaniment underscores the ongoing, incomplete nature of social justice efforts. Further, accompaniment highlights the mutuality of social relationships. This insight enables us to reconceptualize the usual relationship between adults and young people from a one-way transmission of information and knowledge to a multidirectional exchange of ideas and understandings. That is, rather than seeking to “empower” youth, our work has a more modest goal: to acknowledge and engage with the young people we work with as sociopolitical agents who already have rich life experiences and insights that we can learn from and contribute to as we accompany them for a short time along their educational path. We argue that for researchers of language and learning, accompaniment is a valuable guiding concept for conducting socially responsible scholarship that aligns with the goals of sociolinguistic justice, without the potential pitfalls of empowerment discourse.

Authors

• Mary Bucholtz, University of California - Santa Barbara

• Jin-Sook Lee, University of California - Santa Barbara

• Doroles Ines Casillas, University of California - Santa Barbara