Decolonizing Language and Literacy Research: Reconstructive Discourse Analysis for Pluralized Concepts

• In Event: Decolonizing Language and Literacy Research through Reconstructive Discourse Analysis

Proposal

This first presentation of the panel is a theoretical talk that introduces Reconstructive Discourse Analysis as an innovative research methodology that can allow language and literacy researchers to de- and re-construct trending western concepts in educational research to reclaim space for non-Western epistemologies. Over the past few decades, language and literacy researchers in the English-speaking world have created a number of pluralized concepts that aim to expand our understanding of literacy and language use. These concepts include multiliteracies, multimodality, plurilingualism, and translanguaging among others. The research trends that represent these concepts often frame them as cutting-edge research. Nevertheless, non-Western communities have long engaged with these pluri, multi, and trans forms of literacy. The monolingual print-based literacy that is often critiqued by these research movements is the result of Western positivist, colonial, and neoliberal educational structures, which overlook the multidimensional literacy practices already existing in other parts of the world (Gagne et al., 2022). Pluri, multi, and trans literacy movements, thus, should not be regarded as Western inventions, but as attempts to remedy the ills of Western conceptualizations. Societies in the East, for instance, have long histories of translingual and multimodal linguistic practices. In this presentation, we argue that in order to have more reliable and authentic conceptualizations of pluri, multi, and trans literacies, it is important to incorporate non-Western discourses about the same practices in our conversations. Hence, we propose the use of Reconstructive Discourse Analysis as a methodology to revisit pluralized Western concepts in language and literacy research through the lens of Eastern discourses about the same phenomena. As the first presenter of the panel, I will provide an theoretical explanation about how to use Reconstructive Discourse Analysis as a decolonial research approach.

To this end, I will frame Reconstructive Discourse Analysis as a mixed-method approach consisting of Discourse Analysis and Reconstructive Analysis. Discourse analysis helps us identify the historical and sociopolitical paradigms that shape discourses as abstract patterns that load language with meaning (Gee, 2014; Paltridge, 2012). In reconstructive analysis (Carspecken, 2008), discourses are reconstructed in new combinations in order to make the sociocultural and power relational contexts of the discursive hegemony visible, an approach which, in turn, acts as a form of discourse analysis. This kind of discourse reconstruction functions on the knowledge that “semantic structures are instantiated through culturally distinctive uses of words and phrases whose meanings depend on relations to other categories through relations of opposition, contrast, similarity, analogy, metaphor, and homology” (Carspecken, 2008, p. 743). Reconstructive analysis provides an opportunity to compare two different discursive contexts for highlighting “similarities” and “contrasts”, and, as a result, creates a “validity horizon” (Call-Cummings & Ross, 2019, p. 6) for discourse-centered theories by putting them next to possible alternatives. I will explain that Reconstructive Discourse Analysis involves discursive analysis in three different phases (1) Discursive Genealogy, (2) Discursive Intervention, and (3) Evaluation of Practice. The two other presenters will illustrate examples of Reconstructive Discourse Analysis, sharing findings from two empirical.

Author

• Amir Kalan, McGill University