Abstract
While rarely explicitly recognized in our disciplinary frameworks, the openness and curiosity on which Modern Languages in the UK is founded are, in many ways, ethnographic impulses. Ethnographic theories and practices can be transformative in relation to the undergraduate curriculum, providing an unparalleled model for experiential and holistic approaches to language and cultural learning. As a form of emplaced and embodied knowledge production, ethnography promotes greater reflexivity on our geographical and historical locations as researchers, and on the languages and cultures through which we engage. An ethnographic sensitivity encourages an openness to less hierarchical and hegemonic forms of knowledge, particularly when consciously seeking to invert the traditional colonial ethnographic project and envision instead more participatory and collaborative models of engagement. Modern Languages scholars are at the same time ideally placed to challenge a monolingual mindset and an insensitivity to language-related questions in existing ethnographic research located in cognate disciplines. For Modern Languages to embrace ethnography with credibility, we propose a series of recommendations to mobilize these new research and professional agendas.
Highlights
There is not one corner of Modern Languages that may be seen as “ethnographic”
As Modern Languages reflects on the need for disciplinary coherence and renewal, ethnographic theories and practices have a transformative potential in relation to how we conceptualize our approaches to languages and cultures in research and teaching across Higher Education and beyond
At a time when Modern Languages urgently needs to articulate more visibly its identity and rationale, providing not least a clearer sense of what Mary Louise Pratt has called a “public idea about language” which goes beyond an instrumental focus on language skills, ethnographic theory and practice can allow us to more explicitly interrogate and communicate what we know and do
Summary
There is not one corner of Modern Languages that may be seen as “ethnographic”.
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