Seeing the point from which you see what you see: An essay on epistemic reflexivity in language research

Linus Salö

doi:10.14426/mm.v5i1.87

Abstract

This essay deals with epistemic issues in language research, focusing particularly onthe field of language planning and policy (LPP). It outlines Pierre Bourdieu’s principleof epistemic reflexivity as a device for understanding what the view of the researchobject owes to the researcher’s past and present position in social space. I hold thatdeveloping such an understanding is particularly vital for LPP scholars, by virtueof the ways in which the objects investigated here tend to linger in the borderlandsbetween science and politics. Accordingly, the essay unearths the philosophical rootsof epistemic reflexivity and highlights some of its implications in the research practicewith examples from Swedish LPP research. It also examines the value of a reflexivestance in interviews as a way of pinpointing the relevance of epistemic reflexivity inevery moment of the scholarly investigation. In conclusion, the argument is that sinceepistemic reflexivity is a useful device for any critical researcher who wishes to grasp theknowledge he or she produces, it is so also for language researchers, and particularlyso in relation to the ideologically normative practices of LPP scholarship. Therefore, areflexive gaze is a pivotal driver for yielding better language research.

Highlights

This essay deals with epistemic issues in language research, focusing on the field of language planning and policy (LPP)
Viewed through the prism of Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology, research is a form of interested practice governed by a scientific habitus (Brubaker, 1993)
Like other kinds of social research, language research is at times vested in ways which affect its eventual outcomes

Summary

Epistemic reflexivity in language research

The title of this essay derives from the work of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, whose writings on academic knowledge production deal at length with the relationship between the view of the research object, on the one hand, and the viewpoint of the researcher, on the other. It is feasible to account for the position of the individual without adopting an overtly individualistic focus so long as focus is placed on the relationship to one’s research object, and the value-laden social worlds previously encountered In this sense, Bourdieu’s brand of reflexivity pertains to a form of self-analysis that does not privilege the self (e.g., Bourdieu, 2007). Having undertaken university training in applied Scandinavian linguistics, and later pursuing a professional career at the Swedish Language Council, I entered the research practice as a socialized agent of the LPP field, armed with pivotal preconceptions with important bearings on the object undertaken for investigation This fact, does not merely pertain to matters of embodying “Swedishness” on the part of the analyst, but is intertwined with and amplified by a set of professional dispositions with focal values attached to the significance of Swedish in Swedish society, enmeshed in the categories, objectives, and interests imbued in Swedish LPP. My present-day position on this vast and deep-seated matter is that this aim is pivotal but immensely difficult, yet conceivable by adopting a reflexive posture (e.g., Bourdieu, 1983, p. 317)

Interviews and reflexivity

The eye which sees itself