Ecologies of multilingual writing: An interactive colloquium
This colloquium is devoted to exploring the concept of ecology in second language writing. Our purpose is to examine the ecology concept from multiple perspectives and to suggest orientations for the field. Four scholars will engage in informal dialogic interaction on the topic, followed by two discussants.
The ecology concept focuses on where and how we live, who and what we live with, what (values) we live for and by, and how these are interconnected. From this perspective, it is odd that dominant ideologies of science insist that to gain true knowledge we must 1) detach what we study from the rest of the world–remove it from its complex sustaining context; and 2) detach ourselves as researchers from our feeling, valuing, everyday selves, as if emotionless, disembodied, values-neutral human beings ever existed. Ecology in this sense opposes dominant ideologies of science.
In another sense, however, ecology welcomes all approaches to studying and understanding human action. Ecology’s first principle is “everything is connected to everything else” (Commoner, 1971, p. 29); therefore the more perspectives the better, as long as these perspectives can be treated relationally. This approach calls for diversity, patient listening and discussion, synergizing, and interdisciplinarity.
Ecology has two immediate implications for multilingual writing. First, it is increasingly recognized that all forms of communication occur not in vacuums, but in complex multimodal/multisensory/sociomaterial/political/multilingual contexts/environments (Canagarajah, 2018). If so, then we must study writing as environmentally situated. This environmental turn has been fairly well-represented in one of our “parent disciplines” (Silva & Leki, 2004)—composition studies—but less so in the other—applied linguistics. In the latter, writing has often been treated as a thing in itself, e.g., a grammatical entity or cognitive product.
Second, if all writing is ecological, and our fragile human ecology is immediately threatened, then multilingual writing must engage with our ecological crisis. Other fields have begun to do so, e.g., TESOL (Goulah & Katunich, 2020) and composition studies (Roux, 2023). Shouldn’t we join them? Writing is a powerful tool for revolutionary change; let us use it, study it, and teach it to save our lives.
Organizers and Panelists
Dwight Atkinson, University of Arizona, USA
Jeroen Gevers, UCLA, USA
Elena Taylor, Utah State University, USA
Anuj Gupta, University of Arizona, USA
Discussants
Hadi Banat, University of Massachusetts, Boston, USA
Fabiola Ehlers-Zavala, Colorado State University, USA
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