Preconstructed vs. discursive negotiation of group and individual identities - Laura Callahan
Channel: UA German Department
Date: 2012-09-30

Two positions often arise in reviews and criticism of sociolinguistic research. These positions each go by various names, but are often presented grosso modo as two opposing sides. Under the first position, groups and their members are categorized a priori, according to properties such as sex, race, ethnicity, and native speaker. This position is often referred to as essentialist or positivist. Under the second position, which is now often put forward as the one researchers should follow—despite criticisms from some quarters that the methodology of such studies lacks rigor—properties such as the aforementioned are contextual, negotiable, subject to change within interactions between individual speakers. This position has been referred to as constructionist or constructivist. But even when categories such as sex, race, ethnicity, and native speaker are considered to have been imposed a priori, there is recognition that they are still at least to some extent social constructs—if not the categories themselves, the ideas we have about them. So the point of this presentation will not be to oppose essentialism versus constructionism so much as to ask when the construction is supposed to have taken place: pre-interaction, at a macro level, or during each interaction, and therefore at a micro level. The presentation will include a very brief overview of some of my empirical research and how it might relate to the issue of the preimposition versus in-situ construction of group and individual identities.
Questions / prompts this presentation may speak to: Practice: In what ways might multilingual phenomena be considered to be embodied? Can multilingualism be simulated?