Volume 44, Issue 6 - Special Issue: Critical reflections on criticality in the study of language, culture and society; Guest Editors: Anne Larsen, Lian Malai Madsen & Janus Spindler Møller

The present paper analyzes the Discourses underpinning the tracked secondary education system in Italy through the lens of sociolinguistic scales (Blommaert 2007. Sociolinguistic scales. Intercultural Pragmatics 4(1). 1–19). Via an examination of education policy documents, historical accounts of policy discourse, classroom discourse data, ethnographic fieldnotes, ministerial websites, and literary texts, this paper considers how the Discourse of classism (with a capital D , á la Gee 1990. Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourses, critical perspectives on literacy and education . London & New York: Routledge) which underlies the foundations of the tracked school system in Italy has gradually become naturalized and then ‘invisible’ (that is, hegemonic) as it has traveled through scales of political and social speech and texts ( discourse with a lowercase d ). This paper considers an alternative view of scales not as spatiotemporal spaces, places, or settings, but as types of metadiscursive labor (Carr 2006. “Secrets keep you sick”: Metalinguistic labor in a drug treatment program for homeless women. Language in Society 35(05). 631–653). This paper also discusses the role of critique, drawing on Pietikäinen’s (2016. Critical debates: Discourse, boundaries and social change. Sociolinguistics: Theoretical Debates ) concepts of emancipatory, ethnographic, and carnivalesque critique, in rendering visible and available for re-scaling the Discourses which become invisible over time.

In this article, we reflect on criticality in contemporary inequality research through a discussion of the significance of marginalising class discourses in Denmark to the everyday schooling experience of a group of high school students. The article is based on an investigation of how language, class and educational success are linked in public as well as more local discourses among teachers and students in a provincial Danish high school. Based on three case studies of students whose parents do not have a gymnasium degree, it is argued that such discourses affect the students’ identification practices in the gymnasium. Our theoretically informed and class-focused analyses of the wider discourses and the situated classroom practices leads us to a final discussion of the consequences and fairness of our approach. We contemplate the risk of contributing to reaffirming class-related marginalisation against the quest for uncovering excluding social processes. Ultimately, we argue that the task for critical researchers may, in fact, be considered to be not to assume, but to embrace a knowledgeable position in order to fulfil this quest.

In this article I present the notion of ethnolinguistic cornering as an outcome of the Everyday Languaging project and argue for its relevance in ethnographic and interactional sociolinguistics. The Everyday Languaging project is a long-term cooperation with a Copenhagen school where a team of researchers from the University of Copenhagen has conducted language-centered ethnographic fieldwork involving different student groups. The school is situated in a linguistically heterogeneous area of Copenhagen and the students represent a high variety of different linguistic family backgrounds. The data presented in the paper involve a student group who were followed from their first year in the public school system in 2010 through nine years until 2019. Ethnolinguistic cornering denotes moments in interaction where people ascribe each other identities based on assumptions about language and social life, and these ascribed identities are rejected or in other ways treated as negatively charged. I argue that instances of ethnolinguistic cornering deserve particular attention in sociolinguistics because they provide a lens for investigating how the paradox of monolingual standard regimes within multilingual societies is constructed, reproduced and challenged in ongoing interaction.

Linguistic ethnographers are invested in empirically studying, rather than presupposing, social problems that are produced in language. Their dialogue with subjects who experience these problems helps explain why fields such as sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology are considered critical. This article critiques the criticality in this field by problematizing the location of the expert. Drawing from dialogue with Rio de Janeiro peripheral activists, I focus on their reverse ways of describing the work of, largely, middle-class ethnographers who approach them in search of data. “Reverse ethnography” captures the critique of traditional ethnographic “informants” about hierarchies and extractivist practices in ethnography. Their refusal to being ethnographed responds to naturalized ways of studying minorities and indexes a shifting ground of expertise. I also discuss my own responses to prefigured models of expertise by drawing on editorial gatekeeping practices where I have been framed as not sufficiently an expert. I analyze anonymous peer reports that display power-laden presuppositions about what kinds of accounts, theoretical sources, and types of data are valid for providing a legitimate sociolinguistic account of the periphery. Ultimately, peripheral activists and scholars’ reversals of prefigured models of studying the periphery may strengthen ongoing efforts for democratizing sociolinguistics.