Ron Darvin

Identity and a Model of Investment in Applied Linguistics

ABSTRACT This article locates Nortons foundational work on identity and investment within the social turn of applied linguistics. It discusses its historical impetus and theoretical anchors, and it illustrates how these ideas have been taken up in recent scholarship. In response to the demands of the new world order, spurred by technology and characterized by mobility, it proposes a comprehensive model of investment, which occurs at the intersection of identity, ideology, and capital. The model recognizes that the spaces in which language acquisition and socialization take place have become increasingly deterritorialized and unbounded, and the systemic patterns of control more invisible. This calls for new questions, analyses, and theories of identity. The model addresses the needs of learners who navigate their way through online and offline contexts and perform identities that have become more fluid and complex. As such, it proposes a more comprehensive and critical examination of the relationship between identity, investment, and language learning. Drawing on two case studies of a female language learner in rural Uganda and a male language learner in urban Canada, the model illustrates how structure and agency, operating across time and space, can accord or refuse learners the power to speak.

Social Class, Identity, and Migrant Students

A necessary component of the neoliberal mechanisms of globalization, migration addresses the economic and labor needs of postindustrial countries while producing new modes of social fragmentation and inequality (Crompton, 2008). As migrant students insert themselves into segmented spaces, their countries of origin are themselves implicated in a global class hierarchy, often positioning them in ways that refract this world economic order (Kelly, 2012). Operating in these transnational contexts, social class plays a significant role in determining life trajectories and the ways by which migrant students of diverse social classes exercise agency. In language education research, however, social class remains largely underexplored, compared to identity categories of ethnicity, race, and gender (Block, 2012). To address this gap, this article employs a Bourdieusian conceptualization of social class, to examine how class differences in transnational contexts can impact the social and educational trajectories of learners. Data from migrant Filipino students in Vancouver, Canada, illustrate how migrant students continually negotiate class positions in these transnational spaces and how the affordances and constraints of their social class can lead to divergent learning outcomes.

Language, ethnography, and education: Bridging New Literacy Studies and Bourdieuby Grenfell, M., Bloome, D., Hardy, C., Pahl, K., Rowsell, J., & Street, B. V.

In this regard AWB does significant political work—none more powerful than its reappropriation of the term articulate. From beginning to end, the authors implicitly argue that niggas, contrary to popular belief, been articulate. The book makes clear that Black folks’ capacity to deliver nuanced and comprehensively insightful commentary on the relationship between race and power, economics and politics, language and education has always been the norm; there’s nothing surprising, exceptional, or aberrant about it. However, perhaps the most compelling characteristic of the book for me is how it signifies the myth of Black intellectual and linguistic deficiency. Alim and Smitherman demonstrate this point not only through the ease with which they move in and out of varieties of language but also in their titling of the book. The phrase “articulate while Black” is a play on what many in the African American community refer to as “driving while Black” (or Brown, for those of us living in the Southwest). “Driving while Black” is a form of racial profiling that reflects America’s long held imaginings of Black criminality. Implicit in the expression is the racist assumption that Black and Brown bodies need to be “overseen” and policed. The authors bring this understanding of hypervisibility and criminality to bear in their unpacking of the racially coded meanings inherent in the term articulate. In a sense, Articulate While Black offers the ultimate critical rejoinder in that it acknowledges White America’s propensity to police Black Language and culture—and responds to that propensity in an honest, critical, and savvy fashion, thereby demonstrating the verbal ingenuity of Black Language speakers. From my seat in the far back I can see the audience’s reaction to the past president’s comment. Some fidget, heads turn, but for the majority of listeners, Sandy Hayes’ use of the word articulate to describe the speech of a Black man (another Black president) invoked no observable response. We begin exiting the ballroom and I find myself in close proximity to a colleague. I hold up Samy and G’s book. My colleague curtly raises her eyebrow and tonally affirms the sentiment coded in my gesture, “Ummmm hhhmmmm.” Once through the doors I say, “Articulate?” My colleague laughs. “Where she been? Niggas been articulate for days.”

Collaborative Writing, Academic Socialization, and the Negotiation of Identity

In this chapter, Darvin and Norton examine the potential of collaborative writing between student and supervisor as a means of academic socialization. Drawing on the model of investment (Darvin and Norton in Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 35: 36–56, 2015), they discuss how investing in socializing practices within the academic community is located at the intersection of identity, capital and ideology. By challenging assumptions of academic roles and existing norms of scholarly publishing, student and supervisor can reframe their identities (Norton in Identity and language learning: Extending the conversation. Multilingual Matters, Bristol, 2013) and recognize the cultural capital that each one brings. This reconfiguration of power constructs a space where authentic collaboration can begin and where ideas are mutually valued and exchanged to produce a work that bears the inscription of both identities.