The Social Turn

Twenty years ago, I wrote this, the first paragraph of a book about theories of SLA:

There is a “Science and Culture War” currently raging in academia, and it has spilled over into the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA).  When TESOL Quarterly devoted a special issue to research methods in SLA in 1990, and when Applied Linguistics followed with a special issue on theory construction in SLA in 1993, almost all of the articles in both journals assumed a rationalist approach to theory construction, based on logical reasoning and empirical research.  But subsequently, and increasingly in the past few years, a growing number of researchers in SLA have adopted relativist positions of one sort or another, most frequently following the constructivist position of Lincoln (1990) and Guba (1990), or sometimes appealing directly to the work of such post-modernists as Derrida (1973, 1976) and Foucault (1980).  Whatever their inspiration, what unites the rebels is their rejection of the methods, assumptions, and authority of the rationalist/empiricist approach to research and theory construction.

Today, it seems that the bad guys have won, and that those who continue to be guided in their academic work by a realist epistemology, a rationalist approach to research, and a humanistic, libertarian approach to education find themselves the targets of increasingly aggressive attacks from “the new puritans” as Doyle (2022) calls them.

Critical Social Justice

The “science and culture War” of the late nineties has morphed into what Pluckrose and Lindsay (2020) refers to as the crusade of the “Critical Social Justice” (CSJ) believers against those who cling to the obsolete values of “Liberal Social Justice”. In their 2012 work, Sensoy and DiAngelo explain CSJ:

A critical approach to social justice refers to specific theoretical perspectives that recognize that society is stratified (i.e., divided and unequal) in significant and far-reaching ways along social group lines that include race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability. Critical social justice recognizes inequality as deeply embedded in the fabric of society (i.e., as structural), and actively seeks to change this.

The definition we apply is rooted in a critical theoretical approach. While this approach refers to a broad range of fields, there are some important shared principles:

• All people are individuals, but they are also members of social groups.
• These social groups are valued unequally in society.
• Social groups that are valued more highly have greater access to the resources of a society.
• Social injustice is real, exists today, and results in unequal access to resources between groups of people.
• Those who claim to be for social justice must be engaged in self-reflection about their own socialization into these groups (their “positionality”) and must strategically act from that awareness in ways that challenge social injustice.
• This action requires a commitment to an ongoing and lifelong process. (p. xviii)     

Clearly, the “social groups” referred to are identity groups. CSJ sees society as made up of people divided by their race, sex, class sexuality and ability and then ranked and allocated certain resources depending on their identity. Despite all the empirical evidence which falsifies such a simplistic picture of society, CSJ insists on portraying society as a white supremacist, patriarchal, homophobic, ableist system in which people can plot their “positionality” by their identity and predict consistent results from it. This crude framework is claimed to provide the key to understanding society and to unlocking revolutionary change. As Pluckrose (2020) points out, the assumption that all people are socialised into certain beliefs due to their identity leads to the conclusion that society is the result of people’s immutable characteristics. Critical Theory thus “disempowers the people it seeks to empower”. Pluckrose goes on: “Liberals generally reject this reductionist worldview and seek to overcome racism, sexism and homophobia by consistently objecting to anybody’s worth being evaluated by their race, sex or sexuality and seeking empirical evidence of discrimination and effective ways to overcome it”.

Despite all the weaknesses in their simplistic framework, CSJ claims that society is best seen as made up of undervalued groups who are discriminated against by oppressive power systems who control the way everything is talked about, i.e., discourse. These oppressive power systems permeate everything and are identified as white supremacy, patriarchy, colonialism, heteronormativity, cisnormativity, ableism and fatphobia. Those who don’t recognize these systems and fail to see what’s going on are complicit in the oppressive discourses and systems, while the marginalised are in a much better position to see them and thus more competent to identify and define them. Knowledge is thus tied to identity and to one’s perceived position in society in relation to power – often referred to as “positionality.”

CSJ theorists use this peculiar “critical” methodology to “uncover” the oppressive power systems and set the scene for a revolutionary shift to social justice, which crucially depends on everybody in society accepting the CSJ theorists’ interpretations. Those who reject these interpretations are judged to be stubbornly trying to preserve their own privilege, or suffering from false consciousness, or both.  

CSJ theorists and activists adopt a relativist epistemology which denies our ability to obtain objective knowledge. As opposed to scientists and rationalists who adopt a realist epistemology (objective truth exists and can be approximated to through the use of logic, empirical observation and the asymetery between truth and falshood), CSJ adopts a social constructivism view which sees all claims to truth as no more than value-laden constructs of culture. There’s no such thing as objective knowledge, no way we can talk about things and events which corresponds with reality as determined by evidence. Thus, the scientific method has no more legitimacy than any other way of producing “knowledge” – it’s just one cultural approach among many, as corrupted and biased as any other “narrative”. The pursuit of objective knowledge is abandoned in favour of the active pursuit of social justice, and we are caljoled into accepting the CSJ views on no more than their say so. Doyle (2022) gives the example of how CSJ theorists in the field of “Fat Studies” argue that there are no health risks to obesity, claiming that the seemingly irrefutable evidence to the contrary is the result of the bigotry of “the scientific method”. Similarly, as I argued in a recent post about Adrian Holliday’s work, it is asserted – by Holliday – that the scientists’ “positivist ideology” leads them to seeing people from China as being “essentially different”, which results in the further assertion that all scientists are “inherently” racists.

CSJ has nothing to do with critical thinking, i.e., examining an argument or claim in the light of reason and evidence rather than accepting it uncritically. As Baily (2017) makes clear: “Critical pedagogy regards the claims that students make in response to social-justice issues not as propositions to be assessed for their truth value, but as expressions of power that function to re-inscribe and perpetuate social inequalities” (emphasis added). Forget objective knowledge, “critical research is not out to create truth”. The critical research process involves “an active identification of and engagement with power, with the social systems and structures, ideologies and paradigms that uphold the status quo”. It follows that a person engaged in critical social justice practice must be able to recognize that “relations of unequal social power are constantly being enacted at both the micro (individual) and macro (structural) levels.”

Such “logic” is enertgetically rejected by Pluckrose (2022), who questions the CSJ assertion that identity-based power dynamics are constantly in play in every interaction and every system in society. Pluckrose suggests that things are actually “a bit more complicated than this”, and that most people’s lived experience involves seeing others as individuals “rather than as identity-based pawns positioned on a power grid”. What reasoning validates the assertion that identity-based relations of unequal power govern social life? Why, asks Pluckrose, should she “understand” that every time she interacts with a man, he has more power than her and is exercising it against her? Why, every time she interacts with a non-white person, should she “understand” that she has more power than them and that she is exercising that power against them? “Is it that most people fail to “understand” this or is it that most humans who regularly interact with a variety of other humans don’t find it to be true?”

Sensor and DiAngelo urge everybody to “think critically about knowledge; what we know and how we know it”, and go on to warn that disagreeing with the CSJ conception of the world is a symptom of “white fragility”, which occurs whenever white people disagree with and object to the claim that they are inherently racist. Pluckrose (2022) rejoins that fighting for a more socially just society requires acting against Critical Social Justice, not bowing to its dictates. People’s arguments can and should be separated from their identities, “allowing anybody to subscribe to any viewpoint and challenge any viewpoint and not be confined to the one presumptuously deemed to be appropriate for their race, sex or sexuality. It was liberalism that convinced society that women and racial and sexual minorities were individuals with their own minds and voices and in possession of exactly the same moral right to access everything society had to offer (including the full range of ideas). It is this liberal concept of social justice, with its extraordinary record of achievement, that we must defend and further”.

Finally, it’s instructive to look at the short-list competing for the 2023 British Association for Applied Linguistics book prize.  

Gender Diversity and Sexuality in English Language Education: New Transnational Voices edited by Darío Luis Banegas and Navan Govender, Bloomsbury. “Informed by critical theories, critical literacy, post-structuralism, queer theory, and indigeneity/(de)coloniality, the critical perspectives in this volume consider gender and sexuality as dimensions of human life and aim to promote sexual, gender, emotional and relational wellbeing together with the construction of cultural horizons and citizenship”.

Mobile-Assisted Language Learning: Concepts, Contexts and Challenges by Glenn Stockwell, Cambridge University Press. This book provides a resource for present and future language teachers, and for graduate students of applied linguistics and TESOL, to understand how mobile devices can best be used for language teaching. How, one wonders, did such a sensible book make the list!

Antisocial Language Teaching: English and the Pervasive Pathology of Whiteness by JPB Gerald, Multilingual Matters. “The centering of whiteness in English Language Teaching (ELT) renders the industry callous, corrupt and cruel; or, antisocial. This book examines major issues with the ideologies and institutions behind the discipline of ELT and diagnoses the industry as in dire need of treatment, with the solution being a full decentering of whiteness.”.

Standards, Stigma, Surveillance by Ian Cushing, Palgrave Macmillan. “This book traces raciolinguistic ideologies in England’s schools, focusing on post- 2010 policy reforms which frame the language practices of low-income, racialised speakers as limited and deficient….. It draws on fields including critical language policy, educational sociolinguistics, genealogy, raciolinguistics and critical language awareness”.

The Inner World of Gatekeeping in Scholarly Publication edited by Pejman Habibie and Anna Kristina Hultgren, Palgrave Macmillan. “A collection of reflective narratives and autoethnographic accounts by a wide range of journal editors and experienced reviewers who shed light on the often mysterious processes of peer review and editing while taking care to locate these within the pressures of neoliberal academia”.

Implicit and Explicit Language Attitudes by Robert M. McKenzie, Andrew McNeill, Routledge.  This book “details the findings of a large-scale study, incorporating cutting-edge implicit and self-report instruments adapted from social psychology, investigating the evaluations of over 300 English nationals of the status and social attractiveness of Northern English and Southern English speech in England”.

Cushing, with his “Standards, Stigma, Surveillance” was the lucky winner.

References

 Baile, A. (2017) ‘Tracking Privilege-Preserving Epistemic Pushback in Feminist and Critical Race Philosophy Classes

Doyle, A. (2022) The New Puritans. Constable.

Pluckrose, H. (2022) “What Do We Mean By Critical Social Justice”. CounterweightSupport.com. Counterweight.

Pluckrose, H. and Lindsay, J. (2020) Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody.  Pitchstone Publishing.

Sensoy, O and DiAngelo, R. (2012) Respect Differences? Challenging the Common Guidelines in Social Justice Education. http://democracyeducationjournal.org/home/vol22/iss2/1