Untold Autoethnographic Stories of (In)Justice, Teaching and Scholarship: 25 (Encounters)

The voices in this book raise questions about the relationalities and entanglements of applied linguists in a troubled world. They are the personal stories that are sometimes hidden behind and within more conventional teaching, research and scholarship, however iconoclastic and unconventional the endeavors themselves. Injustice runs through and across the chapters, connecting one with another but also highlighting differences. The stories in this book describe or picture anxieties, fears, veils, exclusion, erasures, microaggressions, racism and patriarchy, together with the painful double-binds and pitfalls experienced in applied linguistic fieldwork and teaching. By sharing their stories, the authors attempt to embody the changes called into being through their applied linguistics teaching and fieldwork.

Ari Sherris is a Professor of Bilingual Education at Texas A&M University-Kingsville. His research interests explore communication, meaning making and complex social semiotics in multilingual contexts. Ari also documents and supports indigenous languages and teacher activists reclaiming and revitalizing their languages as they bring those languages into schooling for the Safaliba in Ghana and Salish speakers on the Flathead Reservation in the USA. He has edited four books on indigenous languages, literacies, pedagogies of revitalization and ethnography. His research appears in Writing & Pedagogy, Journal of Multilingual & Multicultural Development, The Canadian Modern Language Review, Language Awareness, and edited volumes. 

Joy Kreeft Peyton is President of the Coalition of Community-Based Heritage Language Schools in the United States, which connects and collaborates with thousands of schools teaching hundreds of languages, mostly on weekends. She has also worked in Ethiopia, Nepal, and The Gambia to develop curriculum, materials, and student pleasure reading books in students’ mother tongues.