Call for chapters

Following the success of a symposium on Language, Technology, and Power at the American Association for Applied Linguistics annual conference in Spring 2021, editors of the Contributions to the Sociology of Language (CSL) series, published by de Gruyter Mouton, encouraged participants to propose a related edited volume. In response to this invitation, Chris Proctor (University at Buffalo, SUNY), Beth Semel (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Enrique (Henry) Suárez (University of Massachusetts - Amherst) and Sara Vogel (New York University, Bank Street College) welcome chapter contributions to a proposed volume in the CSL series which will explore the relationships between digital tools, languaging, and learning as mediated by systems of power.

Many sociologists of language have considered how language, society, and education have co-evolved with the networked digital devices we use to communicate—considering the modalities that digital tools can afford, complicate, or disrupt for learners and educators, and the ways digital communication has accelerated societal forces and processes like globalization, mass migration, and late stage capitalism. Questions about the role of digital communication and digitally mediated languaging for learning have taken on even more urgency as physical classrooms closed their doors and learning moved online in the early stages of the 2020 global pandemic.

And yet, the field has tended to pay more attention to what’s on screens, and how users leverage tools for communication in teaching and learning, and less attention to what's behind the screen, or who’s in front of it. Tech developers often present the digital tools that have gained traction in learning contexts (e.g. personalized learning software, proctoring software, automated graders, machine translation tools) as panaceas that will solve all of the structural problems of our educational systems—especially in relation to the achievement of students who are language-minoritized by traditional schooling. Dominant narratives position digital tools as neutral artifacts or rote algorithmic and statistical processes that simply relay information or streamline social, institutional, and expressive practices.

However, the reality is that digital tools are contingent and politically built artifacts, designed by corporate and institutional actors that can embed the models of learning and, in tandem, models and ideologies of language and communication of the designers that produce them. These artifacts' histories and physicality (how they are made, with what materials and codes, and with whose labor and supply chains) also have profound impacts on languaging, learning, and society. This volume will explore the relationships between digital tools, languaging, and learning as mediated by systems of power.

We expect the audience for this book to include an interdisciplinary community of researchers and practitioners of sociology of language, education and learning, and hope to connect this audience to critical scholarship in human-computer interaction, science and technology studies, information studies, and the history, sociology, and anthropology of computing.

While we acknowledge the power that digital tools can have in learning contexts, we aim for this book to critically consider what forms of languaging and communication are promoted, normalized, and reified through the introduction of digital tools into learning environments. Rooted in these understandings, we hope to surface ways of using technology for liberatory languaging and learning projects.

We are interested in analyses of digitally-mediated learning and languaging contexts, especially empirically grounded works, which:

1. Critically explore the designing, testing, implementation and maintenance of automated systems that process, perceive, mediate, or otherwise mimic languaging, and which are employed in learning environments. We hope contributors will investigate the broad array of metaphors and analogies wrapped up in the process of making and using automated systems that supposedly think, speak, listen, and learn like humans. What do these comparisons reveal, conceal, or transmute? What assumptions do they disclose about language and learning, and which kinds of subjects count as passive vs agentive, skilled vs unskilled, deserving vs undeserving, designer vs user? What language ideologies and structures of domination, subordination, or even liberation are baked into—or broken down—in these technologies, as individuals and institutions build them and as they travel from research labs and start-up offices to schools and other learning contexts?

2. Consider how people and their languaging practices get positioned relative to digital tools and technologies in learning environments. We seek analyses that highlight creative ways of learning and languaging about, with, and through technology that disrupt dominant power structures and traditional language and/or disciplinary learning. Guiding questions might include: How do people (learners, teachers, families, community-based educators) negotiate digitally-mediated learning environments that may not have been designed to recognize or value their languaging practices? How do people enact creativity, criticality, and resistance in digitally-mediated languaging/learning environments? What forms of power structure the relationships between learners, educators, educational systems, language, digital tools, and disciplinary practices? How do these relationships come to be? How do especially language-minoritized and/or racialized people and communities language and learn about, with, and through digital tools?

3. Consider how assemblages of humans and machines may produce new understandings of language and learning beyond the familiar roles of humans as agentic readers and writers and computers as tools or texts. Constructs such as identity, footing, indexicality, agency, audience, and even discourse are destabilized when, for example, Google suggests what to write in your emails, Twitter and Facebook contextualize content with your friends’ implicit endorsements—co-interpreting the texts they present, and appropriating readers' identities. We invite contributions that trouble the boundary between human and machine and that engage with critical possibilities (worlding, history, futurity) for languaging in learning environments. We welcome contributors to consider digital identity and agency from a range of perspectives, including feminist, queer, Indigenous, Afro-futuristic, cyborg, and non-object-oriented perspectives, among others; and to engage interventionist methodologies such as design-based research and others.