AAAL 2025: Invited Colloquium
Convened by Yasmine Romero
Strengths, limitations, and challenges of intersectional approaches
Convener:
Yasmine Romero, University of Hawai‘i-West O‘ahu
Discussant:
Hayriye KayiAydar, University of Arizona
Abstract:
Our colloquium fosters “open critical dialogue” (hooks, 1994, p. 110) about what has been learned when taking an intersectional approach within applied linguistics (Crenshaw, 1991; Aydar et al., 2022). Intersectionality is emerging as a radical, social justice-oriented framework for applied linguists to analyze, interpret, and effect change across diverse teaching, learning, and research spaces (Carbado et al., 2013). Therefore, it is important and timely to not only share the multiple ways intersectionality can be approached and put into practice within the field, but also the strengths, limitations, and challenges of taking intersectional approaches or perspectives. In this way, language teachers and researchers can innovate intersectional approaches/perspectives across pedagogical, institutional, and public spaces.
Our colloquium aims to share, reflect, and discuss intersectional approaches and practices in language classrooms, specifically, and other institutional and public spaces, broadly. Each speaker first shares their history and relationship with intersectionality as a concept, mechanism, and/or critical theory. Speakers then share their intersectional work, and the language teaching and research stories surrounding that work (Nelson, 2011; Romney, 2006). Stories will speak to the strengths, limitations, and challenges learned from engaging intersectionality in theoretical and practical ways (Hill Collins, 2019; Nash, 2018).
As such, our colloquium focuses more on listening and responding to one another, as opposed to traditionally presenting work followed by a formal question and answer session (hooks, 1994, 2003). Our discussant will make connections between what has been shared in order to point to the nuance and care needed when mapping intersectionality onto applied linguistics. In other words, our colloquium strives for what bell hooks (2003) calls “radical openness” (p. 110). We strive to explore intersectionality through sharing and critically reflecting upon our experiences---life, teaching, research---bringing intersectionality into the language classroom, academic publishing, and other institutional and public spaces within applied linguistics.
Dialogue and (counter)story as intersectional tools in multilingual/multicultural spaces
Yasmine Romero, University of Hawai‘i-West O‘ahu
Abstract: This first half of this presentation establishes the approach that our colloquium will take–“open critical dialogue with one another” (hooks, 1994, p. 110). “Open, critical dialogue” builds community through bearing witness, whether that is sharing painful memories in the classroom or asking practical and theoretical questions to figure out collaborative, socially responsible responses and actions in intersectional language teaching and research approaches (hooks, 1994, p. 110; Aydar et al., 2022). Moreover, I share the stakes of this approach and why this approach over others strongly aligns with intersectionality and relational accountability (hooks, 2003; Hill Collins, 2019; Wilson, 2016; Kaomea, 2009).
The second half of the presentation shifts towards my stories on navigating multiple intersections in teaching, learning, and research spaces in Hawai‘i (Perez, 2021; Trask, 1999; Aguon, 2006). Multilingual students in Hawai‘i navigate multiple languages—ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi, Pidgin, Ilocano, English, and more—and negotiate language attitudes, policies, and histories inside and outside the classroom everyday; these tensions point to complex relationships between intersections of indigeneity, sexuality, gender, race, and class.
As a half-white, half-CHamoru queer woman, I share my experiences navigating these intersections in my multilingual classrooms (Crenshaw, 1991; Romero, 2018; Martinez, 2020; Ruiz, 2022). I locate issues of whiteness, epistemological racism, and the colonization and commodification of indigenous knowledge and practices facing language teachers and researchers and their students (McKinley & Brayboy, 2005; Delgado, 1989; Silva, 2004; Perez, 2021). I share how I act upon this knowledge through particular teaching and research moves, such as the sharing student counterstories in multimodal formats and the co-founding of a multilingual undergraduate journal with students, faculty, and librarians in Hawai‘i.
An intersectional analysis of embodied memories through a decolonial feminist lens: doing justice to (trans)languaging bodies at the intersection
Jihea Maddamsetti, Old Dominion University
Abstract: The decolonial perspective on intersectionality speaks to decolonial forms of remembering (Dillard, 2012; see also, Mignolo & Vazquez, 2013): the process of recognizing and re-claiming linguistic and cultural knowledge that has been historically and disproportionally subject to active minimizing, censoring, obliterating, and distorting within colonial logics. Preserving, carrying, and communicating linguistic and cultural memories within and against coloniality has been a struggle for many intersectionally minoritized communities, including racialized bi-/multilinguals both in post-colonial and settler-colonial educational settings (Mignolo & Vazquez, 2013).
By excavating and narrating embodied memories of intersectionality, bi-/multilinguals, including applied linguistics researchers and language teacher educators, can push back against the colonizing “process of dismemberment and fragmentation… [and pursue] reconstruction and reframing, one that allows for putting the pieces together in a new way” (Anzaldúa, 2005, p. 122). Therefore, for many bi-/multilinguals, to probe what is remembered and to re-imagine what could be otherwise in and through intersectional bodies is to re-claim agency and re-configure (counter-)memories across different places, times, and power relations.
By combining the decolonial feminist view of intersectionality (e.g., Anzaldúa, 2005; Collins, 2000; Levins Morales, 2001; Minh-Ha, 1997) with decolonial feminist standpoints on embodied memory work (e.g., Dillard, 2012), I will discuss the significance and challenges of unsettling and shifting disembodied discourse and practice in studying and promoting intersectionality-oriented language teacher identities and emotions in applied linguistics research and practice.
Intersectionality in language teaching: Research and pedagogical opportunities
Gergana Vitanova, University of Central Florida
Abstract: Intersectionality has become an important lens in education theoretically (Pugach et al., 2019) and pedagogically (Case, 2017). At the same time, research about language teacher educators and the multiple social dimensions that shape their identities and agency is just beginning to emerge. In this presentation, I consider my socio-historic background as a scholar and a teacher educator. I will describe how my theoretical positionality evolved, for example, from Bakhtin’s (1984) dialogism to employing intersectionality in a more explicit manner.
In addition, I offer my own story as an intersectional language teacher and TESOL faculty member whose non-native speaker status and others’ perceptions of race have impacted research and pedagogical choices. To this end, I will outline a teaching assignment that I specifically created for my TESOL students, centered on their counter-stories, and how my own experiences and those of my students prompted me to focus on the study of emotions in language teacher education from an intersectional perspective. The presentation will also describe some of the challenges I have faced in using intersectionality in my own teacher education courses.
Voice at the crossroads: Intersectionality in language teaching and learning
J.M. Paiz, The George Washington University
Abstract: In this talk, I explore the transformative potential of intersectional approaches within the field of applied linguistics. Intersectionality, as conceptualized by Crenshaw (1991), provides a framework for understanding how overlapping social identities such as race, gender, and sexuality contribute to unique experiences of oppression and privilege. This framework is increasingly recognized as a powerful tool for fostering inclusivity and equity in educational settings (Hill Collins, 2019; hooks, 1994).
I begin by sharing my personal journey with intersectionality and its integration into my research and teaching practices. Pulling from collaborative work that crosses both disciplinary and personal intersections, I illustrate how intersectional perspectives can enrich language teaching and research by addressing the diverse needs of students (Paiz & Coda, 2022). Furthermore, through case studies and practical examples, I demonstrate the strengths of applying intersectional approaches, such as creating more inclusive classroom environments and enhancing student engagement. I also discuss the potential resistance and the complexity of addressing multiple intersecting identities (Nash, 2018). This conversation concludes with a discussion of the growing resistance to inclusive practices in the United States and parts of Europe before offering research-grounded recommendations for facing these new headwinds with grace and humanity (Paiz, 2024/forthcoming).
This talk emphasizes the importance of continuous learning and adapting intersectional strategies to meet the evolving needs of students. By entering into dialogue with colleagues who also take intersectional approaches and perspectives, I hope to share not only what I know and have learned, but also inspire other language educators and researchers to implement intersectionality into their own pedagogical, institutional, and public spaces by incorporating diverse linguistic materials from intersectionally complex authors; designing inclusive and accessible curricula that challenge tacit discourses of -ness-es (e.g., whiteness, westerness, ableness); employing critical pedagogy techniques; and creating space for reflective practices that address students' intersecting identities.
Navigating academia as a neurodivergent scholar of color
JPB Gerald, Momentus Capital
Abstract:We are told that languages have immutable rules and customs, but we also well know by now that these structures have been imposed by those with the power to do so. Many of the ways we've been taught to communicate are unnatural and do not fit within our idiolects and identities. In this brief recorded presentation, Dr. JPB Gerald explores his growing understanding of how his identity as a neurodivergent scholar of color has become inextricable (Gerald, 2022) from his efforts to challenge raciolinguistic ideologies (Flores and Rosa, 2015), in particular the notion of "justice sensitivity" that is inherent to neurodivergence (Schafer and Kraneburg, 2012) and fuels the discomfort he now understands he always felt as a language teacher, education manager, and scholar within a hostile field.