AAAL 2024 Plenary: Kris Aric Knisely - Trans Linguacultures, Trans Logics

Join us for Dr. Knisely's 2024 Conference plenary presentation via Zoom. Zoom registration is required to attend. The recording will be available for 30 days after the presentation.

AAAL 2024 Plenary: Kris Aric Knisely - Trans linguacultures, trans logics: Re-imagining the potentiality of applied linguistics through gender justice

As scholar-educators in disciplines and departments where languages are taught, learned, and researched, the time for us to work towards forms of gender justice that honor, and revel in the knowledges and linguacultures of trans people has long since been here and is ever-more overdue as globalized and localized forms of anti-trans, anti-education, and other oppressive actions continue (Knisely, 2023; Knisely & Russell, 2024). As recent conference themes suggest, we have grown to understand our field in new ways “in times of reckoning and change” and through the kinds of capacity-building that “collaborating and mentoring” can afford us. Yet, another period of calling in, calling out, and calling forth is needed for us to “think otherwise” and understand distinctly trans approaches to applied linguistics beyond the confines of inclusionary discourses alone. Burgeoning research into trans ways of doing and teaching language has given us new ways of thinking about language-as-social-verb, learning as participation in languaging communities, and education as a site for gender justice. This work has also invited us to continue to intersectionally re-think key concepts in our field, such as through the consideration of distinctly trans approaches to translanguaging and to the undoing of competence. These ways of thinking otherwise invite us to reimagine what we do as language scholar-educators in conversation with trans linguacultures. They invite us to act for change by observing “the tensions of our own humanity, our own languaging and gendering, our own doing and undoing, and look through it for what might be our greater potentiality,” and what might be the greater potentiality of applied linguistics as a whole (Knisely & Russell, 2024). They invite us to ask: What will we do, as individual scholars in a field to work toward a world where language enriches the livability of all of our lives?