New Recording Available: Scholarship and Reflexivity by Prof. Alex Ding

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By Prof. Alex Ding

The term reflexivity is overused and interpreted in diverse ways, rendering it banal and vague. The purpose of this seminar is to rescue reflexivity from banality and to restore meaning and significance to reflexivity in our scholarship practices. Reflexive scholarship is urgently needed in the current socio-political academic context characterised by volatility, brutal cuts in language education, precarity, and increasing anomie among practitioners and language educators.

The first part of the seminar looks at reflexivity as a form of socio-analysis, to help develop a collective lucidity of the forces, agents, capitals, legitimation, and domination that shape and define the fields in which we operate. This systematic and collective reflexivity not only enables greater collective lucidity but also opens vistas of realistic collective and ethical agency. Scholarship is both a means to understand our field with greater lucidity and an end to produce more impactful, ethical, and powerful interventions in our work. Concrete examples of reflexivity in scholarship will help to illustrate this.

Inspired by the work of Alessandra Tanesini (The mismeasure of the self: A study in vice epistemology), the second part of this seminar explores the relationship between reflexivity and epistemic vices. Complementing the socio-analysis in part one of this seminar, the focus here is on the ethical implications of academic vices not only on our own (lack of) contributions to scholarship but also how these vices contribute to a collective weakening of our powers and legitimacy as language educators. Academic fields are structured to propagate these vices, and collective reflexivity is a means to overcome these epistemic vices.

I hope this seminar, despite appearing to be overly theoretical, will help change scholarship practices or, at least, help us understand better what is at stake and what is meaningful for us.