Papers by David H Hanks
Ethnography of Language Planning and Policy
Language Teaching, Apr 2018
A decade ago, Hornberger & Johnson proposed that the ethnography of language planning and policy ... more A decade ago, Hornberger & Johnson proposed that the ethnography of language planning and policy (ELPP) offers a useful way to understand how people create, interpret, and at times resist language policy and planning (LPP). They envisioned ethnographic investigation of layered LPP ideological and implementational spaces, taking up Hornberger’s plea five years earlier for language users, educators, and researchers to fill up and wedge open ideological and implementational spaces for multiple languages, literacies, identities, and practices to flourish and grow rather than dwindle and disappear. With roots going back to the 1980s and 1990s, ethnographic research in LPP had been gathering momentum since the turn of the millennium. This review encompasses selected ethnographic LPP research since 2000, exploring affordances and constraints of this research in yielding comparative and cumulative findings on how people interpret and engage with LPP initiatives. We highlight how common-sense wisdom about the perennial gap between policy and practice is given nuance through ethnographic research that identifies and explores intertwining dynamics of top-down and bottom-up LPP activities and processes, monoglossic and heteroglossic language ideologies and practices, potential equality and actual inequality of languages, and critical and transformative LPP research paradigms.
Working Papers in Educational Linguistics (WPEL), May 2017
For over a century the Ainu language has been threatened with disappearance as a result of langua... more For over a century the Ainu language has been threatened with disappearance as a result of language policies imposed by the Japanese following colonization of Ainu Mosir (now known as Hokkaidō), the Indigenous Ainu homeland. With recent legal and political victories, the Ainu have begun to reclaim their Indigenous culture and language within local communities, on the wider national stage, and internationally. However, while Ainu revitalization efforts continue, discourses of globalization in Japan have contributed to a dramatic increase in the status of English-as-a-foreign-language education, eclipsing other foreign and minority languages at all levels. Examining current policies, both de jure and de facto (see, e.g., Johnson, 2013; Schiffman, 1996), this paper explores how the disproportionate focus on English in contemporary Japanese education, reflected in societal and policy discourses regarding language and globalization, may be contributing to the closing down of ideological and implementational spaces (Hornberger, 2002, 2005, 2006; Hornberger & Johnson, 2007) for Ainu language education, thereby negatively impacting the continued revitalization of the Ainu language. The paper concludes by implicating opposing discursive orientations to globalization within Japanese society, and Japanese educational language policy specifically, in the lack of explicit attention to Ainu language revitalization efforts in national policy, and suggests that more critical examination of the role of English in Japanese education is needed if these efforts are to continue to succeed.
Conference Presentations by David H Hanks
Unsettling scalability in the tourist language commodity: Ethnographic insights from a commercial language school in Bali
Sociolinguistics Symposium 23, Jun 7, 2021
A commercial language school in Bali offers foreign visitors to the Indonesian island province th... more A commercial language school in Bali offers foreign visitors to the Indonesian island province the opportunity to learn the national language toward a goal of fostering “a harmonious and integrated society” (school website 2019) for these visitors and their local counterparts. At the culmination of the beginner-level course, students are taken to a local market and encouraged to leverage their newly learned language skills to haggle with local sellers. Despite being taught the linguistic and cultural basics of haggling prior to their visit, these interactions at the market do not always go smoothly, sometimes resulting in conflict between students and sellers, and often leaving students frustrated and sometimes confused about what transpired. Using data gathered in the course of a multiyear ethnography of language policy (Hornberger & Johnson, 2011), I examine how student–seller interactions on these market day outings, taken together with normative representations of haggling in school language policy, illuminate how the transformation of language access into a commodity for purchase in the context of tourism works to obscure certain undesirable forms of diversity (e.g., class and/or racial difference) between foreign visitors and locals. Through the lens of nonscalability theory (Tsing, 2019), I argue that this erasure of difference is central the commodification of language education—that it necessarily operates on a logic of scalability such that the production of the language commodity is only possible through the appropriation and conversion of contingent nonscalable cultural phenomena (e.g., haggling) into regularized, consumable units for paying customers at larger scales. The paper concludes with a discussion of how naturalizing understandings of language as a scalable commodity can invite the kinds of conflicts present in these students’ market day experiences, and what political economic implications this might have for how such foreign visitors come to view their relationships to local community members.
Getting more than you bargained for: Teaching foreign visitors to Bali to haggle in the Capitalocene
International Conference on Cultural Studies, Aug 29, 2019
A commercial Indonesian language school in Bali offers foreign visitors to the island province th... more A commercial Indonesian language school in Bali offers foreign visitors to the island province the chance to learn Bahasa Indonesia toward a goal of fostering “a harmonious and integrated society” (school website 2019) for these visitors and their local counterparts. At the culmination of a month-long beginner-level group course, students are taken to a local market and prompted to leverage their newly learned language skills to haggle with local sellers. However, in the current era of global disruption, sometimes popularly referred to as the Capitalocene, and typified by the radical simplification and subsequent commodification of otherwise taken-for-granted social engagements like education, mobility, and communication, such interactions become complex socioeconomic sites of identity negotiation. Using this lens, this paper explores some preliminary findings from an ongoing ethnography of language policy (Hornberger & Johnson 2011), focusing on these interactions between students and sellers at the market. Through examination of successful and unsuccessful attempts at haggling during class fieldtrips, it is argued that the practice of commodifying language education for tourist consumption can obscure critical aspects of socioeconomic relationships between transient language learners and the people who inhabit the spaces in which these students are encouraged to use the language abilities they’ve purchased.
"How would you ask your maid…": Implicit language policies and neoliberal subject formation in teaching materials in Bali
Multidisciplinary Approaches in Language Policy & Planning Conference, Aug 2017
As one of the most significant aspects of the Balinese economy, tourism attracts a large number o... more As one of the most significant aspects of the Balinese economy, tourism attracts a large number of foreign nationals to the Indonesian island province. For a variety of reasons many tourists choose to study the national language (Bahasa Indonesia) to at least some degree during their stay. In order to meet this demand, a few small private language schools have been established, having developed their own specialized teaching materials in the process. In this paper supplemental workbook materials published by one such school in Bali are examined through the methodological lens of narrative analysis following the dialogic approach of Wortham (2001). The ways in which statements about language use and language users in these materials interactionally position both students and those with whom they are expected to come into contact during their time in Bali are explored. In conjunction with narrative data collected from participant interviews with school administrators and students, this analysis demonstrates how implicit language policies (see, e.g., Johnson, 2013) communicated by such teaching materials can be seen to work to produce particular dynamically languaged subject formations (Flores, 2017) for local Balinese, Indonesians more generally, and tourists (as well as other non-nationals) embedded within a socioeconomic framework of neoliberal governmentality (Foucault, 2007). Extending this observation, the argument is made that in the context of Balinese society the uncritical inclusion of such implicit language policies in these kinds of materials not only socializes newcomers into understanding that specific language practices are important for navigating racialized divisions of labor, but also has the potential to reproduce and exacerbate socioeconomic disparities and orientalist relations of power between local Indonesians/Balinese and (predominantly) Western tourists. The paper concludes with a discussion of implications for the development of language teaching materials in the Balinese context as well as language teaching materials more generally.
"Maybe I'm not a Javanese speaker": Negotiation of language speaker identity in multilingual Indonesia
11th International Symposium on Bilingualism, Jun 2017
The success of language planning efforts around the development of Bahasa Indonesia as the offici... more The success of language planning efforts around the development of Bahasa Indonesia as the official language of the Republic of Indonesia is commonly seen at the same time to be a remarkable achievement and a necessary means to maintaining unity among a population of otherwise intractable ethnolinguistic heterogeneity. Most Indonesians today speak a number of languages as a matter of course, the vast majority using a regional language other than Bahasa Indonesia in the home and/or community (e.g., Javanese) and studying a foreign language (usually English). For many Indonesians Bahasa Indonesia is as much a second language as the foreign languages studied in school-children often speak little to no Bahasa Indonesia prior to formal education where it is the official medium of instruction. However, its ubiquity in the public sphere and national significance as a symbol of unity tends to elevate its status far beyond that of other languages any individual might also be said to be a speaker of, even their first/home language(s). Following the dialogic approach of Wortham (2001), this paper employs narrative inquiry to examine how metadiscursive regimes (Bauman & Briggs, 2003; see also Makoni & Pennycook, 2007)-normative ideological frameworks for talking about language and language users-identifiable in participant self-narrative, educational language policy documents, and language education materials work to (re)produce idealized multi-languaged subjects (Flores, 2017). From this examination, the argument is made that educational language policy and planning in Indonesia has played a key role in shaping a very narrowly defined ideal multilingual Indonesian, one who is first and foremost a speaker of Bahasa Indonesia and only secondarily a speaker of others, each with their own delineated domains of use.
Who really gets "left behind"?: Problematizing inattention to English as a gatekeeper to educational opportunity in Indonesia
Comparative and International Education Society Annual Conference, Mar 2017
In a section addressing challenges in monitoring SDG Target 4.5, Equality in Education, the most ... more In a section addressing challenges in monitoring SDG Target 4.5, Equality in Education, the most recent Global Education Monitoring Report (GEM) explicitly pinpoints "continuing neglect of mother tongue-based multilingual education in linguistically diverse countries" as one of the primary factors leading to "large disparities in educational outcomes," one that needs to be "tackle[d] head-on if no one is to be left behind" (UNESCO, 2016, p. 270). However, what this section fails to ask is, do all stakeholders agree on what it means to be "left behind"? For many in Indonesia, one of the section's more notably "linguistically diverse" countries, being "left behind" can often be construed as not receiving sufficient access to English language education—for some, the only viable path to quality educational and economic opportunities—regardless of the presence of mother tongue-based instruction. Engaging with this question through the epistemological orientation of a vertical case study model, which situates multilevel analysis in comparative research as sufficient only insofar as it "includes a thorough understanding of the particularity of the micro-level" (Vavrus & Bartlett, 2006, p. 97), this paper explores how ideologies of language and success are constructed at different levels, down to the individual, in the Indonesian educational context. The aim is to demonstrate why calls for mother tongue-based multilingual education (such as those in the GEM) are insufficient (and problematically paternalistic) without simultaneous concerted efforts to dislodge English as a language of exceptional international and educational prestige. To that end, this paper examines personal narratives collected from participant interviews in addition to Indonesian educational language policy discourses, through the methodological lens of narrative analysis. Following the dialogic approach of Wortham (2001), the ways in which these narratives work to construct particular linguistic identities for both the narrator and those around them through interactional positioning are considered relative to abstract and idealized constructs of personhood identifiable in existing policies. By interrogating perceptions of English in individuals' lived experiences and in the policies that shape their educational lives, this study will show how discourses of English as an international language of educational and economic opportunity are inescapable, and as such must be taken into account in any discussion of educational equality in Indonesia. The analysis concludes with the argument that attention to stakeholders at the most micro levels of development discourses is immensely valuable-and perhaps essential-in discerning why "neglect of mother tongue-based multilingual education" continues not only in the Indonesian context, but also in other "linguistically diverse" contexts around the world.
Educational language policy and the brand formulation of Indonesian national identity
115th American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Nov 2016
Nationalistic movements initiated by an emerging elite class of indigenous colonial subjects in t... more Nationalistic movements initiated by an emerging elite class of indigenous colonial subjects in the Dutch East Indies typified the early half of the 20th century, comprising a period referred to as Kebangkitan Nasional Indonesia (Indonesian National Awakening). During this time the Indonesian language—a newly standardized register of the archipelago's mercantile lingua franca—came to be viewed among nationalists as indexing a more distinct notion of Indonesian identity in contrast to that indexed by the language of the Dutch colonizers. As the struggle for colonial independence progressed, the utility of the Indonesian language as an integral component of nation-building grew more apparent, and consequently the language soon became the newly independent nation's sole official language and medium of instruction in education. This paper seeks to highlight the critical role educational language policy and planning has played in the discursive construction and subsequent maintenance of the Indonesian nation-state and national identity in the face of tremendous ethnolinguistic diversity among the peoples inhabiting the Indonesian archipelago. By conceptualizing educational language policy and planning activities both during the National Awakening and since independence within a framework of mediatized semiotic practices, this analysis makes use of historical and contemporary policy analysis and participant narratives to propose that an Indonesian national identity can be conceived of as a kind of brand formulation, one comprising a variety of linked brand fractions (e.g., birthplace, familial heritage, etc.), including, crucially, some demonstrative potential competency in the Indonesian language.
Policy barriers to Ainu language revitalization in Japan: When globalization means English
Multidisciplinary Approaches in Language Policy & Planning Conference, Sep 2016
For over a century the Ainu language has been threatened with disappearance as a result of langua... more For over a century the Ainu language has been threatened with disappearance as a result of language policies imposed by the Japanese following colonization of Ainu Mosir (now known as Hokkaidō), the Indigenous Ainu homeland. With recent legal and political victories, the Ainu have begun to reclaim their Indigenous culture and language within local communities, on the wider national stage, and internationally. However, while Ainu revitalization efforts continue, discourses of globalization in Japan have contributed to a dramatic increase in the status of English-as-a-foreign-language education, eclipsing other foreign and minority languages at all levels. Examining current policies, both de jure and de facto (see, e.g., Johnson, 2013; Schiffman, 1996), this paper explores how the disproportionate focus on English in contemporary Japanese education, reflected in societal and policy discourses regarding language and globalization, may be contributing to the closing down of ideological and implementational spaces (Hornberger, 2002, 2005, 2006; Hornberger & Johnson, 2007) for Ainu language education, thereby negatively impacting the continued revitalization of the Ainu language. The paper concludes by implicating opposing discursive orientations to globalization within Japanese society, and Japanese educational language policy specifically, in the lack of explicit attention to Ainu language revitalization efforts in national policy, and suggests that more critical examination of the role of English in Japanese education is needed if these efforts are to continue to succeed.
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Papers by David H Hanks
Conference Presentations by David H Hanks