Scholarship as Social Work

Every scholar has something that drives them. Sometimes is the love of knowledge, or it might be the quest to prove a point, in some cases it might be the context of the work environment. One interesting, to me, area of discussion in the scholarly literature talks about the relationship between activism, social work, and scholarship. In the field of linguistics (Citation: Newman, 2003) Newman, P. (2003). The endangered languages issue as a hopeless cause. In Janse, M. & Tol, S. (Eds.), Language death and language maintenance: theoretical, practical and descriptive approaches. (pp. 1–13). John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.240.03new and (Citation: Newman, 1998, p. 11) Newman, P. (1998). We has seen the Enemy and it is Us: The Endangered Languages Issue as a Hopeless Cause. Studies in the Linguistic Sciences, 28(2). 11–20. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/2142/11559 relates linguistic field work with social work calling it “linguistic social work”. In some cases he may not be wrong at all. I come to this conclusion because much fieldwork in the 20th century was conducted by missionaries. Missionaries often have a primary purpose which can often be cast as “social work”. But even outside of the context of the “missionary-linguist” field work is often conducted in contexts which follow human relationships. So even outside of “missionary-linguistics” much of the language-documentation movement has seen as its goal the up-lifting of ethno-linguistic communities by supporting their language development and community identity goals. For example, many point to Michael Krauss’s (Citation: Hale et al., 1992) Hale, K., Krauss, M., Watahomigie, L., Yamamoto, A., Craig, C., Jeanne, L. & England, N. (1992). Endangered Languages. Language, 68(1). 1–42. https://doi.org/10.2307/416368 impassioned plea for linguists to take notice and action for the cause of the dissapearing ethno-linguistic minority communities. Krauss’s plea certainly was responded positively by many in the linguistic science community, e.g., (Citation: Goodfellow, 2009) Goodfellow, A. (2009). Introduction. In Goodfellow, A. (Eds.), Speaking of Endangered Languages: Issues in Revitalization. (pp. 1–24). Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Retrieved from https://www.cambridgescholars.com/resources/pdfs/978-1-4438-1238-2-sample.pdf .

In my thesis (Citation: Paterson III, 2021, p. 151) Paterson III, H. (2021). Language Archive Records: Interoperability of Referencing Practices and Metadata Models  (M.A. Thesis).  University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, North Dakota. Retrieved from https://commons.und.edu/theses/3937/ I wrote the following as I built upon Newman’s observation and the role that language documentation has in the life-cycle or reuse of primary language artifacts created through the language documentation movement:

The effects of career academics’ desire to impact indicators demonstrating their scholarly influence should not be under appreciated. Let’s cut to the chase, “linguistic social work” (Citation: Newman, 2003) Newman, P. (2003). The endangered languages issue as a hopeless cause. In Janse, M. & Tol, S. (Eds.), Language death and language maintenance: theoretical, practical and descriptive approaches. (pp. 1–13). John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.240.03new (Citation: Newman, 1998, p. 11) Newman, P. (1998). We has seen the Enemy and it is Us: The Endangered Languages Issue as a Hopeless Cause. Studies in the Linguistic Sciences, 28(2). 11–20. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/2142/11559 is not without value transfer or expectations. After working with a linguist, a language “community” might have a few resources in their language, a new orthography, or recordings of their traditional stories in an archive, but now the piper needs to be paid. The economic currency of academia is reference counts.

That is to say, the work of scholars may be cast as “social work” but it is not always altruism which motivates. Rather personal there is actually often a very deep motivation in the soul of a scholar to create change. Therefore, while I pondered, nearly napping, over many a quaint and curious article of forgotten scholarship… I asked the question “is linguistic social work” a term which may have links to other ideas about social activism in the academy? Other follow-on questions also ensued. These articulated themselves like: So what other ways are there to be an “activist” and a “researcher”? and also What other ideologies are there and what approaches might be related to the ideas of “activism”? after all what is this idea of “activism”? Is it not “research with social impact”? Social impact through activism seems to be asking the question: “Given the current state of social networks what activities need to be conducted to change the make-up of social networks or the power structure of the existing social networks? This begins to sound, at least to me, like the fundamental goals of counterinsurgency (COIN) operations.

It seems like a reasonable follow on question about activism and the academy then would be: Is activism any different than scholarship as diplomacy? Is scholarship as diplomacy evolved to the point where it is diplomacy to non-state actors? I might go out on a limb here but my knee jerk reaction is that, ultimately diplomacy to non-state actors must or should involve COIN (Counterinsurgency) methodology (or whatever COIN evolves into).

A couple of resources I found on these topics along with those cited above are presented in the bibliography below.

Bibliography