In thinking through how to communicate my research, I hope to discover and be able to offer something to various communities. From linguistic anthropologists interested in this sort of scholarship to English instructors focused on practice to Americans in general interested in the everyday impacts of the issues I discuss, emphasizing different purposes of my project and avenues for future research could show how this work would be relevant to people with varying interests and stakes. While anthropologists can discuss the issues embedded in and guiding English language instruction, English instructors and educators may experience those issues first-hand and therefore would hopefully be able to find themselves in the scholars I'm drawing on and interlocutors I'm working with in this project. As I discuss concrete English teaching methods through the lens of linguistic anthropology, I hope to be able to offer English instructors real-world examples of methods others in their same position have employed.
Beyond instructors alone, national interest and conversations have floated around African American Vernacular English (AAVE - also discussed as Black Language, Black English, Ebonics) for years. April Baker-Bell's Linguistic Justice, a text central to my project, places much emphasis on AAVE as the language is spoken by her research participants. While linguistic justice is also discussed in relation to other English forms and my project is not limited to AAVE, one method in communicating my research could be to emphasize its connection to AAVE. This may not only spark interest in my project for those following the decades-long discussions surrounding AAVE, but also open the door for more people to discover how far-reaching conversations about public-facing language and language inequalities are to everyone, regardless of whether or not they already thought their language was involved in those national discussions.
Since linguistic justice is so far-reaching, if I want to continue researching this topic or adjacent ones, I'll have to continue engaging with speakers and scholars outside my field. Similar to the audience I discussed earlier, I hope to interact with and offer outcomes to anyone as a speaker and/or writer in the US and especially in our education system. From a scholarship-generating perspective, this openness will continue to be important as I try to discover how things like language inequalities and linguistic justice are experienced and handled on the ground.
As I sort through scholarship, my project requires a similar openness. Linguistic justice, and potential other projects of neighboring issues, necessarily engages scholarship from English and education, where many conversations about the topic are centered. So despite my writing an anthropology thesis and working extensively with cultural and linguistic anthropologists, my reading thus far hasn't been limited to that field. Additionally, linguistic anthropology scholarship can often overlap with linguistics and sociology. Currently, my project draws on scholars in both of these fields, and I intend for future projects to be similarly open to scholarship from other fields. As research continues to develop on this topic and more history is added to the conversations everyday, I find this interdisciplinary collaboration incredibly important to understanding the full scope of linguistic justice and language inequalities in the United States.
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