I draw on biographization research with migrants to explore how a focus on the research apparatus as material assemblages contributes to understand language repertoires. I focus on objects as “prisms” (Budach et al. 2015) to illustrate how objects and human actions help understand speaking conditions and repertoires.
In previous research on collaborative story-telling on lived experience of migration by immigrants in Portugal, I considered how powerful discourses and subjectivities (for instance, Portuguese linguistic ideologies crossed by gender, colony and nation) circulated in the process of production of knowledge as people biographized themselves as migrants and language speakers, thus adding to the project’s sociolinguistic contributions to the use of biographical approaches in migration studies. The detailed focus on one migrant woman across the events of the project foregrounded the disquieting nature of her living subjectivation as a speaker of languages, happening at the crossroads of subjectivity, intersubjective negotiation (interactional work), material objects and human meaning makers with biological bodies (Lechner, 2015, Keating 2019). I draw on recent emergent work on language repertoires, namely the combination of the rounds of stories with the method of ‘language portraits’ in classrooms and other smaller scale migration projects, to focus in this paper on further articulations of the material and the embodied aspects of biographization as biopolitical work, i.e., those techniques of government that transform, order and invest in the human life and the living body as elements of the economy of power (Foucault [1978]). Following Giorgio Agamben understanding of immanent, pervasive nature of power operating to control life itself, impossible to transcend and only resisted by radical ontological indifference (Agamben 2009: 12–15), I explore the extent to which a material focus on the research apparatus – as assemblages of objects, technologies, spoken and written artefacts, bodies and indexicality orders – might contribute to further understand the dynamics of language repertoires. I follow Budach et al. 2015 focus on objects acting as “prisms” (Budach et al 2015: 392)”, to illustrate how a focus on objects and human action might contribute to understand the spaces of speakerhood afforded by biographical research.
