For this contribution, I am drawing upon on a participatory project (Radinger, forthcoming) in which refugees and volunteer German language teachers involved in the Austrian immigration context engaged in a collaborative philosophical enquiry about language(s), language use, and Spracherleben (Busch 2017). This collaborative enquiry yielded insights into the bottom-up perspective of what it means to teach German as a volunteer language teacher and to learn and use language(s) as a refugee in the Austrian immigration context. The experiences expressed pointed to the inextricable link between agency and structure (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998) and put emphasis on the meaningfulness of the experience of tension in speakers' lives and questions of agency and (re-claiming of) voice.
In the presentation, however, I focus on the approach of combining biographical research with philosophical practice itself to elaborate on how it can help us understand and grasp lived language experience empirically, and how it may contribute to anchoring lived experiences in discussions on social (in)equality by enacting the dialogic interaction of the speaking subject with others and the world, as a collective endeavour.
Busch, B. (2017). Expanding the Notion of the Linguistic repertoire. On the Concept of Spracherleben-The lived experience of Language. Applied Linguistics 28(3),340-358. Radinger, S. (2018).
Emirbayer, M., and Mische, A. (1998) What is agency? American Journal of Sociology 103 (4), 962–1023.
Radinger, S. accepted. "Philosophizing in, with, and about language – reclaiming voice beyond standardized competence levels with a group of refugees and their German language teachers in Austria". In (forthcoming) Korb, C., Gspandl, J., Heiling, A., Erling, E. (eds.). Reclaiming voice. Transforming power relations between languages. Multilingual Matters.
