Pre-Conference Workshops

AAAL 2024 is pleased to provide two pre-conference workshops. They will be held at the University of Houston on Friday, March 15th from 9:00 AM-4:00 PM CST

Doing duoethnogaphy in applied linguistics: Issues and challenges in designing and conducting research

Ethics and data collection in social media research: Navigating private, public, and automated spaces

Doing duoethnogaphy in applied linguistics: Issues and challenges in designing and conducting research

Workshop Abstract

What is duoethnography? How can duoethnography be used in the field of applied linguistics? Who can be the ‘duo’? And, how is duoethnography different from autoethnography? This workshop will introduce participants to duoethnography, a research approach that “invites researchers to serve as sites of inquiry” (Burleigh & Burm, 2022, p. 1), exploring “...how two or more individuals give similar and different meanings to a common phenomenon” (Norris, 2017, p. 2). In the first part of the workshop, drawing on our own experience conducting a duoethnographic study, we will share our research design and discuss challenges of conducting duoethnography. Specifically, we will explore issues related to power relationsthat might impact the process of data collection, analysis, and interpretation when the ‘duo’ are from different backgrounds in terms of race, gender, language, social status, and education. In addition, we will discuss the nature of duoethnography and consider how it is different from autoethnography.

Participants will also closely look at other examples of duoethnographic studies. Collaboratively, we will brainstorm research topics for duoethnography that critically reflect and/or address current trends in applied linguistics as well as cultural and sociopolitical issues in the field.

In the second part of the workshop, participants will work in pairs or groups to design their duoethnographic studies and formulate their research questions. They will outline how they will collect data from each other in order to conduct a mini study considering one or multiple ways of data collection such as interviewing, journaling, or emailing. Participants will then share their mini duoethnographic studies, including discussing methodological challenges and plans for their future studies. The workshop will leave ample time at the end for questions and discussion.

Workshop Presenter

Chatwara S. Duran

University of Houston

Chatwara Suwannamai Duran is an Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Houston, where she teaches courses in Community Engagement, TESOL methods, language acquisition, and Sociolinguistics-related topics. She enjoys doing ethnographic research focusing on multilingualism and literacies among immigrants and refugees originally from Southeast Asia. The book, Language and Literacy in Refugee Families (2017), showcases her multi-year ethnographic study. Her research contributions have also appeared in Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, Linguistics and Education, TESOL Quarterly, and many edited volumes. Her recent duoethnographic study co-authored with Tanita has culminated into an article in Race Ethnicity and Education (2022) where the experiences and positioning of non-native speaking scholars were critically discussed. Chatwara is currently Director of Lower Division Studies in the Department of English to foresee the First Year Writing curriculum and other intermediate level courses while also researching economic and legal literacies of Houston-based Asian-American women.

Workshop Presenter

Tanita Saenkhum

University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Tanita Saenkhum is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Writing, and Linguistics at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where she specializes in second language writing with a focus on placement, assessment, and writing teacher education. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in second language writing, TESOL methods, and second language acquisition. She was Director of ESL from 2013 through 2019. Her book, Decisions, Agency, and Advising: Key Issues in the Placement of Multilingual Writers into First-Year Composition Courses (2016), considers the role of student agency in the placement of multilingual writers in US college composition programs. She has published in Journal of Second Language Writing, L2 Journal, NYS TESOL Journal, and several edited collections. Her recent duoethnographic work with Chatwara appeared in Race Ethnicity and Education (2022). She currently researches English writing education in Thailand and serves as co-editor of the Journal of Second Language Writing’s Disciplinary Dialogues section.

Ethics and data collection in social media research: Navigating private, public, and automated spaces

Workshop Abstract

In this workshop we will discuss questions, challenges, and complicating factors we have encountered or might encounter as we engage in applied linguistic research on social media platforms. We will take into account platforms’ “pre-authorship” (Zentz 2021) of posts, the nature of social media groups and individual walls and feeds, and the roles of administrators and moderators as all playing a role in what we see, how we are able to collect our data, and how we are able to analyze data from any given platform.

Social media research offers dynamic and very complicated sets of circumstances into which we step when we seek to conduct research in these spaces. For instance, the nature of private versus public spaces is frequently unclear, and even varies per platform and per user. The nature of these spaces have been problematized before, leading to conceptualizations of“semi-public” or “semi-private” spaces, “privately public” and “publicly private” ones, extensions of the private self, and so on (Lange 2008; Papacharissi 2010; Tagg & Seargeant 2017). Sveningsson states, “Research ethics, on- as well as offline, seems to remain a dynamic and unsteady field that defies all attempts at drawing up any definite and overall sets of rules and regulations “ (2009, p. 86). Each case seems to come down to some combination of what research ethics boards want, what participants in the specific research context care about, and what the researcher does with all of these potentially competing interests (including, of course, our own needs to publish and get promotions; cf. Boellstorff et al. 2012).

In the first two segments of the workshop, we will focus on Facebook and Twitter, and in the third, we will undertake a discussion of how we might think about the texts produced by platforms such as ChatGPT and Bard.

Workshop Presenter

Lauren Zentz

University of Houston

Lauren Zentz is a Professor of Applied Linguistics in the Department of English at the University of Houston. She is also an Affiliate Faculty in the UH Anthropology Program. Her research interests broadly revolve around language socialization, nationalism, identity, and politics. To this end, her first book, Statehood, Scale and Hierarchy: History, Language and Identity in Indonesia focused on language learning among university English majors and language and state formation in Indonesia more broadly. Her second book, Narrating Stance, Morality, and Political Identity: Building a Movement on Facebook focused on the construction of group and individual activist identities after Trump’s election to US President. In her current project, Echo Chambers and Epistemological Bubbles: Corporate Media, Neoliberal Governance, and Communicative Flirtation with the End of Democracy, she is exploring the Twitter discourses of left-leaning journalists following the January 6th US Capitol insurrection.

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