Joseph Sung-Yul Park

This chapter considers affect as a key for mobilizing multiple identities of language learners toward a politics of refusal against colonial and capitalist subjectivities of language. While recent research has focused on affect as a lens for understanding language education and language policy, this chapter argues that affect is not simply an aspect of identity to be studied, but can open up spaces for reflecting on, researching, and refusing subjectivities that reproduce oppressive relations of power. Focusing on the case of learning English as a hegemonic global language, and drawing from work on decolonial, feminist, and other revolutionary movements that highlight the disruptive potential of affect, the chapter explores how a focus on affect can serve as method – lived, embodied sites of tension with injustice and inequality that can guide language learners, educators, and researchers toward social transformation, political action, and relations of solidarity via their linguistically mediated identities.

This paper considers how Claire Kramsch’s work on subjectivity and language learning contributes to a critique of multilingual advocacy, in which linguistics’ efforts of social engagement tend to focus on sites of inequality characterized by structural linguistic difference ideologically attributed to racialized and minoritized communities. While much criticism has been raised against this tendency, this paper argues that Kramsch’s focus on multilingualism as subjective experience not only offers a resource for undoing dominant language ideologies of the discipline, but also provides a concrete alternative basis for the field’s social engagement, via the way it foregrounds the affective, material, and political realities of being a multilingual speaker. Drawing upon recent works in other disciplines that have been actively turning to affect as a way of rethinking hegemonic epistemologies, this paper suggests considering affect as method, which allows our affects, particularly those of discomfort, anxiety, and unease, to guide us in our engagement with injustices, inequalities, and oppressive relations that are deeply embedded within and shaped by our subjectivities.

This paper considers how a particular understanding of personality, as manifest in the way discourses about personality types are circulated and employed, may serve as a foundation for rationalizing the logic of human capital and its concomitant inequalities. Focusing on the recent popularity of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) in South Korea and the way it is adopted in online content offering advice on English language learning, this paper suggests that a conceptualization of personality as simultaneously enduring and inherent, on the one hand, and standardized and technologized, on the other, allows personality testing and personality type to serve as moral technologies of self that conceal the contradictions underlying the promotion of English language learning as a key to developing one’s human capital in neoliberal Korean society.

Studies on language and affect have identified displays of emotions and feelings as important means through which speakers negotiate their social relations and cultural positions. Extending the findings of those studies, this paper discusses how affect must be seen as an important building block for framing, a resource that allows participants to construct frames that have specific grounding in identifiable social meaning. I make this point by illustrating how interactional management of affect contributes to the constitution of frames via the work of stancetaking, based on a discussion of several examples from a specific discursive context - Koreans’ metalinguistic talk about English. While Koreans are commonly known to show much ‘anxiety’ or ‘uneasiness’ about their own English language skills, I demonstrate that such display of affect may be understood as part of an interactional frame for speaking (about) English that allows speakers to position themselves in relation to English and to each other in a culturally and socially appropriate way. The analysis shows that the semiotic resources that speakers employ in their affective displays allow participants to negotiate specific stances that they should take, and to jointly construct a frame for interpreting the interactional import of the ongoing talk.

This paper discusses how critiquing the convergence of neoliberalism and coloniality can become a crucial juncture for imagining alternatives to neoliberal foreign language education. Neoliberalism and coloniality are both mediated by aspects of subjectivity, which not only obscures their co-dependence, but also naturalizes their logic as they become embedded in dimensions of affect, desire, and morality. Discourses of educational reform that do not attend to this link risk being appropriated by neoliberal ideologies, as they may fail to situate neoliberal conditions of education within broader historical conditions of inequality. This paper illustrates this point through a critical analysis of debates on education reform in Korea, with a focus on a Korean television documentary which argues for liberal reforms emphasizing creativity, individuality, and excellence. The analysis shows how the voice of white Westerners as perceiving subjects is frequently invoked to problematize the Korean education system for its supposed irrationality and backwardness, naturalizing the mutual constitution of historical conditions of capitalism and colonialism through representations of affect. Based on this discussion, this paper argues that alternatives to neoliberal language education must be rooted in policy and practice that questions deeply entrenched subjectivities of capitalism and colonialism.

Figure of personhood, or set of indexicals that are linked with a performable person type, occupies a key role in contemporary metapragmatic analysis. But how can the concept be operationalized so that it can be used to link metapragmatic analysis to critical investigation of the political processes underlying society? In this paper, I suggest that focusing on how figures of personhood in metapragmatic discourse are organized along dimensions of time, space, and affect can serve as valuable heuristics for a critically oriented metapragmatic analysis, as it is those dimensions that highlight the material and political groundedness of figures of personhood. This point is then demonstrated through three sample cases: representations of Koreans as incompetent speakers of English in a commercial advertisement, middle-class Filipino youths’ self-positioning through construction of an undesirable elite figure, and valorization of neoliberal future-readiness in a promotional video for a Singaporean university’s student career center.