Full Description
"Incompetence" is not an objective state lacking competence nor a kind of deficiency that needs to be filled. Rather, it is a constructed state that is productive, working in tandem with its opposite, "competence." Perception of incompetence/competence is what Michel Foucault (1977) calls a technology of "normalization" that pushes individuals to aspire to follow a shared norm, while hierarchically differentiating individuals according to their proximity to the aspired norm. The notion of incompetence is thus "productive" in that it turns individuals into specific kinds of "subjects" (Foucault 1977). The Politics of Incompetence: Learning Language, Relations of Power, and Daily Resistance further investigates other productive processes around the perception of "incompetence" specifically through its intersections with various ideologies—"academic achievement," teacher-student hierarchy, "native speaker" ideology, normative unit thinking, and privilege of vulnerability—as such intersections generate new knowledge, new reflection on one's assumptions and privilege, new space for marginalized language, and more. This volume opens up a new area of study—productive cultural politics of "incompetence"—by focusing on language learning in diverse contexts: Japanese-as-a-Second-Language classrooms in US colleges, Italian language tourism in Italy, and indigenous Māori language revitalization at an Aotearoa/New Zealand school.
Contents
Introduction: Incompetence and Power by Neriko Musha Doerr, Yuri Kumagai, and Cori Jakubiak
Chapter 1: Identities of (In-)Competence and Plurilingual Repertoires: Three Stories of Digital Storytelling in a Japanese Language Classroom by Keiko Konoeda
Chapter 2: "Incompetence" as a Productive Force for Making the Invisible Visible: Linguistic Landscapes Project as a Dialogic Space in a Japanese Language Classroom by Yuri Kumagai with Yuko Takahashi
Chapter 3: Discourse of Incompetence, Unit Thinking, and Uses and Risks of the Translanguaging Framework: Language Politics in Aotearoa/New Zealand by Neriko Musha Doerr
Chapter 4: Studying La Bella Lingua as an Edu-Tourist: An Auto-Ethnographic Account of (In)competence by Cori Jakubiak
Afterword: Towards Understanding Production and Perceptions of (In)Competence by Theresa Austin
