The Politics of Incompetence: Learning Language, Relations of Power, and Daily Resistance - Hardcover

Neriko Doerr; Theresa Austin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1666936235 ISBN 13: 9781666936230

Publisher: Lexington Books, 2024

Synopsis

“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 works as 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 Foreign Language classrooms in US colleges, Italian language tourism in Italy, and indigenous Maori language revitalization at an Aotearoa/New Zealand school.

About this title

About the Author

Neriko Musha Doerr teaches at Ramapo College.

Edition details

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1666936235
• ISBN 13: 9781666936230
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 206