Foreword

(preprint) In L. J. Pentón Herrera (Ed.), More than a title: Autoethnographic explorations of choosing dissertation topics in applied linguistics. Brill. Foreword Farah Ali DePauw University Degree: Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Year of Graduation: 2019 Institution: University at Albany, SUNY Dissertation Title: Language Attitudes among Muslim Women in Barcelona It is truly an honor to be invited to write a foreword for this timely and important volume. The dissertation is often a scholar’s first and most significant research undertaking. Whether or not one ends up pursuing an academic and/or research-oriented profession, the dissertation is a major juncture of a scholar’s academic career, as it often shapes one’s research trajectory that extends well beyond the awarding of the title of doctor. The selection of a dissertation topic is typically centered around practical considerations, and as doctoral candidates, we have often asked ourselves, “Is this topic original?” “Is this study feasible?” And ultimately, “Will my advisor and/or dissertation committee approve of this topic?” In other words, our academic preparation often emphasizes the approval and completion of a dissertation (“the best dissertation is a finished dissertation,” so the saying goes). Of course, this is all with a view to encouraging candidates to advance to the finish line—i.e., being awarded the doctoral degree—and so such questions do merit attention. Yet mentors and mentees seldom discuss one of the crucial aspects of choosing a dissertation topic: the reality that, in many cases, the process of choosing a topic can be a deeply personal experience that is shaped by and even (re)constructs one’s identity, as it can involve an interaction between the personal and the professional (Dikilitaş & Mumford, 2023). As an example, my own dissertation, “Language Attitudes among Muslim Women in Barcelona,” was very much connected to my identity, and subsequently shaped my research trajectory all the way through the present day. As a Pakistani-American Muslim woman who was born and raised in the American Midwest, I had a lifetime of firsthand, often incongruous experiences navigating the American society—ones that are so ubiquitous among second-generation immigrants that we find humor in them: being a native speaker of English, yet being placed in an English as a second language (ESL) class because of my heritage; feeling uneasy at being asked, “Where are you from?” since the inevitable follow-up question is, “but where are you really from?”; being seen as an outsider in one’s country of birth, yet still being seen as an outsider when visiting family “back home” (i.e., Pakistan). When I began my studies in Spanish linguistics, I distinctly recall reading Varieties of Spanish in the U.S. by John Lipski, and being struck by my newfound knowledge of the notion of a “heritage language,” as well as nuances of the quote, “Ni de aquí, ni de allá” (neither from here nor there), which has often been used to describe the Latinx American experience of not feeling a sense of belonging anywhere. I remember being stunned that there were names that described what I thought to be unique and isolating experiences for me. Years later, these experiences shaped the development of my dissertation topic, where I focused on language and identity among first and second-generation Muslim immigrant women. This also lent some originality to my research: Muslim women can be a relatively inaccessible community for an outsider, and as such, the experiences of Muslim women can be rendered invisible in research that does not pay attention to gender and/or religious identity. The fieldwork proved to be an insightful and transformational experience for me, as my participants and I had many shared experiences and values that created a sense of solidarity. As I noted, this later shaped my subsequent research: first through reworking my dissertation into a book (Ali, 2022), but also in opening me up to research on Arabic-Spanish language contact as well as a continued interest in research that intersects with gender studies and migration/border studies. At the time of writing this foreword, I have actually come full circle and am conducting fieldwork relating to discourses about the banning of the Islamic veil in Europe, which has been especially meaningful for me because I conducted much of it during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, resulting in being invited to break fast with some of my participants, and even celebrate Eid (the end of Ramadan) with them. Given that my identity has allowed me to access participants’ time and personal space, be in community with them, and even be indelibly changed by them, I argue that removing oneself and one’s personal investment from the research process is akin to separating the tree from its roots. The present volume looks at the profound link between the academic and the personal, and provides autoethnographic accounts of new scholars’ dissertation journeys. An autoethnography, in short, is a method of research in which the author reflects on personal experiences and connects them to wider sociocultural and/or political meanings. In this way, it is different from an autobiography because it goes beyond storytelling in order to methodically and —at times—critically examine culture. Academia, it can be argued, is its own community and culture, and those entering this community must learn to navigate the social practices and norms that govern its hierarchical culture, which can be an especially thorny endeavor for those whose identities position them as outsiders. Graduate students as a group typically start as outsiders (and unfortunately, many continue to feel that way even as their studies progress) and hold far less power and privilege than their faculty counterparts, which can, in turn, play a major role in shaping one’s career trajectory, for better or worse. Considering that one’s time in a graduate program is often where academic identity is first shaped, it is crucial that we reflect on institutional culture, practices, and discourses that can shape and be shaped by identity, and how academic identity is often tightly bound to other parts of a person’s identity. This is especially critical for academics in privileged positions, such as faculty advisors, who play a key role in the graduate school experience, whether it be the initial admission into a program or exerting influence on a student’s professional choices, such as course enrollment, research topics, conference participation, and certainly the entire process of starting and completing the doctoral dissertation. In many cases—both in and outside academia—it is expected that professional engagement should be devoid of the personal and the subjective, while holding the impersonal and objective as the sterile model for scholarly output. Faculty often perpetuate this and insist on such an approach to research: taking academic writing as an example, Trinh and Pentón Herrera (2021) have critically reflected on a particularly normative practice in academia in which faculty diminish the value of students’ personal experiences, since they deviate from the mythical objectivity that academics are expected to strive for, and instead encourage students to divorce their personal identities from their scholarship. However, can one’s identity—and thus one’s positionality—really be removed from research and other professional engagements? Autoethnography, as an approach to self-research, categorically refutes this idea. Instead, it highlights how one’s personal identities are constructed and negotiated simultaneously, and are subjected to the effects of power dynamics that govern social (and academic) interactions. Thus, one’s individual experiences—through the lens of autoethnographic analysis—are no longer isolated experiences; rather, these experiences become contextualized as products of different positionalities being impacted by academic culture and scholarly knowledge in different ways. Many of us have been trained to approach academic writing through formulas, and one universal component to this formulaic style of writing is to always justify one’s research objectives, and address the question that all reviewers and readers ask when critically examining a manuscript: “Who cares?” In many instances, the author’s immediate response might be, “I care!” Yet this is rarely permitted as a legitimate justification for pursuing a research topic, and so one’s personal motivations must often be padded by citable, peer-reviewed ones. Autoethnographies, while still theoretically and empirically grounded, make space and, in fact, center the author’s positionality, and show how our professional engagement—whether it is teaching, researching, or sitting through a committee meeting—is indeed bound to our personal identities. Moreover, through their focus on subjectivity and use of personal narratives, autoethnographers have the potential to provide a rich and nuanced understanding of a particular topic through firsthand accounts, narrate their research findings in an engaging and evocative tone that can spark empathy and personal connection for readers, and have an opportunity for self-reflection and transformation as they critically examine their own experiences. The present collection of autoethnographies consists of accounts of new scholars and their academic journeys that center around choosing a dissertation topic in applied linguistics. This field is particularly relevant to the discussion of researcher identity, as language and linguistic behavior are notably sociocultural practices that are constructed by speech communities, and are intimately connected to different individual and collective identities. Ample scholarship has examined the connection between language and different identities, and has typically looked at heritage (Leeman, 2015), ethnicity (Fishman & García, 2010), race (Alim et al., 2016), gender (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet, 2013), sexuality (Cameron & Kulick, 2003), and religion (Souza, 2016) as some of the primary identities that are most significant to many individuals. However, because work takes up a significant portion of a person’s day-to-day life, professional identities often take form as we choose our career paths. In the case of academia, language may also play a critical role in negotiating one’s academic identity, particularly among language instructors (Norton & Early, 2011), but is also salient in the context of navigating the language of academia, such as the case for many non-native speakers in a program of study (Halic et al., 2009) as well as anyone whose language variety does not conform to academic standards (Foster, 1995). Regardless of the type of identity being examined, in many instances, research on the relationship between language and identity has been informed by researchers’ personal connections to their topics of study. For this reason, the present volume makes a considerable contribution to our understanding of the otherwise invisible processes that go into the realization of a doctoral dissertation. New doctoral candidates who are just beginning their academic journeys may see themselves in some of these chapters, and may prompt useful self-reflection that will shape their own research in due course. What’s more, it is vital that faculty advisors and mentors are cognizant of what it means to navigate academia from different positionalities, and especially with an endeavor as hefty as a dissertation. A topic that one person can examine from a place of distant indifference can be a point of strong personal investment for another. As scholars who are committed to engaging in dialogue with each other through our academic work, recognizing the motivations and journeys that have culminated in these finished works is a critical step to achieving transparent and nuanced discussions. References Ali, F. (2022). Multilingualism and gendered immigrant identity: Perspectives from Catalonia. Multilingual Matters. Alim, H. S., Rickford, J. R., & Ball, A. F. (2016). 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