Community-Centered Collaboration in Applied Linguistics

‘Why do you do the research that you do?’ It has important implications for major theoretical debates in the field and will help advance scholarly knowledge… ‘Why do you do the research that you do?’ I was trained by the world’s experts in these methodologies, which are the best suited for answering my research questions… ‘No, why do you do the research that you do?’ (I grew up in… My family… I have a friend who… I worked as… I never forgot that time…) ‘But why do you do the research that you do?’ (They didn’t teach me how to do anything else…) This deceptively simple question was posed by Jamaal Muwwakkil, a doctoral student in linguistics and—by my great good fortune—my advisee, in a graduate class on ethnographic methods that I was teaching in Winter 2017, just as Trump took office....