An Ethic of Linguistic Injustice: The Language of Objectivity As the Language of the Oppressor

ABSTRACT

In this article, I make sense of my encounters with the language of objectivity as a student, tutor, mentor, and researcher. I rely on Dorothy E. Smith’s conceptualisation of the ethic of objectivity, a practice that requires the student to devalue their embodied experience while ripping it from their experiential knowledge, which in turn they must rewrite in the language of objectivity. In conversation with Patricia Hill Collins and bell hooks, I reflect on whose perspective the language of objectivity represents. In doing so, I argue it is the language of the oppressor, and thus, the ethic of objectivity creates in the student an internal division between an experienced world written in their own language and an objectified world written in the oppressor’s language. Identifying the ethic as an expression of dominant language ideology, I suggest that any critical writing pedagogy must relinquish the ethic of objectivity.

KEYWORDS:

• Experiential knowledge
• objectification
• mind-body dualism
• oppressor’s language
• linguistic justice
• critical writing pedagogy

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Dr. Jung Choi for his mentorship and support with this project. I had the chance to present a preliminary version of this paper at the Dignified Learning Project: Praxis in Education conference after Dr. Choi prodded me to submit an abstract. After I developed the presentation into this article, Dr. Choi was the first to review my work and offer suggestions. I would also like to acknowledge Erin Flewelling, Chelsea Kerford, and Dr. Kathryn Valentine, the directors of my writing centre who have always supported my research. It was my work in the writing centre that inspired this article, and it was through the directors that I first engaged with linguistic justice research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes on contributors

Elia Delphi

Elia Delphi is an undergraduate student at San Diego State University, where they work as a writing tutor.