Conference Agenda

As a Bakhtinian scholar, in languages and literacies education, who found DST theory afterwards, I have been from the onset intrigued by the relationship, contradiction or potential tension between these theorists. Embarking this quest in dilemma and doubt, I was keen to explore their meta-positioning, as complementary, contradictory or extension of each other.

I was drawn deeply to the notion of positioning and counter position in Herman’s work which informed this query as well, hence I explored unfolding of both theories in my personal, professional and academic life. The more I engaged with Herman’s subsequent works, and concepts of society of the self, democratic and harmonious self and recently exploring contradictions within the self, the more it resonates with what I was experiencing in my life journey at different levels, which was not immediately accessible to me through mere Bakhtinian lens.

In this talk, I bring to the fore how I traversed my journey of becoming at personal, academic and professional levels through both Bakhtin and DST lens and how my sense of the theories turned from a moral obligation to an inevitably entangled pieces through which I am able to make sense of my experience. I bring examples of how these entangled concepts deepened my awareness of self as an immigrant and transnational academic, navigating different languages, cultures and how they eventually informed my teaching, assessment design, literacy practices and leadership practice.

This entanglement was particularly significant in bringing together concepts of trans-positioning with heteroglossic voices, as well as exploring internally persuasive discourse versus authoritative both from within and without and how each chronotopic experience reveal new ‘I’ position or conflicted positions. Thus, my meta-positioning query led me to a more transpositioning of these theories for a holistic exploration of self in, out and in-between.

At the conclusion of her memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran (2004), Azar Nafisi, a beloved literature professor fleeing Iran in the late 1990s, recounts wisdom shared by a wise mentor. As Nafisi expressed her desire to write about the home she loved and literature, her mentor explained “You will not be able to write about Austen without writing about us, about this place where you rediscovered Austen….The Austen you know is so irretrievably linked to this place, this land and these trees” (p. 338). Although my work isn’t situated in Iran or Austen, this passage articulates my own experience coming to Bakhtin and Dialogical Self Theory. That is, I am not able to write about Dialogical Self Theory without writing about Bakhtin. Although my reading and understandings of these theories continues to evolve, Bakhtinian Theory and Dialogical Self theory evoke the people and the places where I discovered these theories, as well as the theories themselves, intricately interwoven into my understandings and what I know of these ideas and irretrievably linked to that time, that place, and those colleagues.

This session explores how discovering Bakhtinian Theory and Dialogical Self Theory in a doctoral Bakhtin course provided a lens for me to make sense of my own perpetual professional and personal becoming, as well as my research during my graduate school experience. Guided by a series of excerpts from papers written during this time, I share how the theories themselves, as well as dialogues with external others and internal I-positions, provided a catalyst for the development of meta positions and third positions that proved formative to my professional and personal becoming. These theories not only shaped the way I conceptualized my research, but they also helped me make sense of my own religious, scholarly, and learner identities.

My aim here considers dialogical theorists alongside critical race theorists and queer scholars to unearth how authoritative and internally persuasive discourse create structures of discourse power. Inspired by the Bakhtinian circle, I imagine these thinkers in active drawing room debates and discussions.

Bakhtin identified and distinguished two crucial modes of discourse, authoritative and internally persuasive discourse (IPD). For Bakhtin, authoritative discourse remains fixed, unquestioned, and often institutionalized in political, religious, or moral spheres. Internally Persuasive Discourse (IPD) emerges from the voices and opinions of others that assimilate into consciousness.

Freire aims to liberate education from authoritative discourse by locating dialogical relations between teacher and learner. To materialize this relationship, he coined the term dodiscência, or teach-learn. To understand is not transitive, but to be acted upon by another. This discourse dynamic becomes internalized into the psyche.

Dialogical Self Theory contends with this vocal polyphony as a salon of Identity Positions of the mind. Identity Positions (I-Positions) are varied identity markers, such as age, race, religion, sexuality, gender identity. I-Positions, which shift over time, may act in conflict or concert with one another. We make or avoid decisions based on the cooperation or stagnation of internalized voices.

In dialogue with these three, I add two scholars on race, sexuality, and gender identity. Crenshaw has notably coined the term “intersectionality” to identify how the intersections of identity markers, such as gender and race, can, amid racism and sexism, be felt like a fraught intersection. Queer scholar Halberstam notes how queer and trans* discourses are indirect and access to the lived experience of such individuals requires a scavenged method of knowledge production. This discourse salon aims to reveal how minoritized discourse patterns express and internalize oppression and second, how double-voiced, queered discourse patterns provide a means of liberatory expression.