(Im)possibility of ethical encounters in places of separation: aesthetics as a quiet applied linguistics praxis

Abstract

What is the possibility of ethical encounters in places that are historically, spatially, and morally configured to avoid them? And what can applied linguistics do to create such a possibility? This study is located in a rural community in eastern Slovakia with a history of separation between Slovak and Roma ethnic groups and the systemic spatial, economic and linguistic marginalisation of the latter. This paper draws on relational ethics to foreground the perceiving subject’s ethical responsibility. I take up the scholarship on semiotic repertoires and exploit their performative power to affect the perceiving subject. Advocating for aesthetics as an applied linguistics research praxis, this article both documents and invites a sensory entanglement with others through a series of aesthetic invitations. I see such an embodied engagement as a way for applied linguistics to stage the ground for ethical encounters, even if never guarantee an outcome. I discuss what this research pathway might mean for doing applied linguistics research in social and educational settings with entrenched narratives about the other and how quiet applied linguistics – one which privileges sensory attending and epistemological indeterminacy – might be a form of activism that disturbs the realm of the impossible.