Dr Sal Consoli, The University of Edinburgh

This talk will draw on Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of capital. Bourdieu’s work has percolated various academic domains and transcended disciplinary boundaries, thereby leading to new vistas and questions. It is in the spirit of generating “new vistas” that this talk offers a novel perspective which may serve as an epistemic and methodological drive to reinvigorate our research practices within language education. In particular, I will argue for a new application of Bourdieu’s sociological concept of capital to account more holistically for the complexities of our research experiences whilst addressing the “realities” and “dilemmas” of our field (McKinley & Rose, 2017). Ultimately, I will propose life capital as a catalyst to promote a fresh a lens which, in the long run, may yield language education research that fully acknowledges, values, and celebrates the humanness of our inquiries

Bio: Dr Sal Consoli is Lecturer in Language Education at The Moray House School of Education, University of Edinburgh. Previously, he worked at other universities in the UK and Hong Kong. His research focuses on the psychology of language education with specific emphasis on student motivation and engagement as well as language teacher wellbeing. He also has an active interest in research ethics and reflexivity in applied linguistics. Dr Consoli has published in various international peer-reviewed journals, such as TESOL Quarterly, System, and the Journal of English for Academic Purposes. He is co-editor of Reflexivity in Applied Linguistics (Routledge). Dr Consoli has co-edited a Special Issue on Narrative Inquiry for the journal System and one on Research Engagement for the journal Educational Action Research.