When the map is not the territory: a duoethnographic inquiry into language portraits, ideology, and researcher reflexivity

Abstract

Language portraits are now a routine tool in multilingual identity research. Their conventions have been examined critically within the field, yet the flatter version that circulates in many applied uses has received less of the scrutiny applied to other research instruments. In this duoethnographic inquiry, a supervisor and her doctoral student take turns producing, interrogating, and re-producing language portraits of themselves. Our contrasting experiences, one of fluent engagement with the format’s conventions and one of sustained frustration with them, are read alongside [Busch, B. (2018). The language portrait in multilingualism research: Theoretical and methodological considerations. Working Papers in Urban Language and Literacies, 236, 2–13.] own framing of the language portrait as a dialogic positioning activity. Reading the two together surfaces a gap between the careful framing Busch advocates and the flatter version we ourselves had inherited. The paper argues that the material-semiotic affordances of the standard body silhouette interact with researchers’ accumulated theoretical and affective positioning in ways worth examining through self-inquiry, and that duoethnographic dialogue is one productive way to turn the tool back on the researcher, extending the dialogic principle that is already integral to the LP activity. The study contributes to ongoing methodological debates within the LP tradition rather than to a critique from outside it.