Abstract
Given the rise of AI and other disruptive technologies that shape the way we perform identities online and offline, this Invited Lecture offers a critical frame through which we can examine digital communication and language learning. Drawing on Darvin and Norton’s (2015) model of investment, it dissects how digital practices are negotiated with platform designs, sociotechnical structures (Darvin, 2023), algorithmic power (Bucher, 2018) and cultures-of-use (Thorne, 2016), and how ideologies and modes of exclusion are woven into these layers of digital mediation. To exercise agency, users need to navigate these entanglements and assemble their material, linguistic, and semiotic resources in ways that enable them to achieve their own intentions online. By engaging with materialist semiotics (Blommaert, 2013), this talk proposes how applied linguistics research can address the compelling issues of language, technology and identity that confront us in the age of AI.
Biography
Ron Darvin is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Language and Literacy Education of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. His research examines issues of language learning identity and investment, digital literacies, materiality and critical pedagogy, and his work has been published in journals such as Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, Language Teaching, Language Learning and Technology, and TESOL Quarterly. He is the recipient of the 2020 Dissertation Award of the American Association of Applied Linguistics (AAAL) and the 2017 Emerging Scholar Award of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) LSP SIG.