WP329. Crítico or Criticón: Standing astride the boundary in language teacher education and critical sociolinguistics

This paper sets out to interrogate the notion of “criticality” that inhabits Critical Sociolinguistics. Starting from two dispositions: being “crítico” (a critic) and being a “criticón” (a criticiser) that emerged whilst working as an English language teacher educator, I use ethnographic and genealogical methods, as well as riff and imagination, to explore the competing conceptualisations and histories of criticality that underpin each of these positions. By “standing astride the boundary” I hope to evade the disciplining of the disciplines of both teacher education and sociolinguistics and hold a space for exploration and questioning. Ultimately, I use this exploration and the heuristic of the crítico / criticón as mechanisms and as a provocations to question what the “Critical” of Critical Sociolinguistics currently is and indeed what it could be in the present-future.