By Sonya Rao, American Bar Association/AccessLex Institute Post-Doctoral Fellow in Legal and Higher Education
The life history interview, a type of oral history that covers the events of an individual’s life experiences, is a useful methodological tool for social scientists and historians. In these interviews, researchers can explore the depths of an individual’s historical experience and bring life and personal stakes to political trends and events. It is especially useful for understanding the impacts of these over time.
But despite these benefits, it is not an especially common approach or widely recognized tradition in studies of language. A recent special issue in Journal of Anthropological Research, which I guest edited with colleague Edwin Everhart, hopes to platform the language life history method and approach to interviewing.
The language life histories that have emerged over the years have stood the test of time. Language life histories have provided fundamental insight into a wide variety of perennial topics, among them language shift and revitalization (Kroskrity 1993, 2009) and child and youth development (Orellana 2007, Orellana and Phoenix 2017).
How can language life histories be made useful more broadly? More specifically, how can we use these in law and social sciences, and the study of law and language?
In my article in the special issue on language life histories, I draw on insights from several life histories of legal interpreters. I use their words, life experiences, and perspectives to draw attention to material issues relating to the treatment of legal interpreters in the courtroom. The interpreters’ stories, in turn, show how language life histories are a tool that can reveal invisible communicative labor, describe the process of coming to realize a work arrangement is exploitative, and show how communication work changes across the life course.
Perhaps most importantly for the interests of social justice, the interpreters’ language life histories demonstrated the difficult communication work they put into professional and labor organizing activities. Interpreters’ own efforts to formalize the interpreting profession through mentoring, interpersonal professionalization, and labor organizing have gone under-credited over the last several decades, and the benefits to the justice system of this work continue to be under-celebrated.
In this case, language life histories initiated a first step toward recognizing the communication work interpreters do to maintain the professional standards of their community, often against a tide of agencies and lax regulations that overlook their esteemed qualifications. It is our hope that this useful method can bring light to other important experiences in the legal community and beyond.