Afterword—Humanizing Language Policy Research

This Afterword locates the intellectual genealogy of the present volume in a path-breaking issue of TESOL Quarterly on the role of English language professionals as agents of language planning and policy (LPP) (Ricento & Hornberger, 1996) and the ethnography of language and education policy. The Empirical turn in LPP research has thus been an ethnographic turn as well. The chapter also shows how the volume contributes to what Spolsky, Inbar-Lourie, and Tannenbaum (2015) called “making space for people”—a humanizing stance to LPP research. By illuminating how complex LPP processes work in practice, the editor and authors suggest the ways in which equitable, humanizing language policies can be constructed.