Resumen de Transformative actions for sociolinguistic equity: mobilizing students' agency at university

Lara Alonso, Luisa Martín Rojo

• Abstract This paper explores the concept of agency for social transformation and its mobilization through a participatory action research project developed with students from the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in Spain. The research, which was longitudinal and employed ethnographic and participatory approaches, was based on critical pedagogy to raise awareness about the role of language in reproducing social inequalities. The students who participated mobilized agency through projects that addressed the lack of social recognition and unequal access to resources and rights due to linguistic hierarchies, intercultural differences, and discrimination. These efforts culminated in the students/researchers’ effective implementation of concrete actions to address these inequalities, including doing posters, workshops, support programs, discussion groups, and proposals for public institutions. In this article, we identify key factors that enabled students/researchers to develop concrete transformative actions to tackle sociolinguistic inequalities, such as students’ social positioning, available resources, the scaffolding provided by the researchers/facilitators, and the crucial role of accompaniment. These dynamics co-constructed three dimensions of agency—reflexive, critical, and distributed—whose interweaving defines this agency as transformative. Finally, we examine the project’s impact, both on a personal and collective level for the students/researchers and researchers/facilitators, as well as its effects on the contexts where the various actions were implemented.