How can Transcultural Pedagogies Support Learning in Superdiverse Classrooms?

This month we published Transcultural Pedagogies for Multilingual Classrooms edited by Rahat Zaidi, Umit Boz and Eve Moreau. In this post Eve discusses how critical multilingual and transcultural pedagogies are used to address the superdiversity in classrooms today.

Teaching in superdiverse classrooms might be trumpeted as one of the great educational challenges of our times. How students straddle distinct cultural and linguistic worlds to make meaning of curricular content has never been more intricate and complex. With technological innovations and the rapid emergence of accessible media content, teachers and learners can, in a sheer instant, connect with people and places who are far beyond the local providing them with a scope of the world that is unlike anything that has existed in education before. And yet, in our current social climate, the divisions that are constructed along stiff identity markers are reinforcing beliefs about separateness among people and fueling discriminatory and violent behaviors in schools and beyond. New ways to address interconnectedness amongst students’ complex networks of difference has become imperative.

Transcultural Pedagogies for Multilingual Classrooms: Responding to Changing Realities in Theory and Practice is a timely, cutting-edge collection of research studies from across the globe from some of the top scholars in multilingual and transcultural education. It explores the ways in which transcultural pedagogies can support learning and literacies in critical, creative and socially just ways. By exploring the value of affirming cultural and linguistic fluidity in classroom teaching, the researchers describe hopeful practices that harness the diversities of students as a rich resource for learning and interrelating.

Each chapter provides a different and innovative perspective with respect to reimagining language and literacy pedagogies in conjunction with students’ diverse literacies and resources. Presenting a collection of classroom and community-based research, the book addresses the intersections of plurilingualism, identity and transcultural awareness in various contexts, including schools, universities, as well as local and Indigenous communities. These settings have been deliberately chosen to profile the range of research in the field, showcasing transcultural, plurilingual, translanguaging and community-engaged pedagogies, among others.

Eve Moreau

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Languaging Myths and Realities by Qianqian Zhang-Wu.

How do we Humanize Practices through Dialogue?

We will soon be publishing Reimagining Dialogue on Identity, Language and Power edited by Ching-Ching Lin and Clara Vaz Bauler. In this post the editors reveal three key takeaways from the book.

The genesis of this book traces back to the beginning of the COVID pandemic, a time when the world ground to a halt, in the wake of the erosion of our familiar ways of human connection. It had become apparent that we needed innovative approaches to stay connected. This period marked a revolution in dialogues, witnessing diverse ways of thinking and languaging due to increased engagement with synchronous and asynchronous digitally mediated platforms such as Zoom and WhatsApp as well as social media communities, especially on X (formerly known as Twitter). However, the dialogues in the book extended beyond mere conversation, delving deeper into critical societal issues surrounding identity, language, and power dynamics. We believed this edited book could serve as an instrument for constructing a junction of dialogue, storytelling, critical listening, creativity, and consequently, fostering love, peace, and social change.

Outlined below are three key takeaways from this book, along with suggested ways of utilizing it:

1. Dialogue as Knowledge Construction: Think of the conversations you had in the faculty lounge, hallways, or restrooms with your colleagues and how it often ignites creativity thereafter. This book guides us on repurposing our discussions for generating knowledge. While retaining the conversational tone, each chapter demonstrates how we can analyze live discussions for further actionable steps. We hope to inspire diverse and mindful ways of reflecting and analyzing daily dialogue, leveraging them for transformative change.
2. Dialogue as a Pedagogical Practice: Acknowledging that our identities and language practices influence classroom pedagogy, many chapters employ collaborative autoethnographic approaches to reflect on classroom practices. This book offers insights into diverse pedagogical ideologies and outcomes. Teachers can use these narratives as a “fishbowl” activity to model reflective practices or writing. Each chapter provides end-of-chapter questions for further exploration.
3. Dialogue as a Research Method and Writing: Dialogue serves as a driving force for inquiry, becoming not only data for subsequent reflection, but also the very methodology by which we can record discursive data via digital media. Just as Suresh Canagarajah suggests in the Foreword, our thoughts and languages engage in a constant dialogue with previous encounters—let’s recognize dialogue as a legitimate qualitative research methodology. This book serves as an excellent example and resource guide on how dialogue can humanize research as a meaningful social practice by unraveling complex voices and dimensions within research.

The book represents a few varied approaches to explore the cycle of dialogue, reflection, and action. We encourage you to advocate for your school district or university to acquire a copy, utilizing it in qualitative methodology educational research for faculty or as a collaborative model in Diversity and Inclusion professional development activities. Let’s sustain and further enrich the ongoing dialogue.

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Shades of Decolonial Voices in Linguistics edited by Sinfree Makoni, Cristine Severo, Ashraf Abdelhay, Anna Kaiper-Marquez and Višnja Milojičić.

How to Implement Antiracist Pedagogy in the Language Classroom

We recently published Language and Antiracism by José L. Magro. In this post the author introduces us to the concept of antiracist pedagogy.

Look at the artwork on my book cover. What do you see?

I am not sure if my rusty graffiti skills were able to represent the purpose of this book: fighting racism within curricula, within the classroom, any classroom. Although the interdisciplinary orientation and examples provided are based on the language classroom, concretely the Spanish language classroom, I tried to express through my graffiti on the cover that, to fight racism, we must take action and decolonize the curriculum, bring the margins to the center (represented as black and brown arrows on the book cover) and decenter/abnormalize hegemonic language, that language traditionally normalized as the higher status, better, more powerful/valuable/prestigious/valid language (represented in the cover as a white tongue in the form of an arrow pointing to the right). In this process of inferiorization of certain languages/language varieties, these ideological views about language go beyond the linguistic sign, they inferiorize communities: we are what we speak, and we speak what we are.

We have at our disposal so many explanatory and exciting theories within the field of raciolinguistics and about power, language, and identity in general; part of this theoretical body is easily accessible and understandable, part of it is more obscure and unreachable for non-experts. You may already be familiar with this theoretical body or become familiar with it after reading the first part of this book, but when you face your students in the classroom, what? Furthermore, what about if you are not an expert and just interested in how language and racism intertwine or simply curious about how a Hip-Hop professor utilizes, in a very Hip-Hop style, the tools available to him to create content that may help promote a significant change in the way students think about language and use language?

For experts in education and applied linguistics, and related fields such as second language acquisition and literacy, this book will not only help you to get closer to the fascinating field of raciolinguistics, but also to connect that theoretical world to practice through concrete examples. In doing so, the non-expert reader will be able to understand the fascinating theory that supports the activities proposed in this book because, although they were developed to be used by educators, they are created and explained for (non-expert) students. Moreover, in this book, you will learn about definitions of racism and antiracism and about how positionality plays a fundamental role in the non-neutral endeavor of teaching languages; you will learn about a traditional Spanish language department in the United States, its actors, and the ideologies (re)produced in it; you will hear the voices of students exposed to the materials I propose; you will know about how Spanish language learning in the United States links to broader political struggles. This book will even address the curiosity that people who follow me as an MC have shown for years about my experience in academia in the United States.

If you are interested in the path towards antiracism, this book, regardless of your level of expertise, will provide you resourceful tools based on the relationships between language, identity and power.

Dr. José Magro
[él/he]
Assistant Clinical Professor
Department of Spanish and Portuguese/SLLC
University of Maryland
magro@umd.edu

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Spanish So White by Adam Schwartz.

Why Intersectionality Matters in the Study of Migration, Language and Identity

This month we published Multilingualism and Gendered Immigrant Identity by Farah Ali. In this post the author introduces the main themes of the book.

When migrants take up residence in a new society and begin the journey of building what many of them hope to be an improved life, this adjustment process is often given different names, such as acculturation, assimilation and/or integration. While each concept involves distinct shifts towards and away from one’s host society and society of origin, all of these processes entail migrants recalibrating their identities and day-to-day practices in a variety of ways so they can navigate life and feel a sense of belonging in their new place of residence. Part of this experience often requires learning another language, a task that is rarely as simple as making the time and effort to learn it. Rather, one’s ability and motivation to learn languages beyond one’s native tongue is shaped by an array of factors, such as the opportunities that are available to language learners, the extent to which a language is necessary in their lives, and – a factor that is often overlooked – the willingness of others to engage with language learners in said language. Together, these factors can play a crucial role in shaping not only migrants’ language learning experiences, but also their identities, cultural connections, and ultimately, their sense of belonging and acceptance in the host society. For sociolinguists interested in studying multilingualism and linguistic behavior among migrant populations, some of the common questions we explore include: how do migrants use their native and second languages in their day-to-day lives? How does the second-generation, born and raised in the host society, continue the process of socially integrating, and how does their linguistic behavior shift, if at all?

In many contexts, however, multilingualism is not just the result of integrating into a host society. Rather, it may be the pre-existing situation in migrants’ societies of origin and/or the host societies to which they move. For instance, while it might be assumed that immigrating to Spain would only require knowledge of Spanish, several autonomous communities in Spain actually have more than one official language. Catalonia, where my study is set, officially recognizes multiple languages, with Catalan and Spanish being the socially dominant ones. As such, migrants’ integration process in this locale also means that they are faced with the possibility of learning both of these languages. While Spanish is the more widely used language across Spain, Catalan is considered the vehicular language by the Catalan government and has been growing in use in the last few decades as the result of continuous linguistic revitalization efforts. More than that, Catalan also carries with it a greater degree of prestige in comparison to Spanish, which may allow for more upward mobility among its speakers. In this scenario, migrants may choose to learn both languages simultaneously, or, if limited in time, motivation, and/or resources, may only focus on one. In the latter context, many choose to forgo the socioeconomic possibilities that learning Catalan may present in favor of learning the language of more immediate need, Spanish.

While it is critical to consider the sociolinguistic situation within a host society, it is also essential to understand how migrants’ identities and experiences serve as key factors that play a major role in the integration process. In other words, different migrant groups may have different experiences with integrating into a given society. In many sociolinguistic studies, migrant groups are often distinguished by their ethnicities, races, and/or nationalities, which serve as the key variable(s) of investigation. While this is certainly a valid approach to studying migrant identities, other aspects of identity can intersect with – or even supersede – the above, in terms of playing a crucial role in shaping migrants’ experiences. That is, one’s ethnicity may be inseparable from one’s gender, and so it is impossible to analyze the experiences of Arab men and Arab women – or Arab women and Latina women – as if they were one and the same. As such, the concept of intersectionality provides a necessary framework for understanding the interconnectedness of identities, and allows us to see how a person’s multiple identities are intertwined and collectively shape one’s experiences. Applied to sociolinguistic research, we can see how intersectional identities extend to informing one’s linguistic behavior, because language not only serves specific communicative functions, but also can be performative of one’s identity.

Multilingualism and Gendered Immigrant Identity: Perspectives from Catalonia examines the intersection of gender and religion among Muslim women in Catalonia, and shows how these intertwined identities are connected to language use, and work hand in hand for many Muslim women as they reflexively or intentionally use language to perform their identities.

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Struggles for Multilingualism and Linguistic Citizenship edited by Quentin Williams, Ana Deumert and Tommaso M. Milani.

What Affects the Uptake of and Access to Foreign Languages?

This month we published Discourses, Identities and Investment in Foreign Language Learning by Jennifer Martyn. In this post the author explains what inspired her to write the book.

The story of this book goes back to my own history of language learning. Access to other languages at an early age outside of the classroom context stands out as being crucial in not only developing my own plurilingual repertoire, but also in piquing my interest in the way in which language learning is socially situated and a fundamentally political activity that can draw in some whilst excluding others. 

A range of contradictory discourses surround foreign language learning (foreign language learning usually describes classroom-based learning of a language that is not generally used by the speaker in their wider community). At secondary school, languages can be perceived as difficult and inessential, but also assets in the jobs market. Language learning is sometimes also perceived as something that girls and women are better at, an ideology that stubbornly endures.

Although each person has some degree of agency in terms of whether or not they choose to study a language or which language to study, we are all very much influenced, whether we are aware of it or not, by the discourses of language learning that circulate in our communities and across wider society. Languages are talked about and represented in a myriad of ways, all of which mediate our perception of them and our learning experiences. Whether or not one has access to a language, both in the literal and figurative senses, can also determine language learning experience. Some of us have access to other languages from an early age, while others do not. Nor are all languages valued equally in the marketplace and in wider society.

As a socially situated activity, language learning, then, is far from straightforward. Structural barriers, gendered language ideologies, and discourses of elite multilingualism, for instance, coalesce to make language learning seem difficult, unnecessary, uninspiring, or simply ‘not for us’. In the Irish context, there is limited research on sociolinguistic perspectives on foreign language education, particularly at the secondary school level. By employing an ethnographic perspective, this book investigates what young language learners think about language learning, while locating their experiences and beliefs within broader societal discourses and practices. It is hoped that this book contributes to a discussion of the social forces that mediate the learning experience in Ireland and elsewhere.  

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Portraits of Second Language Learners by Chie Muramatsu.

Disability, Language and Mothering

This month we published (M)othering Labeled Children by María Cioè-Peña. In this post the author explains the inspiration behind the book.

I never sought to study mothers. To be honest, mothers were never really a part of my professional circle. Yes, I worked with women who were mothers and I also engaged with my students’ mothers, but I rarely saw mothers as an asset; truth be told, I probably didn’t really see them at all. I remember many of my former students but very few of their mothers – the ones I do remember often tended to be the “squeaky wheel” mothers – the ones who came across as “irrational” and “demanding”.  As an educator, I didn’t really think about mothers, not the way I do now.

To be clear, I thought about parents. As a special education teacher, I had been trained to communicate with parents, to consider their emotional capacities, particularly around disability diagnosis or program placements, as well as their education level when communicating information and interacting with them. I was taught to be a co-conspirator, always working with parents towards more inclusive placements. As a bilingual educator I was trained to be culturally responsive and to consider parents’ cultural identity and language practices when communicating. All of this was under the guise of compliance and rarely under the umbrella of collaborative partnerships. After all, I had been trained to believe that culturally and linguistically diverse families needed teachers like me to advocate for them.

My relationship with parents in many ways took on similar characteristics to my relationships with children in special education – I was a helper to the helpless, a voice for the voiceless, an advocate for the powerless. Thus, my relationship to parents took on the same deficit framing that plagues emergent bilinguals and students labeled as dis/abled. So it makes perfect sense that parents, especially mothers, were outside of the scope of my inquiries. This is not to say that I did not have beautiful and meaningful relationships with mothers. On the contrary, I credit those relationships with my growth both as an educator and as a researcher, but at the time I did not recognize them as a part of my practice, rather I saw them as another feather on my cap; another thing that I did that made me great.

I was really interested in studying the ways in which my teacher training had failed me. I recognized that my teacher training had been an amalgamation of parts (special education training with a bilingual extension or a bilingual education training with a special education extension) and as such had failed to prepare me, and others like me, for the unique challenges that a bilingual special education teacher might encounter. It wasn’t until I did a pilot study centered on teachers that a participant made a claim that shifted my whole perspective. When speaking about changes that had arisen as a result of special education reforms in NYC, changes that encouraged Emergent Bilinguals Labeled As Disableds’ (EBLAD) placement in monolingual English Inclusive Co-Teaching (ICT) classrooms over bilingual self-contained special education settings, she commented that she felt badly for the mothers because they had no say in this transition. The bilingual special education classrooms were closed and students were placed in monolingual ICT classes, and while the children could adjust, the mothers had lost a huge connection to their children’s learning. While in the bilingual special education setting they could encounter a teacher who spoke their home language – that was not true in the monolingual ICT classes.

That comment sat and rattled around my head for weeks and months, until finally I realized that the problem didn’t lie in my training. It originated from the fact that these children were being treated as the sum of their classifications: English language learners, students with disabilities, culturally and linguistically diverse, Latinx, etc. My training was a hodgepodge of programs because the students were being viewed as the sum of their parts rather than as whole. Thus, in order to foreground children as whole, I needed to step out of the classroom and into the home. I needed to center their foremost teacher: their mothers. They are the ones who saw their children as whole first. They are the ones who rooted their children’s differences in a disabilities studies perspective. They are the ones who saw their children’s bilingualism as a linguistic human right central to survival not just capitalism. In order to help EBLADs, I first needed to center mothers’ expertise and experiences.

This book, (M)othering Labeled Children, does just that. It centers mothers, their successes, their struggles (inside and outside of their children’s schooling), their ideologies on disability, language and mothering. In order to see children as whole, we need to see their parents, especially their mothers, as whole first. In doing this work, I have come to better understand myself as a teacher and as a mother. In these women’s testimonios I see my mother, my aunt, and myself. I hope that in reading this book others will see the complexity that is motherhood and the ways in which schools can make this work both easier and significantly more difficult. I hope that this book becomes a step towards a more inclusive school model.

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Bilingualism for All? edited by Nelson Flores, Amelia Tseng and Nicholas Subtirelu.

A Glimpse Into The Complexity of Identity and Interaction in Language Education

This month we published The Complexity of Identity and Interaction in Language Education edited by Nathanael Rudolph, Ali Fuad Selvi and Bedrettin Yazan. In this post Nathanael introduces the main themes of his book.

This book is premised on the idea that the dynamic negotiation of identity and community membership is a negotiation of positionality: of who individuals, and others around them, “are/are not,” and “can” and/or “should” be or become. Language education is inseparable from these negotiations, shaping and shaped by contextualized, sociohistorical notions of “truth,” “correctness,” “normativity,” “value,” and “change.” In other words, language education can impose, perpetuate, problematize, challenge, and reify dominant, essentialized, and idealized ways of being and belonging, which create, limit, and eliminate space for diversity.

Critical dialogue in language education (purportedly) seeks to account for the complexity of negotiated identity and interaction characterizing communities and classrooms therein, as well as to address manifested privilege-marginalization that stakeholders encounter in their negotiations of being and belonging. There is no doubt, however, that “criticality” is far from uniform, as it is also a site of ideological struggle over how diversity, (in)equity and inclusivity are imagined and attended to. There are competing conceptualizations of privilege-marginalization, for example: what they are, who experiences them and how, where, and why, and how inequity might be addressed. This is important to understand, as these differences affect the meaning scholars pour into (and how they interpret) terms and concepts relating to interaction, such as “translanguaging”: what it “is,” why and how it might be valued, and who can, should and does engage in it.

We have noticed that critical scholarship pertaining to language education generally concerns itself with problematizing essentialized and idealized nativeness in a particular language (e.g. English), and that such work generally explicitly and implicitly presumes that identity, experience, knowledge, and skills can and should be apprehended categorically (e.g. “native”/“non-native”; “local non-native”/ “non-local [other]”). The majority of such work is detached from broader communal negotiations of identity and interaction, and the transdisciplinary scholarship and social movements which have documented such negotiations, however, leaving a) the contextualized, sociohistorical, local-global origin and nature of such idealized nativeness partially or wholly unaccounted for and unaddressed, and b) the voices of individuals whose identities and experiences transcend such categories, marginalized or silenced.

In our call for proposals and throughout the editing process, we encouraged contributors to envision a criticality that is, “academically transdisciplinary, decentralized, sociohistorically contextualized and connected to the community in which it is situated, and for one that prompts individuals toward self-reflexive attention to positionality; to what frames our seeing (Lather, 1993)” (Rudolph, 2019a: 105). We couldn’t have been happier with, or more inspired by, what resulted.

In Chapter 1, for example, Syed Abdul Manan, Maya Khemlani David, Liaquat Ali Channa, and Francisco Perlas Dumanig, examine English-only language policies and practices in Pakistan, which neglect the pluri- and translingual complexity of society and marginalize the identities of teachers and students. Meike Wernicke (Chapter 2) explores how ‘nonfrancophone’ teachers of French in Canada negotiate personal-professional identity when wrestling with essentialized and idealized notions of nativeness in their workplaces. In Chapter 7, Naashia Mohamed shares a Maldivian teacher’s lived experiences negotiating positionality in the Maldives, during her transition from English teacher to a university instructor of Dhivehi, the national language. Naashia discusses how her participant, Hawwa, initially feels relegated to a second-class occupation, experiences a shift in how she views the role and value of Dhivehi and herself as a professional. April Salerno and Elena Andrei (Chapter 8) present a dialoguing framework for teachers and language teacher educators to explore their language identities and how those identities shape their language-teaching practices, with a focus on their experiences as self-described bilingual (Romanian and English) teacher educators. In Chapter 13, Sarah Hopkyns explores Emirati university students’ lived experiences negotiating positionality as speakers of Arabic and English within their families, schools, and in Emirati society at large.

We hope readers are inspired by the volume! For those interested in exploring the themes more, please feel free to contact Nathanael Rudolph at nrudolph@kindai.ac.jp.

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Research Methods for Complexity Theory in Applied Linguistics by Phil Hiver and Ali H. Al-Hoorie.

Chronotopicity: The Inseparability of Time and Space

This month we are publishing Chronotopic Identity Work: Sociolinguistic Analyses of Cultural and Linguistic Phenomena in Time and Space edited by Sjaak Kroon and Jos Swanenberg. In this post the editors discuss how their book explores the concept of chronotopicity.

How often have you encountered a colleague, for instance at an international sociolinguistics conference, who started talking to you about Bakhtin? And how often did you subsequently engage in a somewhat vague and not very satisfying discussion about some of Bakhtin’s central concepts like heteroglossia or chronotopicity?

Over the last few years, chronotopicity has received renewed attention, not only in the field of literary studies where Bakhtin coined it, but also in other scientific fields. The inseparability of time and space also applies to, for example, social interaction and recently several scholars have shed new light on the possible contributions of the concept of chronotopicity to theorizing in sociolinguistics. This almost automatically led to questions on whether and how the concept could be used in empirical, mainly ethnographically-oriented sociolinguistic research.

In our edited volume Chronotopic Identity Work, we attempt to bring together a variety of empirical studies that put some flesh on the bones of the rather abstract chronotopic theorizing as presented thus far in the field of sociolinguistics. By doing so, we aim to show how Bakhtin’s concept of chronotopicity can be used for unraveling the intricate relationships between language, culture and identity in an era of globalization, digitalization and superdiversity.

Our cooperation with colleagues who agreed to face the challenge of using chronotopicity as a central concept in their research has taken us to:

• young adults in Mongolia interacting on Facebook through mixed and inverted language practices;
• fame-seeking identity plays by so-called baifumei (white, rich, beautiful, young women), within the Chinese ‘attention economy’;
• changes in picturing bureaucratic personhood through descriptions with deictics in local newspapers in Indonesia;
• touristic entertainment in a former traditional rural neighborhood in China;
• the commodification of cultural heritage and identity work in an ethnic minority community in Enshi, China;
• navigations of teachers and students between different language regimes in a multicultural school in Denmark;
• normative behavior and attitudes regarding different language resources in and around school situations in the Netherlands;
• the construction and meaning of Polish identity in an immigrant community in a superdiverse neighborhood in Belgium.

We think this collection of sociolinguistic analyses through the lens of chronotopicity clearly illustrates how the concept can be used in empirical research and how it contributes to the understanding of identity work in relation to the context of time and space.

Sjaak Kroon and Jos Swanenberg

Department of Culture Studies & Babylon, Center for the Study of Superdiversity, Tilburg University (The Netherlands)

a.p.c.swanenberg@uvt.nl

 

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Multilingualism, (Im)mobilities and Spaces of Belonging edited by Kristine Horner and Jennifer Dailey-O’Cain.

Multilingualism – An Asset or A Threat?

We recently published Multilingualism, (Im)mobilities and Spaces of Belonging edited by Kristine Horner and Jennifer Dailey-O’Cain. In this post the editors explain the themes covered in the book.

Like many others in our profession, the two of us are highly mobile people. Each of us changed countries in order to take up our current academic positions – Kristine commutes between the small European country of Luxembourg and the UK, and Jennie relocated from the United States to Canada – and of course our work as linguists is full of regular trips both of the “long-haul” and “short hop” variety.

Even as much of the world we live in considers this kind of mobility of privileged white professional academics as unremarkable, though, the mobility of other kinds of people – such as those from the global South – is often considered far more problematic. While some of us can claim the right to call ourselves “skilled worker immigrants” or even “expats” (a term that conjures up a sort of glamorous yet highly temporary “just passing through” lifestyle), others are dismissed by the societies we live in as “foreign workers” or “migrants”.

It is not all that different with multilingualism. Some forms of it are regarded as an asset or even as an essential skill (such as learning English or French in school and making use of those languages in an eventual work setting), while others can often be deemed problematic or even threatening to national unity. In the end, whether language is a resource, a barrier, or even a site of struggle will tend to come down to who you are, which languages you speak, and especially which contexts you are trying to use those languages in.

Our new book is about what mobility means in different circumstances, some of the different ways that language plays a role in those situations, and how complex social processes play a role in how these occasions and uses of language in those instances are perceived. In addition to our introduction, it includes nine previously unpublished research papers based on fieldwork in Africa, Asia, Australasia and Europe, and three insightful commentaries from experienced researchers that help tie the different papers together. Before publication, many of the contributing authors had the opportunity to discuss work in progress at workshops in Sheffield, England and Cape Town, South Africa. These meetings led to thought-provoking discussions that led us to reflect further on our positionality as scholars. This process was pivotal to the development of the book.

Divided into three thematic sections, the book explores the contestation of spaces and the notion of borders, examines the ways that heritage and authenticity are linked or challenged, and interrogates the intersections between mobility and hierarchies as well as the ways that language can be linked to issues of belonging. We believe that future research will benefit from connecting scholarship in sociolinguistics more closely to scholarship in migration studies and globalization studies. This book is a step along this pathway.

 

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Migration Control edited by Markus Rheindorf and Ruth Wodak.

The Linguistic Foundations of Homophobic Discourses

This month we are publishing The Discursive Ecology of Homophobia by Eric Louis Russell. In this post the author explains how he came to study homophobia in far right groups.

The cover image for this book shows les Hommen during a protest

“But… they’re SO GAY, right?”

A*** and I stared back at our mutual friend B*** [not their initials], somewhat incredulous. Gay? These guys? How could he possibly think that?!

It was early 2013 and the three of us were observing protests against same-sex marriage legalization in France. Among the more conventional opponents on the streets were les Hommen, young men in colorful pants and white opera masks, strutting around shirtless with messages painted on their mostly-chiseled chests, chanting arm-in-arm. For B***, an American anglophone, they would fit in the Marais or Dupont Circle, but were out of place at an anti-gay march. A*** and I understood things differently. Colorful jeans, bare-chested sloganeering, yelling in unison? Not just traditionally hetero-masculine, but exaggeratedly so.

Discussion soon turned to how it is we “read” the Hommen so divergently, without really thinking about it. Particularly curious to me was the inseparability of cultural and linguistic knowledge required in such moments, and the ways in which these are grounded and embodied. With common Francophone backgrounds, A*** and I called on shared knowledge of language and their intersection with cultural practices, concluding the Hommen to be examples of rather blatant heteronormative masculinity. Our American friend misinterpreted these signs at nearly all levels. All three of us, however, struggled to articulate exactly how or why we came to our judgements.

As a linguist, I focus on language forms, structures, shapes and patterns. When I read text or hear speech, I dissect and deconstruct the communicative package – much the way an engineer looks at a bridge or a musician listens to a symphony, I imagine. With some time to reflect on this and similar moments, I became increasingly uneasy at how rarely scholars like myself contributed to conversations around hate speech, regardless of target, context, or participants. It was as if we were only scratching the surface of language, and therefore only looking to a small part of how meaning is created, transmitted, and received. Perhaps worse, so much of the work being done seemed to depart from a “one-size-fits-all” perspective, as if sexualities and identities, as well as reactions to them, were universal or could be understood in linguistic and cultural translation. Being a bit mule-headed – and always up for a challenge – it seemed a good idea to wade into this controversy. Which is what led to this book: an attempt to pierce the surface of language performances and unravel communicative practices at a deeper level.

Is it complex? Certainly. Is this the type of thing that everyone needs to do? Probably not. But I believe it’s important to bring more understanding of language into the critique and confrontation of homophobia (and much else), and to engage in a more culturally-grounded way when doing so. With any luck, this sort of examination can shed light – a potent disinfectant – on hegemonies and hate, especially when they lurk in the shadows and their authors maintain a veneer of civility. At least, that is my hope.

For more information about this book please see our website.