Critical Sociolinguistics - (Advances in Sociolinguistics) by Alfonso del Percio & Mi-Cha Flubacher (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Providing a state-of-the-art overview of critical sociolinguistics, this volume traces the formation and advancement of the field as key academic figures from across the world to explore the work of Monica Heller and the main concepts within critical sociolinguistics, offering insights into the politics that surrounds knowledge of language and society. Each chapter offers a different social and theoretical perspective on the history of the field and provides a detailed reflection on how critical sociolinguistics has acted as a discipline over time"--

Book Synopsis

Providing a series of crucial debates on language, power, difference and social inequality, this volume traces developments and dissonances in critical sociolinguistics. Eminent and emerging academic figures from around the world collaboratively engage with the work of MonicaHeller, offering insights into the politics and power formations that surround knowledge of language and society.

Challenging disciplinary power dynamics in critical sociolinguistics, this book is an experiment testing new ways of producing knowledge on language and society. Critically discussing central sociolinguistic concepts from critique to political economy, labor to media, education to capitalism, each chapter features a number of scholars offering their distinct social and political perspectives on the place played by language in the social fabric. Through its theoretical, epistemological, and methodological breadth, the volume foregrounds political alliances in how language is known and explored by scholars writing from specific geopolitical spaces that come with diverse political struggles and dynamics of power. Allowing for a diversity of genres, debates, controversies, fragments and programmatic manifestos, the volume prefigures a new mode of knowledge production that multiplies perspectives and starts practicing the more inclusive, just and equal worlds that critical sociolinguists envision.

Review Quotes

By interrogating what the critical study of language entails, Critical Sociolinguistics offers a rich and thought-provoking consideration of how knowledge about language is produced and the effects that such patterns of knowledge production have. It is essential reading for thinking through the role language plays in constituting our social realities.
Erez Levon, Professor of Sociolinguistics, University of Bern, Switzerland

The editors of this alternative festschrift dedicated to Monica Heller have assembled a team of 60 contributors to create an intriguing kaleidoscope of experiments in academic writing and knowledge creation.
Ingrid Piller, Professor of Applied Linguistics, Macquarie University, Australia

About the Author

Alfonso Del Percio is Associate Professor in Applied Linguistics at IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society, University College London, UK. He explores the relationship between language, state power and political economy, with a focus on migration and the links between language, labor, and social inequality.

Mi-Cha Flubacher is Lecturer and Research Associate at the ZHAW Department of Applied Linguistics, Institute of Linguistic Competence, Switzerland. She is interested in issues of multilingualism and work, migration and language, and language, gender and race/ialisation and approaches these issues with an ethnographic lens.