Language and Decoloniality in Higher Education - (Multilingualisms and Diversities in Education) (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Language and Decoloniality in Higher Education brings together a collection of diverse papers that address, from various angles, the issue of decoloniality, language and transformation in higher education. It reflects the authors' cumulative years of experience as educators in higher education in different southern contexts. Distilled as case studies, the authors use a range of decolonial lenses to reflect on questions of knowledge, language and learning, and to build a reflexive praxis of decoloniality through multilingualism. Besides a number of decolonial persepectives which readers will be familiar with, this volume also explores a conceptual framework, Linguistic Citizenship, developed over the past two decades by scholars in southern Africa. In this collection, Linguistic Citizenship is used as a lens to 'think beyond' the inherited colonial matrices of language which have shaped this region (and many other southern contexts) for centuries, and to 're-imagine' multilingualism - and semiotics, more broadly - as a transformative resource in the broader project of social justice. Although each chapter has firm roots in the South African context, these studies have much to offer others in their 'quest for better worlds'. Of particular interest to global scholars are the authors' recounts of how they have grappled with leveraging the country's multilingual resources in the project of promoting academic access and success in the face of historical hierarchies of language and social power.

Review Quotes

"Integrating lucid theoretical exposition with a series of vivid first-hand accounts of university teaching, this book is a vital point of reference for anyone asking what decoloniality and linguistic citizenship might actually mean for their own practice in higher education." --Ben Rampton, Professor of Applied Linguistics and Sociolinguistics, King's College London, UK

"Deepening linguistic citizenship, Bock and Stroud present here pluriversal ways of acting linguistically in order to disengage from language coloniality. Centering voices from South Africa, language is presented here as loving entanglements with Others, opening up alternative forms of knowledge and new indexical orderings to reimagine multilingualism and social justice work worldwide." --Ofelia García, Professor Emerita, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, USA

"As an exploration into the transformative potential of multilingualism, this edited collection is an important contribution to sociolinguistics." --Language in Society

About the Author

Zannie Bock is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. She is also the Deputy Dean of Teaching and Learning in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the same university.

Christopher Stroud is Senior Professor of Linguistics and Director for the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. He is also Professor of Transnational Multilingualism in the Centre for Research on Bilingualism at the Stockholm University, Sweden.