About the Book
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 Monica Heller, 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.
Table of Contents:
List of Figures
List of Tables
List of Contributors
Acknowledgments
1. Experiment in Critical Sociolinguistic Knowledge Production: An Introduction to the book, Alfonso Del Percio (University College London, UK) and Mi-Cha Flubacher (Institute of Linguistic Competence, Switzerland)
Part I: Lenses and Ontologies
2. Critical Sociolinguistics and the Imperative to Decolonise Language Studies, Finex Ndhlovu (University of New England, Australia), Emmanuel Ngue Um (University of Yaounde 1, Cameroon) and Virginia Unamuno (Universidad Nacional de San Martín, Argentina)
3. Historical Foundations: Some Threads for Integrating and Interrogating Historiography in Critical Sociolinguistics, James Costa (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, France), Daniela Lauria (National Council of Scientific and Technical Research of Argentina, Argentina), Beatriz Lorente (University of Bern, Switzerland)and Zorana Sokolovska (University of Fribourg, Switzerland)
4. Ethnography, Adrienne Lo (University of Waterloo, Canada) and Lindsay Bell (Western University, Canada)
5. Discourse: A Map in Constant Redrawing, Elisabeth Barakos (University of Vienna, Austria), Juan Eduardo Bonnin (Universidad Nacional de San Martín, Argentina) and Verónica Pájaro (University of Agder, Norway)
6. Political Economy as a Framework for Sociolinguistics, Maria Sabaté-Dalmau (University of Lleida, Spain) and Mi-Cha Flubacher (Institute of Linguistic Competence, Switzerland)
7. Let's Be Concrete: Language, Revolution, Materiality, Governmentality, Abdelhay Ashraf (Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, Qatar), Alfonso Del Percio(University College London, UK) and Alistair Pennycook (University of Technology Sydney, Australia)
Part II: Apparatuses and Instantiations
8. Language, Power and the State, Alfonso Del Percio (University College London, UK), Kyoko Motobayashi (University of Tokyo, Japan), He Shanhua (Yangzhou University, China), Julie Tay (Lancaster University, UK) and Catherine Tebaldi (University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg)
9. Mobilities, (Post-)Nationalism, and Trajectories Across Linguistic Borders, Maria Rosa Garrido (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain) and Michelle Daveluy (Université Laval, Canada)
10. Power and Critique, Eva Codó (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain) and David Karlander (Uppsala University, Sweden)
11. Capital(ism) in Our Lives, Christian W. Chun (University of Massachusetts Boston, USA), Ana Deumert (University of Cape Town, South Africa), Sebastian Muth (Lancaster University, UK) and Joseph Sung-Yul Park (National University of Singapore, Singapore)
12. Work/Labor, Kori Allan, Jillian Cavanaugh (Brooklyn College, USA), Jonas Hassemer (University of Vienna, Austria) and Kamilla Kraft (University of Copenhagen, Denmark)
13. Media Discourse and the Public Sphere: A Transnational Reflection on Truckers' Protests during the Covid-19 Pandemic, Emilie Urbain (Carleton University, Canada) and Branca Falabella Fabrício (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
14. The Battleground of Language and Education: A Conversation Among Four Women Academics, Martina Zimmermann (University of Teacher Education (HEP Vaud) Switzerland), Jennifer B. Delfino (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA), Andrea Sunyol I Garcia-Moreno (UCL's Institute of Education, UK) and Mompoloki Bagwasi (University of Botswana, Botswana)
Part III: Processes of Differentiations
15. Discursive Spaces of Identity, Lilian Lem Atanga, Melissa Moyer (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain), Miguel Pérez-Milans (University College London, UK), Shanthini Pillai (UKM, Malaysia) and Aileen O. Salonga (University of the Philippines, the Philippines)
16. Authentic Problems: Critical Reflections on Theorizing Authenticity, Sara C. Brennan (Université Toulouse Capitole, France), Elaine Chun (University of South Carolina, USA), Kati Dlaske (University of Jyväskylä, Finland), Martha Sif Karrebæk (University of Copenhagen, Denmark) and Harshana Rambukwella (NYU Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates)
17. Working the Field Through Different Lenses: The Interwoven Narrative of Four Sociolinguists Who Work On Language Minoritization, Isabelle LeBlanc (Université de Moncton, Canada), Annette Boudreau LeBlanc (Université de Moncton, Canada), Brigitta Busch (University of Vienna, Austria) and Claudine Moïse (Université Grenoble Alpes, France)
18. Ideology, Practice and Political Economy in the Study of “Bilingualism”, Virginia Zavala (Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Peru) and Ruanni Tupas (University College London, UK)
19. Short Stories on Social Inequalities, Alexandre Duchêne (University of Fribourg, Switzerland), Luisa Martin Rojo (Universidad Autónoma, Spain), Mireille McLaughlin, Prem Phyak (Columbia University, USA) and Sari Pietikäinen (University of Jyväskylä, Finland)
Part IV: Prefigurations and Utopias
20. Critique, Katy Highet (University of the West of Scotland, UK), Sinfree Makoni (Pennsylvania State University, USA), Bonnie Urciuoli (Hamilton College, USA) and Jacqueline Urla (University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA)
21. Paradoxes of Activism in Sociolinguistics: Politics, Research, and Partisanship, Sibo Rugwiza Kanobana (Open University, Netherlands), Nicole Dolowy-Rybinska (Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland) and Joan Pujolar-Cos (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain)
22. Water Teaching , While the World is on Fire, Bonnie McElhinny (University of Toronto Scarborough, Canada)
Index
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.
Review :
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.
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.
