Dignity in Diversity: Turbulent approaches to linguistic citizenship
Christopher Stroud
University of the Western Cape
Christopher Stroud is a Senior Professor of Linguistics at the University of the Western Cape, where he is currently Director of the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research, and Professor of Transnational Multilingualism at Stockholm University. His research foci encompass the sociolinguistics of multilingualism in Southern Africa, especially mobility and displacement in multilingual encounters, the politics and ideology of language and literacy and semiotic landscapes in transforming urban contexts. He has earlier conducted research in Papua New Guinea (multilingualism and literacies in small languages), Sweden (language politics, sociolinguistics and educational linguistics), Singapore (sociolinguistics of literacy markets) and Mozambique (bilingual education and emerging practices of Mozambican Portuguese). He has been part of the Sociolinguistics of Superdiversity program at the University of the Western Cape which is a collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for Ethnic, Social and Religious Diversity.
Abstract
This paper will deal with the ‘dark side’ or underbelly of globalization. Conflict, tension and marginalization suggest a need for an ethical sociolinguistics that can enhance conditions for linguistically mediated... [ view full abstract ]
This paper will deal with the ‘dark side’ or underbelly of globalization. Conflict, tension and marginalization suggest a need for an ethical sociolinguistics that can enhance conditions for linguistically mediated dignity. Two questions in particular will be in focus for this presentation: how can we grasp the complex, layered and shifting conditions of entanglement implicated in competing regimes of language that characterize situated and unequal encounters across lived diversity? And how can we understand the simultaneity of living within the limits of bordered categories (both traditional and invented), on the one hand, and the historically-grounded but contemporary deconstruction and reconstruction of these categories that comprise individual’s experience of radical social change, on the other? In order to approach these questions, the paper will offer illustrations of how people seek to pursue a dignified life in Southern African (postconflict) societies undergoing transformation, discussing these in terms of a metaphorical framing of a sociolinguistics of mobility in the notion of turbulence. Following Cresswell and Martin (2012) ‘turbulence’ can be understood as a productive analytic concept to describe the local contingencies of encounters, the messy and disruptive moments of ‘disjunctive interplay’ when ‘shifting registers of order and disorder, neither of which is permanently stable’ (p.516) meet. A ‘turbulent’ approach promises to capture the fundamentally ‘restless’ nature of being human, and thus the contingent, novel, unpredictable nature of linguistic practices relevant to diversity encounters. It also offers some purchase towards an ethical sociolinguistics rooted in an ethnography of interruption, and empathy, as well as points to how a notion of linguistic citizenship may articulate an approach to a politics of language for turbulent spaces.
Session
PL-04 » Plenary lecture 4 - Christopher Stroud (17:45 - Friday, 5th June, Grand Hall)
