Strangely bordered entities: languages, bodies, animals and things
Professor Alastair Pennycook
University of Technology Sydney, Australia
Alastair Pennycook is Professor of Language in Education at the University of Technology Sydney. He has worked in language education in many parts of the world and is best known for his work on the global spread of English, critical applied linguistics, language and popular culture, and language as a local practice.
Three of his books – The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language (Longman, 1994), Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows (Routledge, 2007), and Language and Mobility: Unexpected Places (Multilingual Matters, 2012) – have been awarded the BAAL Book Prize. His recent work has focused on urban multilingualism, leading to the book (with Emi Otsuji), Metrolingualism: Language in the city, (Routledge, 2015).
Lately he has been working on the idea of critical applied posthumanist sociolinguistics.
Abstract
It is not just the borders between countries and cultures, and the resultant co-constructions of language, nation and ethnicity, that we need to address in any attempt to rethink the possibilities of language, but also the... [ view full abstract ]
It is not just the borders between countries and cultures, and the resultant co-constructions of language, nation and ethnicity, that we need to address in any attempt to rethink the possibilities of language, but also the borders that have been assumed between humans and other animals, verbal and nonverbal communication, mind and body, the internal and the external, people and things. The era of European thought and empire building not only turned nations and languages into strangely bordered entities (south, north, east and west), but also insisted on a range of oppositional divisions (humans and animals, humans and things, men and women, the mind and the world) that were deemed forever different (in here, over there, up above, down below). As we witness a shift, however, from an era of stable sociolinguistics – with its assumptions about relatively secure languages, dialects, societies, codes and domains – to a more fluid era focused on sociolinguistic practices, several trends that undermine these older certainties are emerging: an understanding of language as an integrated assortment of embodied and embedded resources; a focus on a wide spectrum of semiotic potential, including not just the multimodal but also the multisensorial; an emphasis on communicative processes as they happen in the moment, rather than regularity of structure over time; a view of cognition, agency and language as distributed beyond human actors; and an insistence on the need for ethnographic descriptions of these entangled assemblages. This shifting terrain of sociolinguistics demands a rethinking of time and space and thus also the borders and entities that have been deemed to exist within these configurations. Drawing on recent research on semiotic assemblages, this paper will examine the ways in which things, language, people and places come together in particular momentary constellations.
Session
KN-5 » Keynote (18:30 - Thursday, 28th June, F&PAA Lecture Theatre)
