This panel invokes the notion of linguistic entrepreneurship (De Costa, Wee & Park, 2016) to critique how actors are encouraged to brand themselves as neoliberal subjects in order to maximize their potential on the global stage. In light of this sociolinguistic and material reality, the three-hour colloquium brings together international language policy scholars who examine how countries in the Asia-Pacific region are actively reconfiguring their language-in-education policies to keep abreast with rapid changes in society. The first three papers explore ways in which the notion of linguistic entrepreneurship applies to the educational contexts of Singapore, South Korea, and the Philippines, respectively. The next three papers respond to the three initial papers and at the same time comment on how the construct of linguistic entrepreneurship can be applied in conjunction with related constructs in language policy research.
Paper 1 frames the key issues underlying the neoliberal turn in language-in-education policies in the Asia Pacific Rim.
Paper 2 examines how Mandarin language enrichment centers in Singapore share a discourse of Mandarin learning as character-building struggle, in which the struggle is a source of self-improvement.
Paper 3 discusses how the South Korean government mobilizes the bilingual resources of marriage migrants as it attempts to transform these migrants into bilingual teachers for nationalistic purposes.
Focusing on Mindanao, in the Philippines, Paper 4 investigates how neocolonialism facilitates the deepening instrumentalization of language and neoliberal subjectification of individuals.
Problematizing the notion of linguistic entrepreneurship, Paper 5 maintains that what is actually valued in transnational contexts is communicative entrepreneurship. The paper also calls for an examination of who benefits and who suffers from economic gaps.
Underscoring how the role of individuals has been under-appreciated, Paper 6 posits that three broad power/authorizations, which generate registers of intervention in language policy praxis, are linked to four kinds of participants who typically generate language change in these power/authority ‘containers’.
Paper 7 responds to the panel through the lens of (dis)citizenship, asking how linguistic entrepreneurship links economic and political forms of inequality, and what forms of moral and social order it reproduces or introduces.
