Var Topics: Decolonizing Ling

3 Credits · Level: Graduate

This seminar examines the present watershed point in linguistics where there is wide recognition that the history of the discipline is deeply entangled with colonial and postcolonial injustice and that a decolonial linguistics is a needed (if difficult) paradigm shift. We will read about ontological erasures and epistemic injustices that need to be disrupted, related to Euro-North-American biases in how language is understood, how language learning and social practices are investigated, and how knowledge about linguistics is produced. We will study ideas about language, multilingualism, and raciolinguistics that come from Southern, Indigenous, and decolonial scholars in Latin America, Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East/North Africa and we will trace how they have been taken up by critical linguists in the Global North. The seminar will support students in the writing of a positionality statement (a key decolonizing strategy that seeks to interrogate ontologies and voices/identities) and in the development of a final project that can be an autoethnography, a multi-book review, a re-analysis of existing data using a decolonial lens, and/or a critical literature review.