Suchergebnisse

This is a brief reflection on two decades of work in NGOs and with trade unions from 1982 to 2001. For most of the time covered by this research note, I worked for a non-governmental organisation (NGO), one of several small, politically committed literacy organisations that sprang up in the aftermath of Soweto 1976 as part of a broader response to increasingly repressive state policies.

This is a brief reflection on two decades of work in NGOs and with trade unions from 1982 to 2001. For most of the time covered by this research note, I worked for a non-governmental organisation (NGO), one of several small, politically committed literacy organisations that sprang up in the aftermath of Soweto 1976 as part of a broader response to increasingly repressive state policies.

This study aims to contribute to the growing body of knowledge on the circumstances under which adult education, in particular adult basic education, can support and occasionally initiate participatory development, social action and the realisation of citizenship rights. It traces developments in adult basic education in South Africa, and more specifically literacy and language learning, over the years 1981 to 2001, with reference to specific multilingual contexts in the Northern and Western Cape. The thesis is based on four individual studies, documenting an arc from grassroots work to national policy development and back. Study I, written in the early 1990s, critically examines approaches to teaching English to adults in South Africa at the time and proposes a participatory curriculum model for the additional language component of a future adult education policy. Study II is an account of attempts to implement this model and explores the implications of going to scale with such an approach. Studies III and IV draw on a qualitative study of an educator development programme after the transition to democracy. Study III uses Bourdieu's theory of practice and the concept of reflexivity to illuminate some of the connections between local discursive practices, self-formation, and broader relations of power. Study IV uses Iedema's (1999) concept of resemiotisation to trace the ways in which individuals re-shaped available representational resources to mobilise collective agency in community-based workshops. The summary provides a framework for these studies by locating and critiquing each within shifts in the political economy of South Africa. It reflects on a history of research and practice, raising questions to do with voice, justice, power, agency, and desire. Overall, this thesis argues for a reconceptualisation of ABET that is more strongly aligned with development goals and promotes engagement with new forms of state/society/economy relations.

Abstract
In writing of the economies of abandonment of late liberal globalization, Elizabeth Povinelli also points to the potential for SPACES OF OTHERWISE, those spaces of "curiosity and risk, potentiality and exhaustion" which open possibilities for more ethical becoming and the emergence of new forms of sociality and social life (2012. The will to be otherwise/the effort of endurance. South Atlantic Quarterly 111(3). 453–475: 454). This Special Issue aims to contribute to an expanded, southernized sociology of language and sociolinguistics by exploring what role sociolinguistics can play in thinking through and with these spaces. It brings together a set of papers from southern contexts rarely represented in sociolinguistic research (Crimea, Mozambique, Palestine) spaces of grim endurance where suffering is chronic rather than catastrophic, and a study of the metaphorical south in the north, where migration imperatives land people in situations of precarity, in this case, Sweden. An illuminating invited commentary offers a novel perspective on the key theme QUASI-EVENT threading across all the papers. In exploring the construction of spaces of otherwise, authors use the southern concept of Linguistic Citizenship that construes language as a site of political struggle. This framing offers an alternative approach to a politics of language where potentialities for otherwise can be attended to. The papers show how, through acts of Linguistic Citizenship, participants bring potential worlds into existence, however fleetingly. From the chronicling of these 'quasi-events' emerges a sociolinguistics of potentiality, one which contributes to an understanding of what enables some emergent forms of life to endure and others not. The sociolinguistics of potentiality is an invitation to listen beyond and within 'noise' to those who inhabit discounted bodies and speak unvalued languages, to move beyond 'community' and 'selfhood' to becoming otherwise with others in projects of world-building, simultaneously prompting research which seeks to be 'ethically otherwise'.

This study of a postcolonial site engages with epistemic justice from the perspective of language. It understands epistemic justice as relating to issues of knowledge, understanding, and participation in communicative practices. It suggests that monoglossic language-in-education policies, often colonial in origin, constitute a form of epistemic injustice by denying learners the opportunity to learn in a familiar language and removing their ability to make epistemic contributions, a capacity central to human value. It further suggests that translanguaging in formal school settings is for the most part geared towards a monolingual outcome, that is, towards accessing knowledge in an official language. This unidirectional impetus means that translanguaging remains an affirmative rather than transformative strategy, leaving underlying hierarchies of value and relations of knowing unchanged. In contrast, this study presents linguistic ethnographic data from a three-year pilot project in Cape Town where primary school learners could choose their medium of instruction to Grade 6 and use all languages in subject classrooms. It analyses how a Grade 6 learner used laminated, multilingual, affective and epistemic stances to construct others as knowers, negotiate epistemic authority, and promote solidarity. It proposes that, in so doing, she constructed new decolonial relations of knowing and being. It further proposes that the shift from a monolingual to a multilingual episteme, which substantially improved educational performance overall, also enabled the emergence of politically fragile yet institutionally robust social, epistemic, and moral orders from below, orders that could lay the basis for greater epistemic justice. ; Towards Epistemic Justice: Language, Identity, and Relations of Knowing in Post-colonial Schools ; Multilingualism and identities in and out of school: urban youth on the Cape Flats

This book offers a fresh perspective on the social life of multilingualism through the lens of linguistic citizenship. Each chapter illuminates how multilingualism (in both theory and practice) should be, or could be, thought of as inclusive when we recognize what multilingual speakers do with language for voice and agency