June 28 - July 1, 2022

Language, education and social inequalities: towards more equal and inclusive societies in the Global South

For more information visit https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/language-education-and-social-inequalities-tickets-348823288847

About the context

Chile is currently undergoing a historical moment. For the first time after its independence in 1810, a Constitutional Convention has finished drafting a new political constitution which will radically change the way we imagine the nation and distribute political power in the state. Keywords such as interculturality, diversity (anti)neoliberalism, decoloniality, buen vivir [the good life] have become central in these new more inclusive and democratic ways of thinking about Chilean society. In this context, a number of social actors are mobilising their own ideas about language to further their own political and economic agendas. While some strive for more inclusiveness, others are profoundly undemocratic: the Chilean far right has weaponised language to a point where democratic conversation and deliberation in the public sphere seem impossible. This, we believe, calls for an active engagement as academics from sociolinguistics and various other disciplines in the public debates such as the one taking place in Chile. This historical moment is also the context for the webinar “Language, education and social inequalities: towards more equal and inclusive societies in the Global South”, which we see as a humble starting point to imagine, practice, and cultivate solidarity, collaboration, redistribution and change within and outside academia.

About our views on language

We, the organisers of this webinar, take the view that language plays an important role in the organisation of social and political life. It is fundamental in the way we make sense of the world and negotiate relationships and identities. Language can be used to decide who can have access to other resources such as political or economic power, jobs, education and culture (Heller, Pietikäinen & Pujolar 2017). Language, together with the way we think about it and what we do with it, can be deployed to sustain hierarchisation, domination and inequality: Its ubiquitous nature has seen language abused in the historical construction of national, ethnic, racial, gender, sexual, linguistic and other identities leading to social discrimination and related inequalities. But as the title of the webinar suggests, it can also contribute to different forms of resistance, social transformation, justice, and emancipation. This necessarily requires moving beyond views of language as an individual cognitive ability and as a bounded entity, essentially linked to land and identity (but, paradoxically, abstracted from speaking subjects and their material historical conditions). Instead, we draw on a conceptualisation of language as “a set of resources which circulate in unequal ways in social networks and discursive spaces, and whose meaning and value are socially constructed within the constraints of social organizational processes, under specific historical conditions.” (Heller 2007:2). Understanding language as a political social practice, and as a meaning making activity allows us to ask how language intersects with, for example, colonialism and capitalism (Heller & McElhinny 2017), how it is imbricated in processes of social differentiation and inequality, naturalising racism, classism, sexism, and obscuring asymmetrical relations of power in unequal societies. This perspective, while acknowledging the centrality of language, also opens up the possibility of strategically decentring language when reflecting on these issues (Rudwick & Makoni 2021).

About creating international networks of academic solidarity

Latin American scholars have long been making efforts to fight against the historical exploitation and exclusion of the periphery and interrogating where and how knowledge is produced and used, and by whom (cf. Dussel 1999; Escobar 2007; Freire 1985, 1993;Lugones 2008; Mignolo 2002, 2005, 2007; Quijano 1991, 1998, 2000; Rivera Cusincanqui 2012). In this regard, we acknowledge the work of our colleagues on Glotopolitica (cf. Arnoux 1999, 2010, 2014; Arnoux & Del Valle 2010; Arnoux & Nothstein 2013; Bonnin & Unamuno 2021; Del Valle 2005, 2014, 2017; Molina 2019; Zavala 2020a, 2020b) to open the space to projects that seek to examine the relation between language and politics from different theoretical and methodological positions (AGlo 2017). We are aware that, for some, in this context, bringing disciplinary knowledge from the “Global North” may be seen as reproducing a coloniality of knowledge (Lander 2000). However, instead of flatly rejecting these traditions, disciplines, and languages, which would be tantamount to a simplistic and essentializing understanding of the geopolitics of knowledge production, we engage with them critically, examining categories and frameworks, taking a cautious and vigilant stance, as we also do with our own work. Importantly, we see this coming together of academics as an attempt at creating international networks of solidarity to oppose nativist discourses and to find effective strategies in the promotion of more equal societies, a struggle in which countless academics around the world are actively involved.

About (re)appropiating the university as a site of struggle

Finally, instead of surrendering to the neoliberal domestication of universities, we argue that, in spite of their ambivalence, they are still a platform, especially in South America, “a través de la cual se puede impugnar la naturalización o mitificación del mundo que habitamos, a la vez que entrega elementos para su transformación”, [through which we can challenge the naturalisation or mystification of the world we inhabit, and at the same time, it provides us with elements for its transformation] (Rodríguez, 2020, p. 25). This is only possible by opening the university to a universe of people “con las cuales se puede aprehender el mundo de manera heterogénea, pues son quienes impiden el cierre de la universidad sobre sí” [with whom we can apprehend the world in a heterogenous way because they are the ones who prevent the university to close on themselves], (Rodríguez, 2020, p. 26.). We have thus invited a number of organizations from outside academia to contribute to this conversation with their knowledges and experiences. These include community organizations and members of the Chilean Constitutional Convention. In this way, this webinar can also be seen as a kind of minga (de Sousa Santos, 2018), a collaborative attempt at bringing together internationalscientific knowledge and local artisanal knowledge, both incomplete, but both full of surprises and challenges, to co-create knowledges useful for our struggles, in the understanding that the limitations are many, but that opportunities do exist or must be created with the means we have available.