Language Decoloniality And Social Justice In The Caribbean

This edited collection aims to contribute to the decolonial social and cultural analyses of global entangled inequalities by focusing on their local articulations. Drawing on empirical research conducted by scholars in Germany, Trinidad and Tobago, Australia and in Canada, the book engages with the conceptual framework of global inequalities and the methodological perspective on entanglement. It does so by approaching global inequalities and their local articulations: (a) global political economy, structural violence, entangled inequalities; (b) financial inequalities and state injustice; (c) inequality within and beyond race and ethnicity; (d) decolonial struggles against inequality; and (e) decolonial futurities. It is on these grounds that this edited volume aims to contribute to the analysis of entangled global inequalities by mobilizing a decolonial framework paying attention to the intersections of race, gender, labour, finances and the State.

With a strong focus on decoloniality and social justice, this volume brings together critical theories, concepts, and practices on TESOL from multiple Brazilian perspectives. The chapters showcase the work of teachers and teacher educators in confronting sociopolitical issues in Brazil, including in the domains of democracy, language education, and knowledge production, as well as prevailing issues within TESOL itself. Contributions stem from an eclectic range of analytical orientations that reflect ontological and epistemological diversity while demonstrating why, where, and how TESOL is done in Brazil. In doing so, this volume also establishes a place for Southern voices to be heard in the move toward challenging complex and long-standing issues of representation, marginalization, and exclusion that have traditionally characterised North-South relations in TESOL as a field. This volume seeks to promote Southern-based conversations about decoloniality and social justice in TESOL and will be of direct relevance to graduate students, researchers, and scholars in the field of TESOL and foreign language education.

This volume brings together the work of six authors who explore various dimensions of language rights and how they intersect with social justice in the Caribbean context. Language rights advocacy has been an ongoing issue in Caribbean linguistics since at least the 1970s when the Society for Caribbean Linguistics was established and linguists started to turn their attention to the marginalised status of Creole languages in the region. This continued into the 1990s when dismal scores in secondary school English resulted in governments singling out Creole languages as the culprit and linguists had to get involved in shaping language policy for territories across the region. By 2011 the role of linguists was cemented in the language rights debate with the creation of the Charter on Language Rights in the Creole-speaking Caribbean. Using examples from Jamaica and St. Lucia, the current study examines the challenges that still persist ten years after the Charter, specifically in the areas of language advocacy, linguistic discrimination, and communicative hurdles in the courtroom.

This volume brings together the work of six authors who explore various dimensions of language rights and how they intersect with social justice in the Caribbean context. Language rights advocacy has been an ongoing issue in Caribbean linguistics since at least the 1970s when the Society for Caribbean Linguistics was established and linguists started to turn their attention to the marginalised status of Creole languages in the region. This continued into the 1990s when dismal scores in secondary school English resulted in governments singling out Creole languages as the culprit and linguists had to get involved in shaping language policy for territories across the region. By 2011 the role of linguists was cemented in the language rights debate with the creation of the Charter on Language Rights in the Creole-speaking Caribbean. Using examples from Jamaica and St. Lucia, the current study examines the challenges that still persist ten years after the Charter, specifically in the areas of language advocacy, linguistic discrimination, and communicative hurdles in the courtroom.

After the Decolonial examines the sources of Latin American decolonial thought, its reading of precursors like Fanon and Levinas and its historical interpretations. In extended treatments of the anthropology of ethnicity, law and religion and of the region’s modern culture, Lehmann sets out the bases of a more grounded interpretation, drawing inspiration from Mexico, Brazil, Bolivia and Chile, and from a lifelong engagement with issues of development, religion and race. The decolonial places race at the centre of its interpretation of injustice and, together with the multiple other exclusions dividing Latin American societies, traces it to European colonialism. But it has not fully absorbed the uniquely unsettling nature of Latin American race relations, which perpetuate prejudice and inequality, yet are marked by métissage, pervasive borrowing and mimesis. Moreover, it has not integrated its own disruptive feminist branch, and it has taken little interest in either the interwoven history of indigenous religion and hegemonic Catholicism or the evangelical tsunami which has upended so many assumptions about the region’s culture. The book concludes that in Latin America, where inequality and violence are more severe than anywhere else, and where COVID-19 has revealed the deplorable state of the institutions charged with ensuring the basic requirements of life, the time has come to instate a universalist concept of social justice, encompassing a comprehensive approach to race, gender, class and human rights.

As academics in postcolonial Caribbean countries, we have been trained to believe that research should be objective: a measurable benefit to the public good and quantifiable in nature so as to generalize findings to develop knowledge societies for economic growth. What happens, however when the very word “research” connotes a derogatory term or semblance of distrust? Smith (1999) speaks towards the distrustful nature of the term as a legacy of European imperialism and colonialism. Against this backdrop, how do Caribbean researchers leverage recognized and valued (indigenous) methods of knowing and understanding for and by the Caribbean populace? How do we learn from indigenous research methods such as Kaupapa Maori (Smith, 1999) and develop an understanding of research that is emancipatory in nature? Decolonizing qualitative methods are rooted in critical theory and grounded in social justice, resistance, change and emancipatory research for and by the Other (Said, 1978). Rodney’s (1969) legacy of “groundings” provides a Caribbean oriented ethnographic approach to collecting data about people and culture. It is an anti-imperialist method of data collection focused on the socioeconomic and political environment within the (post) colonial context. Similar to Rodney, other critical Caribbean scholars have moved the research discourse to center on the notions of resistance, struggle (Chevannes, 1995; Feraria, 2009) and decolonoizing methodologies. This proposed edited volume will provide a collective body of scholarship for innovative uses of decolonizing qualitative research. In order to theorize and conduct decolonizing research, one can argue that the researcher as self and as the Other needs to be interrogated. Borrowing from an autoethnographic ontology, the researcher or investigator recognizes the self as the unit of measure, and there is a concerted effort to continuously see the self, seeing the self through and as the other (Alexander, 2005; Ellis, 2004). This level of interrogation may require frameworks such as Reasonable Humanism in which there is a clear understanding of the role of the researcher and researched from a physiological and psychosocial standpoint. Thereafter, the researcher is better prepared to enter into a discourse about decolonizing methodologies. The origins of qualitative inquiry in the Caribbean can be traced to political and economic discourses – Marxism, postcolonialism, neocolonialism, capitalism, liberalism, postmodernism- which have challenged ways of knowing and the construction of knowledge. Evans (2009) traced the origins of qualitative inquiry to slave narratives, proprietor’s journals, missionaries’ reports and travelogues. Common to the Caribbean is an understanding of how colonial legacies of research have ridiculed oral traditions, language, and ways of knowing, often rendering them valueless and inconsequential. This proposed edited volume acknowledges the significance of decolonizing approaches to qualitative research in the Caribbean and the wider Caribbean diaspora. It includes an audience of scholars, teacher/ researchers and students primarily in and across the humanities, social sciences and educational studies. This proposed volume would provide much needed knowledge and best practice strategies to the community of researchers engaged in decolonizing methodologies. Additionally, this volume will allow readers to think of new imaginings of research design that deconstruct power and privilege to benefit knowledge, communities and participants. It will spark key objectives, directions and frameworks for deeper discussions and interrogations of normative, westernized and hegemonic approaches to qualitative research. Lastly, the volume will welcome empirical studies of application of decolonizing methodologies and theoretical studies that frame critical discourse.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. It is free to read at Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Decolonizing Linguistics, the companion volume to Inclusion in Linguistics, is designed to uncover and intervene in the history and ongoing legacy of colonization and colonial thinking in linguistics and related fields. Taken together, the two volumes are the first comprehensive, action-oriented, book-length discussions of how to advance social justice in all aspects of the discipline. The introduction to Decolonizing Linguistics theorizes decolonization as the process of centering Black, Native, and Indigenous perspectives, describes the extensive dialogic and collaborative process through which the volume was developed, and lays out key principles for decolonizing linguistic research and teaching. The twenty chapters cover a wide range of languages and linguistic contexts (e.g., Bantu languages, Creoles, Dominican Spanish, Francophone Africa, Zapotec) as well as various disciplines and subfields (applied linguistics, communication, historical linguistics, language documentation and revitalization/reclamation, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, syntax). Contributors address such topics as refusing settler-colonial practices and centering community goals in research on Indigenous languages; decolonizing research partnerships between the Global South and the Global North; and prioritizing Black Diasporic perspectives in linguistics. The volume's conclusion lays out specific actions that linguists can take through research, teaching, and institutional structures to refuse coloniality in linguistics and to move the field toward a decolonized future.