At Home and Exiled in Language Studies: interdisciplinarity,

intersectionality and interculturality

Alison Phipps

University of Glasgow

What is the Crisis?– Of the disciplines– Of linguistic inclusion– Of global mobilities

– Of technological fix

– Of performativity

– Of management– Of imagination– Of language diversity

Modern Languages: Phipps & Gonzalez 2004

Worked with 2 key concepts (2004)

Languaging – with emphasis on improvisation and development of language habitus – strongly focused Freirean critical pedagogies and Boalian creativity.

Intercultural being – an ontological model, shifting from a skills based model to a model of practice, following ingold and Bourdieu

Introducing language diversity & Interculturality in 2004?

• Varieties of English?• World languages?• Languages spoken by

minority groups?• Heritage languages?• Indigenous

languages?• Multilingualism?• Plurilingualism?

Arguing for Diversity in 2004

Globalization

Marketization

Size Matters

Protection

Survival

Fragility

Conservation

Apocalyptic Scenarios

Using Diversity Arguments

• Choice• Heritage• Political Statement• Ecological trope• Linguistic

Anthropology• Defence against

standardization

Things are getting worse

“Things are always getting worse and the cultural critic like the despairing travel writer can only report on a world that is about to lose its distinctiveness and leave us adrift in a standardized world.”

Cronin (2006)

Decline

• The trope of a decline in diversity is common to cultural criticism and to today’s linguistic criticism.

• This trope is ‘a particular myth of knowledge like evolution, placing history outside of the domain of human activity’ (Cronin 2006).

e.g. • Language death vs. Language genocide• “The Persistence of Diversity” (Forsdick 2005)

“The Persistence of Diversity”

• Arguments for language diversity in higher education are often not arguments for languages but for social and symbolic capital.

• Languages persist despite higher education

• How languages persist and why is a crucial research question and question of language pedagogy.

e.g. Scottish Landscape for Languages

Languages Persisting to Degree Level in Scotland

Arabic; Chinese; Czech; French; German; Greek; Hebrew; Italian; Japanese; Latin; Modern Greek; Persian (Farsi); Polish; Portuguese; Russian; Sanskrit; Scottish Gaelic; Spanish

What do language offerings tell us?

• We have enemies/ we are diplomats.

• We go on holiday to sunny places

• We learn ‘world languages’• We are part of Europe• We are part of literary Europe• We are part of a Classical past• We are part of a Biblical past• We were part of the Cold War• We have migrant workers• We would like to open into the

‘new markets of Asia’

Scottish Languages History

• What languages should we teach to tell us something of our past?

• Classical languages (including Biblical languages)

• French (Auld Alliance)• Gaelic• Scots

• Old Norse/ Anglo Saxon

Contemporary Scottish Languages:

• What should we learn to understand who we are today?

• Indigenous languages (Gaelic; Scots)

• European languages• Neighbouring languages (Irish,

Welsh; Scandinavian)• Postcolonial languages

(Chichewa; Urdu• Tourist languages• Languages of relationship• Varieties of English• Languages for peace building

(English, Arabic)• Migrant languages

Language Futures – towards Translating Cultures

• Languages of hope• Language lines of

relationship and love• Languages for ecological

futures• Languages for new

economic futures• Languages for beauty

and for justice• Languages for utility

(greater good)• Language learning and

languaging

RM Borders: Critical language reflection

• Where is this language from?• Why am I learning this?• How am I learning this?• Why am I learning this, this way?• What questions of history, identity, process and

nationhood does this language and its pedagogy offer?

• What difference does it make that I am learning this language, at this time, in this place?

Giving up on simplicities (Law: 2005)

• We will need to teach ourselves to know some of the realities of the world using methods unusual to or unknown in humanities and social sciences.

• Hungers, tastes, pains of our bodies.

• Sensibilities, private emotions, passions, intuitions, fears, griefs or betrayals.

Modern Languages: Outside the Classroom and H.E.

e.g. Tourist language learning (Phipps 2006)

• Margins, after hours.

• In people’s lounges.

• During holidays.

• Taught by (excellent) hourly paid women.

Possibilities

• Languages are alive and well, on holiday!

• Why bother?• Learning to ask for a cup

of coffee. • What is most despised is

what creates the social miracle.

• Meeting, greeting and eating. (Williams) – languages in the social world of Applied Linguistics.

Languaging• Languages, skilfully

embodied and enacted, are part of the richness of human being.

• Languaging is a life practice. It is inextricably interwoven with social experience – living in society – and it develops and changes constantly, as that experience evolves and changes.

• Languaging is the intellectual challenge for languages in a post-disciplinary H.E.– How to teach languaging &

intercultural being?– How to live in translated

worlds?– How to enable real, messy,

internationalisation & interdisciplinarity in H.E.?

2004-2014

RM Borders Project

Welcome to the Anthropocene

Today’s World

Anthropocene

Royal Geological Society 2011

The Context for Applied Linguistics in 2015

Today’s World

“Globalisation takes place only in capital and data. All else is damage

control.”

(Spivak 2013, p. 3)

The Challenge

“A new and dynamic approach to foreign language education, in the context of the communication effects of globalization, requires ongoing interrogation as it surrounds us with unprecedented challenges of conceptualization and still unimagined challenges of pedagogy.” (Lo Bianco, 2014, p. 523)

Context of the project

UK Arts and Humanities Research Council:Researching Multilingually at the Borders of the Body, Language, Law, and the State(2014-2017)

Translating CulturesAfter Multilingualism

Context

‘It is becoming clear that the very nature of multilingualism is now increasingly unmoored – even from the frameworks that were applied in the 1990s’

Unpredictability

The languages used to language – to attempt to work through the loss and possibilities, the pain and the hope – are now radically unpredictable.

The unmoorings (loss of one or both anchors) of mono & multilingualism are myriad and occurring at the levels of :

• Self• Kin• Community• Work• Environment• Market• Politics (local / global)

Researching Multilingually

Aims:1)to research interpreting, translation and multilingual practices in challenging contexts, and,

1)while doing so, to document, describe and evaluate appropriate research methods (traditional and arts based) and develop theoretical approaches for this type of academic exploration.

2)To up end the ‘normal’ routines of academic representation giving control and voice to those normally denied representational power as artists.

5 Case Studies

1) Global Mental Health: Translating Sexual and Gender Based Trauma (Scotland/Sierra Leone)

2) Law: Translating vulnerability and silence in the legal process (UK/Netherlands)

3) State: Working and Researching Multilingually at State and EU borders (Bulgaria/Romania)

4) Borders: Multilingual Ecologies in American Southwest borderlands

5) Language Education: Arabic as a Foreign Language for International Learners (Gaza)

Hubs and Impacts

- Academic Hub-Creative Arts Hub

Multimodal Creative Interventions

Curation of films, workshops, methods, poetry, drama, devising.

A human ecological language Perspective – with Glenn Levine

● Creativity● Complexity● Capabilities● Conflict● Compassion

Responding to these creatively, reflexively and ethically defines for us the characteristics required for a human ecological language pedagogy.

Noyam: Devising; Improvising; languaging

Intentional Multilingualism20 languagesCalabash as Babel.(Post) decolonial. Decreating languages in order for re-creation to emerge.

English Last

A Festival of Creative Multilingualism: SOLAS 2017

Serious Work

Intersectionality; Interculturality; Interdisciplinarity need to be part of decreation of modern languages in order that they can be fit for the critical and creative purposes of the challenges of the twenty-first century.

Translating at Root

Slow, careful, considered, deliberate – utterly dependent on the slow wisdom of translation as metaphor and material reality

But always

exemplary languagesubtle as flowersplastic as wavesflexible as twigspowerful as windconcentred as rocksyncraticas the selfbeautiful as love.