Summary:
This book, which combines scholarly articles with interviews, seeks to imagine a decolonized sociolinguistics. All the chapters are firmly grounded in southern approaches to knowledge production, focusing not only on epistemology but also on the complex relationship between epistemology and ontology. The chapters address issues ranging from author positionality to the central theorists of a southern sociolinguistics, and roam from the language classroom to the church, in ways which invite us to begin to decolonise ourselves and rethink normative assumptions about everything from academic writing to research methods and language teaching. The book provides scholars and teachers with inspiration for how to teach linguistics in ways that challenge colonial hegemonies and that allow one to ‘do’ sociolinguistics otherwise. It also makes a powerful argument that debates about decolonization, southern theory and social justice are not just academic pursuits: what is at stake is our future and how we imagine it.
Author Biography:
Ana Deumert is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Her research is located in the broad field of African sociolinguistics and has a strong transdisciplinary focus. She is co-editor of Struggles for Multilingualism and Citizenship (2022, Multilingual Matters) and Colonial and Decolonial Linguistics: Knowledges and Epistemes (2020, Oxford University Press).
Sinfree Makoni is Professor in the Department of Applied Linguistics and Program in African Studies at Pennsylvania State University, USA, and is an Extraordinary Professor at North West University and University of the Western Cape, South Africa and Visiting Professor at Nelson Mandela University, South Africa. His main research interests are language and politics and Southern Theories. He is co-editor of the Multilingual Matters series Global Forum on Southern Epistemologies.
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