The next Activism in Progress presentation will be from Yoana Dancheva (Cambridge) and Colin Reilly (Stirling). Details and booking link are below. 

Having a blether about decolonising linguistics 

Yoana Dancheva, University of Cambridge
Colin Reilly, University of Stirling

Wednesday 20 November, 2pm

In this interactive talk, we aim to share reflections on our experiences of decolonisation within linguistics and academia more generally. We draw on Behari-Leak and Chetty’s (2021) social cartography of responses to calls for decolonisation in the university and discuss the dominant approaches they identify: academics as conservative, as moderate, and as radical. To take a decolonial approach to linguistics requires a rejection of “one-ness ideologies” (Ndhlovu & Makalela 2021) which involves challenging mono-lingual, mono-epistemic, mono-discipline, and mono-researcher approaches. 

Through our talk we aim to illustrate the need for a collaborative approach to decolonising linguistics and we offer perspectives on decolonisation as individuals at different levels in the university, highlighting the challenges and necessity of taking a decolonial approach to linguistics. We draw from our experiences working in different subfields of linguistics to reflect on what decolonisation means for us in our everyday practice of being linguists, and how this influences our teaching and research. 

We invite all seminar attendees to bring their own experiences and perspectives of how coloniality and decolonisation affect their work as linguists, and join us in having a blether. 

Yoana Dancheva is a PhD candidate in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. She previously collaborated with a team from the University of Essex—where she completed her BA—on a project which focused on issues around decolonising the curriculum, which laid the foundation for the work presented at this LAGB seminar.

Colin Reilly is a Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Stirling. Before joining Stirling, he was a Senior Research Officer in the Department of Language and Linguistics at the University of Essex. His research focuses on language policy in multilingual contexts. He is currently leading a British Academy funded project Multilingual Markets: Investigating Language Skills for Informal Employment in Malawi.

Register here: https://essex-university.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcqf-yqpj0pHNZp4WfAKWnMNYDpOyPGwsIf