2027 Virtual Invited Colloquia
Convened by Phan Le Ha and Joel Windle
Troubling/Interrogating Local Knowledges in Applied Linguistics
Convener:
Phan Le Ha, National Chung Cheng University, Taiwan, University of Social Sciences and Humanities, VNU Hanoi, Vietnam, UCL-IOE, University College London, UK
Joel Windle, Adelaide University, Australia
Colloquium Abstract
A growing body of work has rediscovered and reformulated the importance of local knowledge as well as its nuances. This includes discussions on the geopolitics of knowledge circulation, the sociolinguistics of globalization, knowledge mobilization and academic mobility, alternative approaches to creating, presenting and communicating (academic) knowledge, critical literacy and critical approaches to language education in global contexts, and on the dynamics of colonialism/coloniality on language and education. Local knowledge emerges as an epistemological resource, an emancipatory counterpoint to global knowledge systems, and the locus of both meaning and identity making. In this recouperation and celebration of local knowledge, however, there is a danger of erasing complexities, tensions and hierarchies in favour of a romanticised and unified notion of the local and what it may entail. At the same time, radical critics of both local and colonial oppressions sought to reimagine different local-global futures that broke with exclusionary power structures, creating new mythologies and solidarities across borders.
Local knowledges always shift in their meaning and effects through processes of scholarly reframing and circulation, including practices of (trans)languaging, translation and reinterpretation in new contexts. This invited colloquium seeks to debate the politics, practices and consequences of local knowledge production, as well as their documented and anticipated effects, and possible recontextualizations of local knowledge in the field of applied linguistics. It asks a number of questions such as “Why does the global-local knowledge paradigm/nexus persist despite critiques? Whose local knowledge and language are granted recognition? How should/may we make sense of the different scales and hierarchies of knowledge as embedded in language? How can we approach intercultural encounters across layers of local knowledges and languages? Who is referred to when discussing local knowledge and local language? And what implications these complex dynamics may have for teaching, research, and community service and engagement in applied linguistics and language education more broadly?”
TOWARDS a Politics of Locus of Enunciation: The Ethics of Opacity
Professor Lynn Mario T. Menezes de Souza, Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil
Contemporary decolonial scholarship emphasizes the importance of the locus of enunciation as a means of exposing the false globality of Western knowledge. Yet, despite its critical value, the politics of locus of enunciation is often understood as a politics of recognition, in which marginalized local voices seek visibility within hegemonic global regimes of intelligibility. This presentation argues for a shift from recognition to relation, and from transparency to opacity, drawing on Lugones’s (2006) notion of complex communication, in dialogue with my work in Southernizing Linguistics (Souza 2024). Challenging the assumption that subjects occupying different local sites of oppression can automatically understand one another, which presupposes transparency, I argue that local-local coalitions require an engagement with opacity. This acknowledges that different histories and languages generate distinct lifeworlds that cannot be reduced to a common framework. Communication, therefore, is not the global achievement of consensus or equivalence, but the ongoing negotiation of difference. It is through this process that new relational identities, meanings, and possibilities for collective action emerge.
Building on this insight, I propose that the locus of enunciation should be understood not as a fixed identity position or point of origin, but as a dynamic and relational constellation of linguistic, ancestral and cosmological relations. Seen thus, communication becomes a transformative encounter in which interlocutors are not required to translate themselves into globally familiar terms but are invited to remain partially and locally opaque to one another. Opacity thus becomes an ethical and political condition for pluriversal coexistence. As an invitation to cultivate communicative practices capable of sustaining pluriversality without assimilation, the politics of locus of enunciation thus becomes a politics of relational accountability, grounded not in mutual transparency but in the ongoing creation of coalitional worlds across difference.
Unheard Voices in Localised English Language Teaching Materials in Bangladesh: A Critical Reflection
Professor Shaila Sultana, Dhaka University and BRAC University, Bangladesh
shailasultana@du.ac.bd and shaila.sultana@bracu.ac.bd
The English for Today textbooks used in government and non-government schools and colleges across Bangladesh, have undergone extensive localisation. They feature local names, traditional contexts, and italicised text. The books also incorporate rules, interactions, and scenarios familiar to Bangladeshi learners. Lessons address local issues, cultures, national geography, social settings, traditional lifestyles, national history, and civic life, thereby making language learning more relatable. In addition, the series integrates Bangla alongside English, responding to local communicative needs.
Drawing on this series, the paper examines how textbooks produce and legitimise local knowledge, educational philosophies, and lived experiences. The analysis shows that the textbooks sometimes present local culture in homogeneous terms. By privileging dominant political ideologies and the social and cultural values of the Bengali majority, they promote a uniform national identity. The state-sanctioned textbooks, when using English and Bangla in instructions, ignore the presence of Indigenous and minority languages in the linguistic ecology of Bangladesh. The oral traditions, local knowledge, and political and cultural histories of Indigenous communities are not adequately represented. Women, third-gender people, religious minorities, and rural communities are either absent or inadequately represented, further silencing marginalised local voices. In other words, the local knowledge promoted in the books marginalises voices from peripheral communities. In addition, references to local and rural life primarily portray Bangladesh through social problems such as child labour, child marriage, food adulteration, drug abuse, poverty, traffic violations, and pollution. Most importantly, the approaches and methods promoted for teaching reflect those introduced by the British Council, UK, in the late 1970s and early 1980s in Bangladesh. The paper argues that legitimising the local is an ambiguous and relational process, inseparable from both the legacies of colonialism and contemporary forms of epistemic colonisation. It thus challenges the uncritical idealisation and valorisation of the local.
Troubling local knowledges: Ambiguity as a Space of Potentiality in Applied Linguistics
Associate Professor Marcelyn Oostendorp, Stellenbosch University, South Africa
A reviewer recently questioned my claims of indigeneity. This greatly upset me. What made this reviewer believe that I could not claim to be indigenously African? Since it was not a double-blind review, I surmised that my surname, “Oostendorp” probably did not sound sufficiently “local” or “African”. My racial positionality is also one of ambiguity. I identify as a black/coloured South African (See Oostendorp 2023). In South Africa, the category coloured, was invented specifically to deal with those who troubled categories of native and white (see Posel 2001). Drawing on this experience, I will propose that this ambiguity can be a space of potentiality in applied linguistics. I will present examples from a project in which students worked with lecturers to reimagine multilingualism and focus on how they worked with ambiguity to imagine new relationalities, new selves, and different knowledges. Using the theoretical approach of linguistic citizenship, I use these examples to tease out a vision of applied/sociolinguistics as a space of potentiality (Kerfoot & Stroud 2024) to think beyond binaries.
Moving Forward? Local Knowledge and the Temporalities of Victimhood in Critical Applied Linguistics
Professor Othman Z. Barnawi, Royal Commission for Yanbu Colleges and Institutes, Saudi Arabia
This paper responds directly to an often under-theorized dimension of local knowledge in applied linguistics: local knowledge, local language, and the temporalities of victimhood within the geopolitics of knowledge circulation. It argues that, within the recuperation and celebration of local knowledge(s) in applied linguistics, EFL learners and teachers together with their academic systems in the Global South(s) are often framed, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, as victims of past epistemic violence, social injustice, exclusion, oppressive pedagogies, and colonialization, among other past wrongs. Consequently, interventions such as mother-tongue-based multilingual education, localizing school curricula, place-based pedagogies in language learning, Indigenous pedagogies in language education, and translanguaging pedagogy are sought as just transitions—moving away from past colonial, monolingual, and western-centric educational systems toward present systems that privilege local knowledge(s), local language(s), and community agency.
In this context, little is still known about the role of time and temporality—as sources of power, struggle, healing, transition, movement, and change—in the study of local knowledge in applied linguistics. How time and temporality (re)construct victims and victimhood in global-local knowledge tensions and transitions in applied linguistics remains under-theorized. Building on the scholarship of victimhood (Brewer 2010) and time and temporality in language education (Barnawi, 2020/2025), this paper uses Saudi Arabia as a national case to address the above question. It analyzes news items published in leading local Saudi newspapers to understand the dominant temporal expectations associated with centering local knowledge while adhering to international best practices. It then draws on hiwar (حوار, or dialogue) with four business and management teachers and four senior students at a Saudi English-medium-instruction university to explore how tensions between individuals' own pace of moving forward and institutional and national demands for transition may unpack temporal conflicts and hierarchies in the Saudi HE context.