AAAL 2027: Invited Colloquium
Convened by Kathleen Heugh
Resisting north-south divides, reclaiming multilingualisms in education
Convener:
Kathleen Heugh, Adelaide University.
kathleen.heugh@adelaide.edu.au
Colloquium Abstract
Contrary views of multilingualism, especially in education, have become a litmus test for deep theoretical division between southern and northern applied and socio- linguists since 2009. Restricted views of multilingualism as comprising multiple monolingualisms since then have driven a wedge between northern and southern experiences of linguistic phenomena and their relationship with human endeavour. In southern experiences of pluriversal worlds, multilingualisms are multidimensional, multiscalar, and characterised by numerous triangular axiological, metaphysical and spatio-temporal relationships. These include ethos, logos and pathos; cosmology, epistemology and ontology; pasts, presents, futures. This colloquium attempts to untangle difficult conversations across south-north divides with misalignments between critical postcolonial theory and decolonial practices with multilingualisms in education.
Three papers followed by a discussion will be offered. The first maps a research programme, ‘Southern multilingualisms, knowledges and decolonising education’ that draws from decolonial and 'southern theory' (e.g., Connell 2014, Nakata 2007), Anangu education (e.g., Tjitayi & Osborne, 2014; Armitage, 2021); literary archives of Africa (Maseko, 2018), socioapplied linguistics (e.g., Heugh, Stroud, Taylor-Leech & De Costa, 2021; Windle et al, 2024). The second brings the perspectives of Anangu Elders and Teachers in remote Australia. Anangu relationships with language, knowledge, Country, ancestors, and futures (Tjukurpa) are crucial to culture and identity. Central to collaborative partnerships is reciprocity, ‘malparara way’ (Emily Buddy 2024). When policy loosens the grip of postcolonial logic, resistance within instruments of governmentality continue, requiring patience and wisdom. Two multilingual universities in South Africa offer the third paper. The authors illustrate collaborative partnerships that centre African languages, epistemes and ontologies while grappling with southern and decolonial discourses of multilingualisms within the constraints and artifice a northern-facing academy and postcolonial technologies of state enterprises. A discussant concludes with a commentary on how the field of multilingualisms in education might converge or divide, and a question: ‘If we tread carefully, is it possible for those entrapped within neocolonial infrastructures to come to convivial reciprocity with those who attempt to free themselves, ‘dancing with ambiguity’ (Bunnell, 2015)?
Paper 1: Reclaiming and recentring southern multilingualisms
Kathleen Heugh, Adelaide University
kathleen.heugh@adelaide.edu.au
Language of delivery: English
Between 2008 and 2012 three moves precipitated a significant shift in the field of northernfacing Applied Linguistics, bringing into stark relief a yawning abyss between southern and northern conceptualisations of multilingualism. The first was with Aronin and Singleton’s recognition of multilingualism as ‘a new linguistic dispensation’ (2008). The second was May’s celebratory ‘multilingual turn’ (2012). The third was the translocation of ‘translanguaging’ (García, 2009) from Wales to North America. A rapid deployment of translanguaging, casting multilingualism as universally constricted to multiple monolingualisms served to erase southern expertise in its pluriversality and multidimensionality. What had been a lingering disquiet of colonial and postcolonial exclusions in socio- and applied linguistics, became an abyssal cleavage that required a response.
Southern multilingualisms, articulated in conversations among colleagues in southern Africa, South America, South Asia, and Australia from 2012 onwards was a move to re-place, and recentre the field with millennia of expertise and scholarship that inform ethical practices of linguistic care, conviviality, reciprocity and hope. It was to hold to account hasty narratives excluding southern voice. Several strands of southern thinking and efforts to articulate decolonial linguistics followed – some travelling in similar directions, others attempting to reclothe coloniality in new vocabulary.
Southern multilingualisms are mapped in triangular balance and relation with several cooccurring human characteristics and phenomena including: cosmology, epistemology, ontology; ethos, logos, pathos; pasts, presents, futures; love, arrogance, aggression. Mapping is followed by an introduction to south-south collaborations among higher education colleagues in Southern Africa and Australia, and among remote communities and higher education, linking these with the Southern multilingualisms, knowledges and decolonising research programme. These collaborations navigate the constraints of (post)colonial systems with multilingualisms as they move, careful with words, towards reciprocal communities. Learning from, keeping balance, listening with care, ‘dancing with ambiguity’ (Bunnell 2015), and seeking two-way exchanges offer hope on the journey from coloniality and the sticky webs of despairing universality.
Paper 2: Anangu perspectives of multilingualisms, knowledges and decolonising education
Samuel Osborne, Adelaide University
Dom Barry, Adelaide University & IWIRI Aboriginal Corporation
Languages of delivery: English, Pitjantjatjara
Innovative action research brought forward in this paper responds to growing domestic and international concerns of the nature, causes and implications of contemporary inequalities for Aboriginal, Indigenous and Minority communities. It intersects with transnational frameworks prioritising inclusion, socio-economic transformation, and safety. Primary stakeholders include Aboriginal communities, often mobile and living in diasporas. The research sits within an uneasy relationship with secondary stakeholders, including state and national education authorities. It articulates with and has implications for transnational bodies that prioritise multilingualism and Indigenous knowledges to secure equality and inclusion. Two examples are UNESCO's Key and Intersectoral Programmes: International Decade of Indigenous Languages, IDIL 2022-2032; and Local and Indigenous Knowledge Systems, LINKS 2020-2029 – with a focus on desert and small island communities.
The authors reflect on ongoing partnered action research that has travelled across several decades in the remote Anangu, Pitjantjatjara, Yankunytjatjara Lands in central Australia. Attention here is drawn to Anangu ways of holding languages, knowledges (kulini) and Country in ontological, epistemic and cosmological balance. The paper addresses calls for decolonising education that question, “how can equality and social cohesion in education be achieved for Indigenous, minoritised and displaced communities to secure safe futures?” Through building collaborative and trusted partnerships over more than thirty years, remote community and women’s organisations together with an urban-located university open spaces for innovative Anangu citizenship and Anangu pedagogies, including malparara (two-way) reciprocity between Anangu and piranpa (non-Anangu) teachers. [Film footage of two-way pedagogy in practice and voices of Anangu Elders unable to attend the conference will be included.] Simultaneously, however, persistent governmentality and the reluctance of monolingual, monocultural and singular curricular regimes require ongoing epistemic and ontological challenge and resistance. This, as elsewhere, is accompanied by epistemic and ontological exhaustion (Kerfoot & Stroud, 2024).
Paper 3: Multilingualism for an African University: Beyond Compliance and Towards Epistemic Transformation
Dr Sisonke Mawonga, Rhodes University, RSA.
Prof Pamela Maseko, Nelson Mandela University, RSA.
Dr Jacqui Lück, Nelson Mandela University, RSA.
Mx Chanel van der Merwe, Nelson Mandela University, RSA.
chanelvandermerwe@mandela.ac.za
Language Medium: The presentation will be primarily in English, with some of the data presented in isiXhosa and Afrikaans
The South African Language Policy Framework for Public Higher Education Institutions (2020) identifies institutional collaboration as a key enabler of multilingualism in higher education (HE), requiring universities to accelerate the enhancement and use of indigenous African languages as languages of teaching, learning, research, and scholarship. In 2025, Nelson Mandela and Rhodes Universities launched the Multilingualism Indaba, a collaborative partnership bringing together years of policy implementation initiatives to centre Southern perspectives of multilingualism within institutions still dominated by Eurocentric knowledge regimes. These perspectives advocate ontological and epistemic multiversality, centring marginalised African realities in the politics of knowledge production in HE.
This approach critiques Global South multilingual education policy as often reduced to compliance-driven, tick-box implementation, leaving deeper epistemic and intellectual potential unrealised. Implementation in epistemically rigid institutions should begin not with policy mandates or Northern-derived models, but with an ontological understanding of the institution itself. Drawing on Barnacle and Dall'Alba's ontological turn in HE, Heugh's emphasis on African languages as vehicles for knowledge production, and Maseko's call to centre African intellectual traditions, we argue for multilingualism as epistemically constitutive: not deliverable content, but a relational mode of being, embedded in existing practices and enabling transformation beyond compliance.
This relational mode of being takes different but complementary forms across both institutions, reflecting two Southern efforts toward a shared end. At Rhodes University, multilingualism is implemented through initiatives that reflect African perspectives, enhancing isiXhosa as an academic language and embedding inclusive multilingual pedagogies. At Nelson Mandela University, groundbreaking work documents and translates early isiXhosa intellectual and literary texts, recovering indigenous knowledge archives to diversify the academic canon, work now used in Historical Studies and other disciplines.
Together, these initiatives advance multilingualism for African universities, grounding knowledge production in African epistemologies, languages, and intellectual traditions moving beyond compliance toward transformative praxis, redefining teaching, learning, and research through epistemic inclusion and institutional reorientation.