Abstract Applied linguistics has increasingly engaged with posthuman perspectives that challenge human-centered and representational understandings of language and learning. Among the diverse strands informing this turn, Deleuze and Guattari have been particularly influential, offering concepts such as assemblage, rhizome, becoming, affect, stuttering, minor literature, and smooth/striated space thought through an ontology of immanence. As these engagements continue to unfold, this conceptual review maps how Deleuzo–Guattarian concepts function across applied linguistics scholarship and how they open spaces for reconceptualizing language and learning. Across their diverse mobilizations, these concepts unsettle bounded and representational understandings, reimagining language and learning as relational events continually varying on a plane of immanence. Building on this cartography, I conceptualize the haecceitic encounter as an approach to inquiry on which language, learning, and teaching cease to be subjects or objects and instead become events, through which other problems and new concepts may emerge.
Abstract Applied linguistics has increasingly turned toward trauma, yet traumatized individuals typically enter research as those to be known rather than those who know. What if the researcher studying trauma is herself a survivor? In this feminist autoethnography, I examine how my lived experience of gender-based violence propelled me toward research on language and violence and shaped the questions I asked, the meanings I perceived, and the knowledge I produced. As I trace how silence, dissociation, helplessness, and anger became entangled with my research trajectory, I show how they became epistemically productive rather than disruptive: my affective proximity to violence and trauma sensitized me to forms of agency under constraint, the linguistic construction of harm and resistance, and the embodied force of language in ways that might otherwise remain less perceptible. Research, in turn, became a site of meaning-making, agency, and healing. Bringing feminist epistemologies into current applied linguistic discussions of autoethnography, epistemic injustice, and decolonial knowledge production, I argue for feminist autoethnography as an embodied and affective mode of inquiry through which survivor-researchers can become not merely objects of knowledge but legitimate producers of knowledge.
Abstract Drawing on a longitudinal ethnographic study at an Australian Aboriginal Playgroup in Western Australia , this article calls for a shift from passive revitalization of Aboriginal languages to active lived reclamation language programs that sustain the everyday, intergenerational language use within Aboriginal communities. Active lived reclamation of Aboriginal languages refers to Aboriginal community-driven processes and practices to bring the endangered languages back into daily institutional and interpersonal contexts. In doing so, active lived reclamation integrates the framework, First Languaging , which refers to languaging practices that First Nations people embody by weaving together First Knowledge systems, along with their Indigenous language and semiotic resources into their daily communicative practices. First Languaging , in this sense, serves not only as resistance to dominant monolingual ideologies but also as an advocacy for community-embedded, transformative form of language education.
Abstract This paper is an autoethnographic account of our journey as parents, language activists, researchers and teacher educators in achieving anti-racist language policy change at two historically White primary schools in South Africa. The paper is situated within the critical ethnography of language policy and draws on the coloniality of language including Anglonormativity as well as Kosonen and Benson’s (2021. Bringing non-dominant languages into education systems: Change from above, from below, from the side—or a combination? In Carol Benson & Kimmo Kosonen (eds.), Language issues in comparative education II: Policy and practice in multilingual education based on non-dominant languages. Leiden & Boston: Brill) framework of language policy change from above-below-side. We describe briefly the socio-historical and political context in which policy change took place, including university student protest movements and a social media campaign focused on experiences of racism in historically White schools. The paper offers first-hand accounts from parent activists who are also language policy researchers and were involved in the process of language policy revision at the two schools, influencing policy as parents and as “side” actors (Brown 2021. Jumping, sliding, and creating shared spaces “from the side”: Reflections on Võro language education in Estonia. In Carol Benson & Kimmo Kosonen (eds.), Language issues in comparative education II: Policy and practice in multilingual education based on non-dominant languages . Leiden & Boston: Brill). Processes that moved from activism to language policy revision at the two schools and the conditions which supported and/or prevented this will be compared and contrasted. Our paper illuminates the complex, contested process of moving from ideological critique and advocacy to enacting sustained anti-racist language policy change. It also expands theorising of grassroots, anti-racist language policy development in the global South.
Abstract Language ideologies have been widely examined in applied linguistics, yet less attention has been paid to how ideological awareness informs advocacy and transformative action in language education. This introductory article frames the contributions to this special issue by conceptualizing advocacy as a glocally situated, relational, and action-oriented process through which educators, researchers, communities, and policymakers respond to linguistic inequities. Synthesizing six studies conducted across diverse educational contexts, we highlight how advocacy is enacted through community engagement, teacher agency, institutional negotiation, and critical reflexivity. Building on these contributions, we outline an advocacy-oriented pedagogical perspective that extends critical language awareness toward transformative praxis, clarify key conceptual terms, and identify directions for future research on advocacy in language education committed to equity and social justice.
