Perspectives on African Language Research in the Global South

Catalog description

The innovations and challenges of the Global South extend beyond an agenda that redresses exclusions. Rather, these are deep-seated challenges to the core tenets of language research as well as new directions for theories and practices on language research in the Global South in general. A renewal of southern epistemologies requires an understanding of the absences such knowledge implies. To engage with the transformative potential of non-Eurocentric thinking, the course explores the relevance of a decolonial imagination that makes it possible to envisage an alternative reality and justice that engenders"radical hope." Topics central to the course are the decolonization of research methods, feministic perspectives on African languages, Southern Multilingualisms and education, digitization of African cultural practices, indigeneity, an engagement with "Indigenous cosmovisions," and reinvented traditional concepts, such as ubuntu or sumac kawsay, that suggest that the formation of other worlds is feasible. These newly reinvented cosmovisions render it feasible to move beyond the limitations of Western-centric politics and knowledge production. The course is far more than a critique of the Global North's scholarship. It will cultivate a decolonial imagination, consequently producing African language knowledge with the South, and not on the South.