This dissertation investigates how feminist and LGBTQ undergraduate students involved in activism on UC Davis use language to construct their identities, focusing on two gender and sexuality-based resource centers (the women's center and LGBTQ center). It seeks to address two research questions. First, how do cisgender, trans, and nonbinary…

This essay explores the language of social protest in two geographic and diasporic locations in the Caribbean (Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic) with long and ongoing histories of colonialism and imperialism. We analyze social media and digital mobilizing to examine how, in the midst of social protest, linguistic and semiotic tools indexed…

This paper probes alternative meanings and processes for decolonizing English that arise from the particular geopolitical histories and identities of Hong Kong and engagement with political and translingual activism. I illustrate the positioning and tension between English, 'Kongish' (a mix of English and localized linguistic resources in Hong…

This article discusses the intersection of language choice, identity and online political activism in the context of the 2011 Syrian uprising by bringing together the notions of "entextualization" and "chronotopes." The data is drawn from a longitudinal analysis of two Syrian dissidents' Facebook pages between 2010 and 2012 as…

Unmooring language is a proposal for a language-based social justice concept that aims to go beyond national and local epistemologies of language in place. This article contributes to current discussions in critical sociolinguistics about how to conceptualize language bearing in mind the primacy of mobility and fluidity. Drawing on folk…

The present and future situation of the Celtic languages is intrinsically interesting. Two are moribund, while the other four possess varying degrees of strength and institutional support. From the weakest to the strongest, however, there are pressing concerns about stability and maintenance, to say nothing of possible revitalisation. All are…

This Perspectives article proposes a renewed vision of teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) through a translanguaging (TL) stance, grounded in critical sociolinguistic inquiry and embodied practice. A TL theory of language asserts an activist agenda to dismantle mono/lingualism, inviting a more dynamic and expansive view of…

This study examines the discourses of educators in Pakistan through the lens of Critical Multilingual Language Awareness (CMLA) to demonstrate how their lack of critical awareness reinforces and reproduces subtractive language policies and practices in a diverse multilingual setting. CMLA stands for the understanding of the social, political and…

Bilingual education policy in Singapore permits the students learn both English as working language and mother tongues, such as Chinese, as L2 anchoring to culture heritage. Starting from historical and sociolinguistic reasons, this paper is intended to provide a panoramic view of Chinese education in Singapore, clarify and compare Chinese…

Pahari speakers form one of the largest ethnic non-European diasporas in Britain. Despite their size and over 60 years of settlement on British shores, the diaspora is shrouded by confusion regarding official and unofficial categorisations, remaining largely misunderstood as a collective with a shared ethnolinguistic memory. This has had…

This article engages with Archer's call to further research on reflexivity and social change under conditions of late modernity (2007, 2010, 2012) from the perspective of existing work on reflexive discourse in the language disciplines (Silverstein 1976, Lucy 1993). Drawing from a linguistic ethnography of the networked trajectories of a group of…

Despite its multilingual heritage, the USA has a history of linguistic intolerance. Arizona, in the country's desert Southwest, is decidedly anti-bilingual although it has significant non-English-speaking groups, especially Spanish-speaking Mexicans/Mexican-Americans and indigenous groups such as the Navajo, Hopi and Yaqui tribes, among many…

In recent years there has been growing awareness of the need to support primary and secondary students in developing competencies for active and participatory citizenship. Among the essential competencies identified in a recent study of politically active teachers was the ability to expand ideas into arguments. This article reports on the early…