Language Policies and (Dis)Citizenship

Rights, Access, Pedagogies

Edited by Prof. Vaidehi Ramanathan

Publication date:

07 August 2013

Publisher

Multilingual Matters

Dimensions:

210x148mm
6x8"

ISBN-13: 9781783090198

This volume explores the concept of 'citizenship', and argues that it should be understood both as a process of becoming and the ability to participate fully, rather than as a status that can be inherited, acquired, or achieved. From a courtroom in Bulawayo to a nursery in Birmingham, the authors use local contexts to foreground how the vulnerable, particularly those from minority language backgrounds, continue to be excluded, whilst offering a powerful demonstration of the potential for change offered by individual agency, resistance and struggle. In addressing questions such as 'under what local conditions does "dis-citizenship" happen?'; 'what role do language policies and pedagogic practices play?' and 'what kinds of margins and borders keep humans from fully participating'? The chapters in this volume shift the debate away from visas and passports to more uncertain and contested spaces of interpretation.

In this thought-provoking volume, Vaidehi Ramanathan and colleagues push forward the boundaries of research on language and citizenship, foregrounding human agency and the situated and processual nature of citizenship. The volume opens with a beautifully written, agenda-setting Introduction by Ramanathan and then, in the chapters that follow, we encounter detailed and illuminating accounts of the ways in which language practices are bound up with situated citizenship processes at work in different social and political contexts.