Papers by Caroline Kerfoot
International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2024
In writing of the economies of abandonment of late liberal globalization, Elizabeth Povinelli als... more In writing of the economies of abandonment of late liberal globalization, Elizabeth Povinelli also points to the potential for SPACES OF OTHERWISE, those spaces of "curiosity and risk, potentiality and exhaustion" which open possibilities for more ethical becoming and the emergence of new forms of sociality and social life (2012. The will to be otherwise/the effort of endurance. South Atlantic Quarterly 111(3). 453-475: 454). This Special Issue aims to contribute to an expanded, southernized sociology of language and sociolinguistics by exploring what role sociolinguistics can play in thinking through and with these spaces. It brings together a set of papers from southern contexts rarely represented in sociolinguistic research (Crimea, Mozambique, Palestine) spaces of grim endurance where suffering is chronic rather than catastrophic, and a study of the metaphorical south in the north, where migration imperatives land people in situations of precarity, in this case, Sweden. An illuminating invited commentary offers a novel perspective on the key theme QUASI-EVENT threading across all the papers. In exploring the construction of spaces of otherwise, authors use the southern concept of Linguistic Citizenship that construes language as a site of political struggle. This framing offers an alternative approach to a politics of language where potentialities for otherwise can be attended to. The papers show how, through acts of Linguistic Citizenship, participants bring potential worlds into existence, however fleetingly. From the chronicling of these 'quasi-events' emerges a sociolinguistics of potentiality, one which contributes to an understanding of what enables some emergent forms of life to endure and others not. The sociolinguistics of potentiality is an invitation to listen beyond and within 'noise' to those who inhabit This Special Issue is dedicated to the memory of our dear friend and colleague, Manuel Guissemo.
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South African Journal of Science, 2024
This Invited Commentary discusses how language-in-education policies and practices that embrace m... more This Invited Commentary discusses how language-in-education policies and practices that embrace multilingualism and multilingual learning can promote epistemic justice, constructing more equitable, just, and ethical conditions for learning. The findings considered are significant in that they illuminate sustained multilingual knowledge-building among peers, showing how these processes enhanced disciplinary learning, legitimated all learners as producers of knowledge, and simultaneously constructed a decolonial ethics of knowing. In so doing, they challenge persistent, colonial linguistic and epistemic hierarchies of value as well as longstanding assumptions about the difficulties and costs of implementing mother-tongue-based multilingual education across the curriculum.
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Applied Linguistics, 2023
In this study of a postcolonial school, we expand understandings of epistemic justice from the pe... more In this study of a postcolonial school, we expand understandings of epistemic justice from the perspective of language, addressing issues of knowledge , understanding, and participation in communicative practices. We suggest that monoglossic language-in-education policies constitute a form of epistemic injustice by diminishing learners' ability to make epistemic contributions, a capacity central to human value. We further suggest that translanguaging in formal school settings generally promotes epistemic access rather than epistemic justice, leaving value hierarchies and relations of knowing unchanged. Conversely, this study presents linguistic ethnographic data from a three-year project where learners could choose their language of learning to Grade 6 and use all languages in subject classrooms. We analyse how a Grade 6 learner used laminated, multilingual stances to construct others as knowers, negotiate epistemic authority, and promote solidarity. We argue that she thereby constructed new decolonial relations of knowing and being. Moreover, the shift from monolingual to multilingual episteme, which substantially improved performance overall, enabled new social, epistemic, and moral orders to emerge from below, laying the basis for greater epistemic justice.
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Multilingual Margins, 2020
This Special Issue continues the decolonial task of making absences present: of bringing into the... more This Special Issue continues the decolonial task of making absences present: of bringing into the frame the linguistic and other knowledges traditionally excluded from educational policy and curricula, and pointing the way to more ethical and equitable forms of knowledge exchange among community members, learners, teachers, researchers, and state actors.
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Language and Decoloniality in Higher Education: Reclaiming Voices from the South , 2021
This chapter explores in what ways language-and multilingualism in particular-can be rethought in... more This chapter explores in what ways language-and multilingualism in particular-can be rethought in order to further epistemic justice. In order to situate the question of language in a broader decolonial project, it starts by critically reviewing three main strategies proposed for epistemic injustice in South African Higher Education over the last thirty years: scaffolding into colonial metropolitan languages, intellectualization and/or endogenization, and the use of translanguaging. It argues that the role of language/multilingualism in such strategies is compromised by the 'coloniality of language' (Veronelli 2015), that is, understandings of language inherited from the colonial project. It further advances the notion of Linguistic Citizenship (LC) (Stroud 2001, 2017) as a way of disengaging from coloniality. LC informs epistemic justice by focusing on the potential carried by language(s) for ontological refashioning of selves, socialities, and concomitant knowledges, thereby offering a way to rethink multilingualism as a transformative epistemology and methodology of difference.
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Entangled Discourses: South-North Orders of Visibility, 2017
Constructing invisibility : The discursive erasure of a black immigrant learner in South Africa
... more Constructing invisibility : The discursive erasure of a black immigrant learner in South Africa
This chapter aims to contribute to an epistemology of the global South (Santos 2012) by pointing to invisibilized processes of social production as a necessary starting point for greater ethical engagement and mutual intelligibility. It builds on research on the co-construction of micro-interactional identities and macro-social categories to analyse the gradual invisibilisation of the linguistic and epistemic resources of a 13-year-old Cameroonian immigrant in diasporic and educational sites in Cape Town, South Africa. Invisibilisation is understood as an interdiscursive process achieved through a set of indexical phenomena including the operation of dual indexicality (Kulick 2003), tied into circulating discourses of belonging and constrained by institutional frameworks. Drawing on a four year Linguistic Ethnography, the chapter draws attention to the ways in which discursive processes construct orders of visibility, both momentary and of longer duration, which in turn rework local orders of indexicality and associated hierarchies of ‘race’, language, and ethnicity.
References
Kulick, D. 2003. ‘No’. Language & Communication 23 (2): 139–51.
Santos, B. de S. 2012. ‘Public Sphere and Epistemologies of the South’. Africa Development 37(1): 43–67.
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Applied Linguistics, Sep 20, 2016
This article engages with Bourdieu’s notion of field as a ‘space of play’ to explore what happens... more This article engages with Bourdieu’s notion of field as a ‘space of play’ to explore what happens to the educational field and the linguistic regimes operating within it in a site in which new discourses and practices of identity, language, ‘race’, and ethnicity become entangled with local economies of meaning. The context is a primary school in a low-income neighbourhood in Cape Town, South Africa. We draw on multilingual classroom and playground data from observations, interviews, and audio-recorded peer interactions among Grade 6 learners to illuminate the strategic mobilization of linguistic repertoires in encounters across difference: as identity-building resources and as means of shaping new interaction orders, restructuring hierarchies of value, subverting indexicalities, and sometimes resignifying racial categories. We further draw attention to a set of circumstances in which local actors have the potential to change, not only the rules of the game, but the game itself.
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Introduction to C. Kerfoot and K. Hyltenstam (eds.) Entangled discourses: South-North Orders of V... more Introduction to C. Kerfoot and K. Hyltenstam (eds.) Entangled discourses: South-North Orders of Visibility. Routledge Critical Studies in Multilingualism. New York: Routledge
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Journal of Education, 2008
This paper explores the ways in which adult education can contribute to increased agency in devel... more This paper explores the ways in which adult education can contribute to increased agency in development and under what conditions. It draws on a study of an educator training programme in the North ...
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Language and Education, Dec 25, 2014
This article is the guest editors' introduction to the special issue ‘Language in epistemic acces... more This article is the guest editors' introduction to the special issue ‘Language in epistemic access: Mobilising multilingualism and literacy development for more equitable education in South Africa’. The issue offers complementary perspectives on improving epistemic access for all learners but especially those whose home language does not match the language of learning. Plüddemann examines the complex configurations of ideological and structural factors in South African language policy processes and the diverse positions taken up by teachers in response. Makalela argues that a methodology that encourages translanguaging can overcome historical separations between groups and promote transformative pedagogies. Probyn points to the importance of principled ‘pedagogical translanguaging’ in the mediation of secondary school science knowledge. Kerfoot and Van Heerden illustrate the substantial benefits of Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) genre-based pedagogies for second or additional language writing in the middle years. White, Mammone, and Caldwell in Australia offer evidence that similar benefits were maintained over six years for learners who faced both socio-economic and linguistic disadvantage in schools. Finally Cummins and Heugh offer expansive perspectives on the issue. The editors argue that dynamic plurilingual pedagogies can be allied with the explicit scaffolding of genre-based pedagogies to help redress asymmetries in epistemic access.
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STELLENBOSCH PAPERS IN LINGUISTICS PLUS, 2016
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Struggles for Multilingualism and Linguistic Citizenship
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Language and Education, Jan 4, 2015
Twenty years after democracy, the legacy of apartheid and hitherto unmet challenges of resourcing... more Twenty years after democracy, the legacy of apartheid and hitherto unmet challenges of resourcing and teacher development are reflected in a severely inequitable and underperforming education system. This paper focuses on second language writing in the middle years of schooling when 80% of learners face a double challenge: to move from ‘common sense’ discourses to the more abstract, specialised discourses of school subjects and, simultaneously, to a new language of learning, in this case English. It describes an intervention using a systemic functional linguistic (SFL) genre-based pedagogy involving 72 learners and two teachers in a low socio-economic neighbourhood of Cape Town. Using an SFL analytical framework, we analyse learners’ development in the information report genre. All learners in the intervention group made substantial gains in control of staging, lexis, and key linguistic features. We argue that the scaffolding provided by SFL genre-based pedagogies together with their explicit focus on textual and linguistic features offer a means of significantly enhancing epistemic access to the specialised language of school subjects, particularly for additional language learners. Findings have implications for language-in-education policy, teacher education, curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment in multilingual classrooms.
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Linguistics and Education, 2013
ABSTRACT The language policy of the University of the Western Cape (2003) reflects the tempered t... more ABSTRACT The language policy of the University of the Western Cape (2003) reflects the tempered traces of historically and politically charged negotiations. We argue that a reinterpretation of ‘policy failure’ as responsive engagement with complex new forms of linguistic and social diversity can lead to a critical rethinking of the nature of multilingualism and language policy in a South African tertiary education sector in transformation. We submit that university language policies need to consider (a) how the complex linguistic and non-linguistic repertoires of students can be mobilised for transformative discipline-specific curricula and pedagogies, and (b) the concept of multilingualism both as a resource and a transformative epistemology and methodology of diversity. We suggest a policy development process that moves from micro-interaction to macro-structure, tracing processes of resemiotisation, interrogating legitimised representational conventions, and reshaping institutional practices and perceptions. We discuss the implications for register formation and for broader epistemological access and ownership.
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Journal of Education, 2008
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This paper explores in what ways language – and multilingualism in particular – can be rethought ... more This paper explores in what ways language – and multilingualism in particular – can be rethought in order to further epistemic justice. In order to situate the question of language in a broader decolonial project, it starts by critically reviewing three main strategies that have been proposed to address epistemic injustice in South African Higher Education over the last thirty years: scaffolding into colonial metropolitan languages, intellectualization and/or endogenization, and the use of translanguaging. It argues that the role of language/multilingualism in such strategies is compromised by the ‘coloniality of language’ (Veronelli 2015), that is, understandings of language inherited from the colonial project. It further advances the notion of Linguistic Citizenship (LC) (Stroud 2001, 2017) as a way of disengaging from coloniality. LC informs epistemic justice by focusing on the potential carried by language(s) for ontological refashioning of selves, socialities, and concomitant knowledges, thereby offering a way to rethink multilingualism as a transformative epistemology and methodology of difference.
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This study aims to contribute to the growing body of knowledge on the circumstances under which a... more This study aims to contribute to the growing body of knowledge on the circumstances under which adult education, in particular adult basic education, can support and occasionally initiate participa ...
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This paper analyses some of the discursive interactions through which a 13-year-old francophone C... more This paper analyses some of the discursive interactions through which a 13-year-old francophone Cameroonian student attempts to construct new social and academic identities in Cape Town, South Africa. In so doing, it illustrates a process of invisibilisation in which her affective and epistemic stances are consistently disbarred and through which linguistic features of her repertoire and other material markers become enregistered as ethnically and linguistically ‘other’. Through these processes, while she becomes marked and highly visible as ‘other’, her identities as competent linguistic, social and academic performer are erased. Here Kulick’s (2003, 2005) concept of dual indexicality is used to point to ‘absent presences’ that render certain subject positions impossible.
The paper builds on research on the situated co-construction of micro-interactional identities and macro-social categories such as ethnicity and race (Bucholtz 1999; Ochs, 1992; Rampton 2006). It draws on a five year Linguistic Ethnography in two Cape Town schools, using observational, interview, and audio-recorded interactional data among a group of Cameroonian immigrant youngsters and their peers in classrooms, playgrounds and home settings. Through its combination of Interactional Sociolinguistics and ethnography, LE enables an examination of the ways in which power asymmetries are constructed through interaction and individuals may thereby be rendered unable to construct or negotiate desired identities and identifications.
References
Bucholtz, M., 1999. You da man: Narrating the racial other in the production of white masculinity. Journal of Sociolinguistics 3, 443–460.
Kulick, D., 2005. The importance of what gets left out. Discourse Studies 7, 615–624.
Kulick, D., 2003. No. Language & Communication 23, 139–151.
Ochs, E., 1992. Indexing gender, in: Duranti, A., Goodwin, C. (Eds.), Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 335–358.
Rampton, B., 2006. Language in Late Modernity: Interaction in an Urban School. Cambridge University Press.
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Research note (ftc, Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics Plus): A brief reflection on two decades o... more Research note (ftc, Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics Plus): A brief reflection on two decades of work in NGOs and with trade unions in adult basic education and development in South Africa from 1982 to 2001, engaging with issues of voice and representation, reflexivity and whiteness.
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Papers by Caroline Kerfoot
This chapter aims to contribute to an epistemology of the global South (Santos 2012) by pointing to invisibilized processes of social production as a necessary starting point for greater ethical engagement and mutual intelligibility. It builds on research on the co-construction of micro-interactional identities and macro-social categories to analyse the gradual invisibilisation of the linguistic and epistemic resources of a 13-year-old Cameroonian immigrant in diasporic and educational sites in Cape Town, South Africa. Invisibilisation is understood as an interdiscursive process achieved through a set of indexical phenomena including the operation of dual indexicality (Kulick 2003), tied into circulating discourses of belonging and constrained by institutional frameworks. Drawing on a four year Linguistic Ethnography, the chapter draws attention to the ways in which discursive processes construct orders of visibility, both momentary and of longer duration, which in turn rework local orders of indexicality and associated hierarchies of ‘race’, language, and ethnicity.
References
Kulick, D. 2003. ‘No’. Language & Communication 23 (2): 139–51.
Santos, B. de S. 2012. ‘Public Sphere and Epistemologies of the South’. Africa Development 37(1): 43–67.
The paper builds on research on the situated co-construction of micro-interactional identities and macro-social categories such as ethnicity and race (Bucholtz 1999; Ochs, 1992; Rampton 2006). It draws on a five year Linguistic Ethnography in two Cape Town schools, using observational, interview, and audio-recorded interactional data among a group of Cameroonian immigrant youngsters and their peers in classrooms, playgrounds and home settings. Through its combination of Interactional Sociolinguistics and ethnography, LE enables an examination of the ways in which power asymmetries are constructed through interaction and individuals may thereby be rendered unable to construct or negotiate desired identities and identifications.
References
Bucholtz, M., 1999. You da man: Narrating the racial other in the production of white masculinity. Journal of Sociolinguistics 3, 443–460.
Kulick, D., 2005. The importance of what gets left out. Discourse Studies 7, 615–624.
Kulick, D., 2003. No. Language & Communication 23, 139–151.
Ochs, E., 1992. Indexing gender, in: Duranti, A., Goodwin, C. (Eds.), Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 335–358.
Rampton, B., 2006. Language in Late Modernity: Interaction in an Urban School. Cambridge University Press.
This chapter aims to contribute to an epistemology of the global South (Santos 2012) by pointing to invisibilized processes of social production as a necessary starting point for greater ethical engagement and mutual intelligibility. It builds on research on the co-construction of micro-interactional identities and macro-social categories to analyse the gradual invisibilisation of the linguistic and epistemic resources of a 13-year-old Cameroonian immigrant in diasporic and educational sites in Cape Town, South Africa. Invisibilisation is understood as an interdiscursive process achieved through a set of indexical phenomena including the operation of dual indexicality (Kulick 2003), tied into circulating discourses of belonging and constrained by institutional frameworks. Drawing on a four year Linguistic Ethnography, the chapter draws attention to the ways in which discursive processes construct orders of visibility, both momentary and of longer duration, which in turn rework local orders of indexicality and associated hierarchies of ‘race’, language, and ethnicity.
References
Kulick, D. 2003. ‘No’. Language & Communication 23 (2): 139–51.
Santos, B. de S. 2012. ‘Public Sphere and Epistemologies of the South’. Africa Development 37(1): 43–67.
The paper builds on research on the situated co-construction of micro-interactional identities and macro-social categories such as ethnicity and race (Bucholtz 1999; Ochs, 1992; Rampton 2006). It draws on a five year Linguistic Ethnography in two Cape Town schools, using observational, interview, and audio-recorded interactional data among a group of Cameroonian immigrant youngsters and their peers in classrooms, playgrounds and home settings. Through its combination of Interactional Sociolinguistics and ethnography, LE enables an examination of the ways in which power asymmetries are constructed through interaction and individuals may thereby be rendered unable to construct or negotiate desired identities and identifications.
References
Bucholtz, M., 1999. You da man: Narrating the racial other in the production of white masculinity. Journal of Sociolinguistics 3, 443–460.
Kulick, D., 2005. The importance of what gets left out. Discourse Studies 7, 615–624.
Kulick, D., 2003. No. Language & Communication 23, 139–151.
Ochs, E., 1992. Indexing gender, in: Duranti, A., Goodwin, C. (Eds.), Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 335–358.
Rampton, B., 2006. Language in Late Modernity: Interaction in an Urban School. Cambridge University Press.
The book brings together an exciting mix of voices of both established and new scholars in multilingualism and diversity from a range of social, political, and historical contexts and provides coverage of areas previously underrepresented in current research on multilingualism, globalization, and mobility, including Brazil, South Africa, Australia, East Timor, Wallis and Mayotte, Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau. This volume is key reading for scholars, researchers, and graduate students in multilingualism, globalisation, sociolinguistics, mobility and development studies, applied linguistics, and language and education policy.