尤物视频

Special Issue Guest Editors

Meg Holden, 尤物视频; Annika Airas, 尤物视频; Kamala Todd, 尤物视频; Cedissia About, Lab鈥橴rba, Universit茅 Gustav Eiffel; Salla Jokela, Tampere University; Pascale Elbaz, Institut Sup茅rieur d'Interpr茅tation et de Traduction; Majken Taftager Larsen, Roskilde University

Contact: saga_research@sfu.ca

Overview of Special Issue

This proposed special issue of City, Culture and Society addresses the topic of translanguaging and urban sustainability transitions from interdisciplinary perspectives that may include urban sociolinguistics, social learning, critical urban studies and geography, decolonial studies, sustainability studies, cultural studies, and more. For a complete overview of the conceptual understanding and research directions being pursued by the SAGA research team, please see our Green Paper, SAGA Snapshot, or project webpage.

Rationale, Justification and Significance

With a focus on languages and sustainability, this call for abstracts invites research contributions that add to understanding of social change by examining the movement across languages in discourse, landscapes, and texts. We are interested in exploring how diverse language use, terminologies, and skills contribute to urban sustainability transitions and culturally relevant change. In addition, we seek to deepen our understanding of the value of language superdiversity in cities and its potential for fostering meaningful and intentional urban change.

The term translanguaging represents a newly evolving understanding of language use and language learning. It has recent origins in studies of applied sociolinguistics and pedagogy.

As a sociolinguistic theory of language practice, translanguaging emphasizes the process-based nature of learning and using language as a creative and critical effort that occurs in particular sociopolitical contexts (Li 2018). Within pedagogy, the term emerged to describe teaching methods that make dynamic and integrated use of different known languages to resolve questions and build knowledge of unfamiliar languages (Williams 1994).

Instead of viewing language learning as the acquisition of a language as a finished product to be studied to perfection, the notion of translanguaging puts an emphasis on language making and use as continually in process (Ortega y Gasset 1957, Maturana and Varela 1980, Garc铆a 2009). In this way of thinking, human beings鈥� knowledge of language cannot cleanly be separated from other sets, structures and processes of human relationships and interactions. This puts questions of language use in a key position of power that deserves to be recognized and interrogated when we seek to understand social conditions and crises, including the solutions we recognize, and those that we discredit, due in part to the language we use.

By contrast with the conventional approach to language learning, a translanguaging approach neither considers monolingualism the norm nor does it consider new language acquisition to be a switching out of one language to abide within another鈥檚 codebook (Mazak 2016). Instead, intentional language learning is seen as a process of becoming something other than monolingual. Translanguaging puts an emphasis on language making and use as continually in process. In this way of thinking, multilingualism is not only about gaining mastery of a new language; insight may come from incomplete and truncated usages and knowledges of different languages, and from growing and interrogating one鈥檚 ability to engage more effectively in contexts with a richer array of communication competencies. Heteroglossia, code-switching, and semi-speakers are new terms used to refer to the breaking down of old-fashioned expectations about partial knowledge of languages. We affirm the view that partial knowledge of languages is not merely a barrier to understanding, but is a prevalent, complex phenomenon to be considered carefully.

Within critical pedagogy and sociolinguistic studies, translanguaging is also applied to understanding and transforming the social construction of educational and other social systems, structures and practices. This approach understands language as 鈥渁 multi-scalar organization of processes that enables the bodily and the situated to interact with situation-transcending cultural-historical dynamics and practices鈥� (Thibault 2017: 78). Where teachers, students, and language speakers are viewed as challenging and reinventing socially constructed language codes and systems, structures and practices, they are also opening up possible transformations of orders of discourse and power to serve social

justice and linguistic human rights (Garc铆a and Li 2014). Translanguaging can be thought of as an instinct to use one鈥檚 idiolect or full linguistic repertoire to reach desired ends in any given sociopolitical context (Li 2018). This creative, strategic instinct creates translanguaging space, which Li (2018: 23) defines as: a space that is created by and for translanguaging practices, and a space where language users break down the ideologically laden dichotomies between the macro and the micro, the societal and the individual, and the social and the psychological through interaction. In this way, taking a translanguaging approach entails the study of languages in use as a process of knowledge construction and shaping, including cognitive and affective engagement that reach beyond language acquisition and mastery of codes to culture, ideology, politics, subjectivity, connections to place, memory, experience, and feelings. It is therefore an area of study that demands attention across social sciences beyond linguistics and pedagogy. Beyond the educational system and formal study of linguistics to other social systems and structures, consideration of translanguaging has the potential to recognize ongoing efforts to 鈥渞emake the world through language鈥� (Mazak 2016: 5-6).

This is where the relationship with the contemporary predicament with respect to the failures of urban sustainability transition comes in. Farley and Smith (2020: 3) openly question whether there is something inherent to the term sustainability that inhibits meaningful or transformational social change to emerge from sustainability efforts in diverse contexts: 鈥淭he term sustainability has become a familiar part of our social lexicon yet something keeps this concept from bringing about transformational change.鈥� Other researchers, taking a more pragmatic approach to social change, dedicate their attentions to turning the tide of inaction to generate more sustainable results from sustainability efforts. Van Poeck et al. (2022) refer to the need for efforts to increase the 鈥渋nclusive action competence鈥� of sustainability initiatives. The focus of this special issue on translanguaging identifies the potential of attention to language resources and languaging skills to break the cycle of inaction on sustainability principles, goals and efforts in multicultural and Indigenous urban contexts. We suggest that such attention is an underexamined route to sustainability transition and transformational change.

Language skills and resources constitute accessible pathways to the deeper cultural values that underlie the continued popularity of sustainable development, although they may be often left unstated. Nikulina and colleagues provide an example of how the UN Sustainable Development Goals require nations to work together, while encountering challenges and possibilities within the multilingualism that is an essential part of today鈥檚 societies (Nikulina et al. 2019: 3).

From a non-cynical view, at least part of the international appeal of sustainable development is rooted in the consistency of the sentiments of sustainability across diverse human cultures. Pragmatically stated, communication and persuasive justification of proposed changes is needed across languages and cultures if desired changes are to be achieved. The need recognized by the IPCC in its latest synthesis for inclusion, coordination, communication, leadership, and collective action to advance transformative adaptation implies a need for more attention to the pluri- and multilingual urban reality (Dodman et al. 2022). As such, cities are key sites where a good life within planetary boundaries needs to be rendered a possibility. It would be at least foolish to attempt this without drawing upon and across the resources of every language, and learning from the leadership and cultural knowledge of much more diverse and expansive communities of people. At worst, it would be disastrous, as cities concentrate not only human development opportunity but also structural and operational vulnerabilities that are differentiated in space, and across language and culture.

Suggestive list of research questions and directions

• What are the relationships between ideas about cities and sustainability, in the words used to define urban material practices, in different languages and locations?
• How do particular social actors create and transform the terms that describe and designate urban realities, in relation to sustainability objectives and visions?
• What concepts appear in terms that are shared among different cities and languages, and what concepts are unique to specific cities and languages?
• What changes in meaning and usage of key terms across languages, and in different cities, are meaningful to sustainability transitions and sustainable futures?
• What are the effects of English neologisms in sustainability and climate discourse? What are their ties to ancient and non-English wisdom?
• How do different expert, community, and student learning settings and efforts affect translanguaging efforts and contributions to urban sustainability transitions?
• What terms and concepts defy direct translation? What can be done to improve shared understanding across languages and cultures, in these cases?
• How can we facilitate and smooth the passage between languages in multilingual discourse about sustainable urbanism?
• What is the effectiveness of the translanguaging approach in terms of respect for the language-specific understandings of concepts and practices of sustainable cities?
• What opportunities exist for resistance to English domination as the language of research and science in sustainability? What are the trends and counter-trends?
• What role exists for the use of Indigenous languages and principles in formal and informal urban sustainability and urban development agendas, including place names, urban design, laws, rights and regulations, and stories?
• How are Indigenous language revitalization efforts in urban contexts returning languages to the land in urban spaces and practices?
• How is moving across languages experienced among Indigenous language speakers participating in urban sustainability efforts?
• What windows to understanding sustainability transition are opened by attention to different languages in context? What windows have been closed by the inverse?
• Can we change sustainability transition dynamics through attention to translanguaging dynamics? Are there trade offs or drawbacks?
• Can attention to translanguaging in sustainability transitions spaces explain part of the meaning and motivation for action toward urban sustainability transition?
• Can translanguaging efforts create discursive potential to generate or transform sustainability agendas?
• How can greater attention to language and culture in the city mitigate sustainability risk; and act as a key means to remove barriers to sustainability transition?

References

Dodman, D., B. Hayward, M. Pelling, V. Castan Broto, W. Chow, E. Chu, R. Dawson, L. Khirfan, T. McPhearson, A. Prakash, Y. Zheng, and G. Ziervogel. 2022: Cities, Settlements and Key Infrastructure. In: Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [H.-O. P枚rtner, D.C. Roberts, M. Tignor, E.S. Poloczanska, K. Mintenbeck, A. Alegr铆a, M. Craig, S. Langsdorf, S. L枚schke, V. M枚ller, A. Okem, B. Rama (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK and New York, NY, USA, pp. 907鈥�1040, .

Farley, H. and Smith, Z. 2020. Sustainability: If it鈥檚 everything, is it nothing? Routledge.

Garc铆a, O. 2009. Bilingual education in the 21st century: A global perspective. Wiley/Blackwell.

Garc铆a, O. & Li, W. 2014. Translanguaging: language, bilingualism and education. Palgrave Macmillan.

Li, W. 2018. Translanguaging as a practical theory of language. Applied Linguistics 39(1): 9-30.

Maturana, H.R. & Varela, F.J. 1980. Autopoiesis and Cognition: the realization of the living. Kluwer.

Mazak, C.M. 2016. Introduction: theorizing translanguaging practices in higher education. In C.M. Mazak & K.S. Carroll (Eds.) Translanguaging in Higher Education: Beyond monolingual ideologies (pp. 1-10). Multilingual Matters.

Nikulina, V., Larson Lindal, J., Baumann, H., Simon, D., Ny, H. 2019. Lost in translation: A framework for analysing complexity of co-production settings in relation to epistemic communities, linguistic diversities and culture. Futures 113: Article 102442.

Ortega y Gasset, J. 1957. Man and people. W. W. Norton & Co.

Thibault, P. J. 2017. The Reflexivity of Human Languaging and Nigel Love鈥檚 Two Orders of Language. Language Sciences 61: 74 鈥� 85.

van Poeck, K., Vandenplas, E. and Ostman, L. 2022. 鈥淭eaching action-oriented knowledge on sustainability issues鈥�, Environmental Education Research.

Williams, C. 1994. Arfarniad o Ddulliau Dysgu ac Addysgu yng Nghyd-destun Addysg Uwchradd Ddwyieithog, [An evaluation of teaching and learning methods in the context of bilingual secondary education]. Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Wales, Bangor.