Sumud Pedagogy as Linguistic Citizenship: A World-Building Semiotics Where Languages Are Used “Otherwise”

Abstract

This paper responds to a recent call to develop a sociolinguistics of potentiality by examining how semiotic and multilingual practices may participate in processes of ethical world-building. It looks at contexts where minoritized language speakers who are subjected to colonial government use colonial languages (e.g., English) along with other semiotic resources to create spaces of potentiality where alternative social projects embody complex interplays of hope and despair. Employing the Southern notion of sumud pedagogy as a localized application of Stroud's notion of Linguistic Citizenship, I examine how Palestinian Arabic-speaking youth in Israel employ multilingual and semiotic resources to deconstruct social constructs and reject imposed subjectivities. Combining my voice as a Palestinian sociolinguist in Israel with the voices of Palestinian youth from Haifa, I illustrate how a horizontal movement from one language to another enables multilingual-minoritized speakers to disrupt English hegemony through constructing new modes of being, belonging, and knowing.