Troubling circulating discourses on planet earth. Attending to complexities through a mobile-loitering gaze

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper highlights the erasures of normal-languaging and normal-diversities that mark the contemporary human condition. Its aim is to make visible North-centric assumptions regarding the nature of language by asking what, when, why and where language exists and how it plays out in global-local, analogue-digital timespaces. In particular, the study presented in this paper troubles the interrelated ‘webs-of-understandings’ regarding language, identity and culture that are embedded in both traditional concepts and neologisms. It illuminates the looped taken-for-grantedness of established and emerging discourses in the Social Sciences and Humanities. Drawing attention to boundary-markings in scholars languaging that have become naturalized, the paper critically appraises how conceptual epistemic hegemonies continue to flourish across northern-southern places-spaces. It thus, also discusses the relevance of such questions in doing research itself. Inspired by an overarching reflection on various ‘turns’ (like the multilingual-, boundary – and mobility-turns), this paper calls for moving from North-centric knowledge regimes to engaging analytically with global-centric epistemologies where gazing from a mobile-loitering stance is key. This means that this paper poses uncomfortable and revised analytical–methodological questions that potentially destabilize existing global/universal understandings related to language, identity and culture.