Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research

This edited volume addresses lacunae given the momentum translanguaging has already gained internationally in publications on school contexts for pupils aged 4 to 18. In this book, the epistemological shift enriches the educational landscape with a particular focus on higher education and research. The editors Bojsen, Daryai-Hansen, Holmen, and Risager together with 16 other contributing authors address dialogic, context-bound social power relations in different languages and regions of the world. In doing so, they distance themselves from the dominant monoglossia-oriented knowledge, i.e., the structuralist perception of a language, often embodied and deployed in universities, by instead offering compelling narratives to unravel the hidden and suppressed reality of bilinguals and the bilingual world. Thus, they promote multiperspectivity and coproduction of knowledge through the notions of symbolic competence (Kramsch, 2006), pluricultural capital (Zarate, 1998), centrifugal and centripetal vectors (Bakhtin, 1981), and forced and free poetics (Glissant, 1981). Presenting studies from the nano, micro, meso, and macro levels, the book reflects multiperspectivities by drawing on different data types in various languages. Most data reflects students’ experiences but teachers’ viewpoints and researchers’ perspectives are also represented. The book is well structured and sets the scene in explaining the sequence of chapters in addition to providing a concise genealogy of translanguaging and epistemological decentring. The volume includes studies focusing mainly on students’ beliefs and language practices and researchers’ perspectives in line with translanguaging from different contexts. Finally, the editors bring together critical insights from students’ testimonies along with chapter abstracts at the end of the book. In Chapter 1, Bojsen, Daryai-Hansen, Holmen, and Risager situate the nexus of translanguaging and epistemological decentring after a concise genealogy of these two constructs by highlighting the transformational potential of translanguaging beyond a theory of language and a pedagogical stance. Moreover, they invite the reader to employ a different epistemological frame after having presented a brief overview of the chapters through Glissant’s notion of Lieu (place), which is understood as social locality. This chapter also alludes to the empirical context of the study, which explores how students had to silence their plurilingualism if it was under appreciated but it is now regarded as an asset through a translanguaging prism. Chapter 2 illustrates the connection between translanguaging and epistemological decentring through extracurricular courses entitled ‘Language Profiles’ in which students from different contexts with different languages reflect on the normativity of knowledge production and conceptual tools as well as navigating across their perceived boundaries. This offers a very useful empirical backdrop. This chapter applies the analytical lens of Bakthin’s concept of centrifugal and centripetal vectors, Glissant’s notions of forced and free poetics as well as Risager’s notion of linguaculture which showcases the gradual evolution of students’ positioning and their conceptual agency in a concrete manner. British Journal of Educational Studies Vol. 71, No. 4, 2023, pp. 459–472