| 1. |
-
‘Spaces of otherwise’? Towards a sociolinguistics of potentiality
- 2024
-
Samlingsverk (redaktörskap) (refereegranskat)abstract
- In writing of the economies of abandonment of late liberal globalization, Povinelli (2012: 454) 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. 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 discounted bodies and speak unvalued languages, to move beyond ‘community’ and ‘selfhood’ to becoming otherwise with others in projects of world-building, simultaneously prompting research which seeks to be ‘ethically otherwise’.
|
|
| 2. |
- Clifford, Marian, 1954-, et al.
(författare)
-
English : language of hope or broken dreams?
- 1992
-
Ingår i: Adult basic education in South Africa. - Cape Town : Oxford University Press. - 0195707095 - 9780195707090 ; , s. 152-218
-
Bokkapitel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This chapter provides a critical overview of the major debates, theories and teaching approaches in second language education for adults with little or no formal education. The first two sections examine the contested role of English as a language of access in South Africa and the debates surrounding the language of instruction for initial literacy. They draw on Nicaraguan and Mozambican literacy campaigns to illuminate some of the consequences of decisions on language of instruction for large-scale campaigns. The third section critically examines current approaches to teaching English as a second language to adults in South Africa in terms of the understandings of language and language learning that underpin them. The fourth and final section attempts to lay the groundwork for the second or additional language component of a future adult education policy. Framed by a vision of participatory democracy, it proposes a model which integrates theoretical principles from Freirean-inspired popular education, adult education and second language learning.
|
|
| 3. |
-
Entangled discourses : South-North orders of visibility
- 2017
-
Samlingsverk (redaktörskap) (refereegranskat)abstract
- This book uniquely explores the shifting structures of power and unexpected points of intersection – entanglements – at the nexus of North and South as a lens through which to examine the impact of global and local circuits of people, practices and ideas on linguistic, cultural and knowledge systems. The volume considers the entanglement of North and South on multiple levels in the contemporary and continuing effects of capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism, in the form of silenced or marginalized populations, such as refugees, immigrants, and other minoritised groups, and in the different orders of visibility that make some types of practices and knowledge more legitimate and therefore more visible. It uses a range of methodological and analytical frames to shed light on less visible histories, practices, identities, repertoires, and literacies, and offer new understandings for research and for language, health care, education, and other policies and practices.
|
|
| 4. |
- Kerfoot, Caroline, 1955-
(författare)
-
Changing conceptions of literacies, language and development : Implications for the provision of adult basic education in South Africa
- 2009
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- 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 participatory development, social action and the realisation of citizenship rights. It traces developments in adult basic education in South Africa, and more specifically literacy and language learning, over the years 1981 to 2001, with reference to specific multilingual contexts in the Northern and Western Cape.The thesis is based on four individual studies, documenting an arc from grassroots work to national policy development and back. Study I, written in the early 1990s, critically examines approaches to teaching English to adults in South Africa at the time and proposes a participatory curriculum model for the additional language component of a future adult education policy. Study II is an account of attempts to implement this model and explores the implications of going to scale with such an approach. Studies III and IV draw on a qualitative study of an educator development programme after the transition to democracy. Study III uses Bourdieu's theory of practice and the concept of reflexivity to illuminate some of the connections between local discursive practices, self-formation, and broader relations of power. Study IV uses Iedema's (1999) concept of resemiotisation to trace the ways in which individuals re-shaped available representational resources to mobilise collective agency in community-based workshops. The summary provides a framework for these studies by locating and critiquing each within shifts in the political economy of South Africa. It reflects on a history of research and practice, raising questions to do with voice, justice, power, agency, and desire. Overall, this thesis argues for a reconceptualisation of ABET that is more strongly aligned with development goals and promotes engagement with new forms of state/society/economy relations.
|
|
| 5. |
- Kerfoot, Caroline, 1955-, et al.
(författare)
-
Constructing invisibility : The discursive erasure of a black immigrant learner in South Africa
- 2017
-
Ingår i: Entangled Discourses. - New York : Routledge. - 9781138192263 - 9781315640006 ; , s. 37-58
-
Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This chapter explores how the discourses of 'born frees' at a tertiary institution in South Africa both reproduce and transform inherited racial identities and positions. It focuses on the points in the data when 'identities, spaces, histories—come together or find points of intersection in unexpected ways'. The chapter picks up a different thread and explores those points where different discourses intersect and commonalities emerge. It argues that despite the racial anxiety suffusing the data, the participants seek to disentangle from the apartheid past and position themselves in a postracial future. The chapter aims to draw attention to the ways in which race is reproduced in discourse and so to raise awareness about how this may shape or constrain progress towards postracial ways of thinking, speaking, and being. It explores that small stories analysis can help build this knowledge by providing a lens onto the tangled web of race and by showing how racial positions are discursively reproduced.
|
|
| 6. |
- Kerfoot, Caroline, 1955-, et al.
(författare)
-
Constructing invisibility : An immigrant learner in South Africa
- 2016
-
Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This paper 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.
|
|
| 7. |
- Kerfoot, Caroline, 1955-, et al.
(författare)
-
Game changers? Multilingual learners in a Cape Town primary school
- 2016
-
Ingår i: Applied Linguistics. - : Oxford University Press (OUP). - 0142-6001 .- 1477-450X. ; 37:4, s. 451-473
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- 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.
|
|
| 8. |
- Kerfoot, Caroline, 1955-, et al.
(författare)
-
Introduction : Entanglement and Order of Visibility
- 2017
-
Ingår i: Entangled discourses<em></em>. - New York : Routledge. - 9781138192263 - 9781315640006 ; , s. 1-15
-
Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This chapter elaborates the concepts 'entanglement' and 'orders of visibility', arguing for their potential to illuminate both absences in theory, knowledge, and representation and emergences in social and semiotic practices. It suggests that this dual focus on absences and emergences, following Santos (2014), is essential for the development of a sociolinguistics of the South. The chapter presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book seeks to build on socio- and applied linguistic work that grounds the view from nowhere through historical, ethnographic, interactionist, and discourse analytic approaches to the analysis of language in the construction of social difference and inequality. It aims to illuminate the ways in which different orders of visibility are constructed by conceptual, methodological, and analytical lenses. The book illuminates the ways in which language is used as a resource in constructing, naturalizing, or resisting inequality in everyday interactions and institutional sites.
|
|
| 9. |
- Kerfoot, Caroline, 1955-, et al.
(författare)
-
Introduction
- 2017
-
Ingår i: Language in Epistemic Access. - : Routledge. - 9781138715066 ; , s. 1-9
-
Bokkapitel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)
|
|
| 10. |
- Kerfoot, Caroline, 1955-
(författare)
-
Making absences present : Language policy from below
- 2020
-
Ingår i: Multilingual Margins. - 2221-4216. ; 7:1, s. 69-76
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- A commentary on the Special Issue ‘Grassroots participation and agency in bilingual education processes in Mozambique’. 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.
|
|
| 11. |
- Kerfoot, Caroline, 1955-
(författare)
-
Making and Shaping Participatory Spaces : Resemiotization and Citizenship Agency in South Africa
- 2011
-
Ingår i: International Multilingual Research Journal. - : Informa UK Limited. - 1931-3152 .- 1931-3160. ; 5:2, s. 87-102
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In South Africa, democratic consolidation involves not only building a new state, but also new interfaces between state and society. To strengthen the agency of citizens at these interfaces, recent approaches to development stress the notion of “participatory citizenship.” The purpose of this article is to explore the links, rarely achieved in practice, between such practices of participatory citizenship and possibilities for literacy and language education. The article draws on a study of a capacity-building program for educators of adults in the Northern Cape Province. It uses the concept of resemiotization to explore the ways in which participants reshaped the multilingual representational resources available to them to legitimize the authority of subaltern actors and mobilize collective agency. Finally, it argues that such semiotic practices can be seen as a form of “linguistic citizenship,” which could promote locally rooted and participatory democracy under a radically reoriented adult basic education system.
|
|
| 12. |
- Kerfoot, Caroline, 1955-
(författare)
-
Participatory education in South Africa: contradictions and challenges.
- 1993
-
Ingår i: TESOL quarterly (Print). - 0039-8322 .- 1545-7249. ; 27:3, s. 431-447
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper describes and critiques a participatory ESL curriculum development project within a South African nongovernmental organisation. It locates this project within the political and economic context as South Africa moves from apartheid towards democracy. The contradictions inherent in developing participatory curricula and materials for large-scale use are described, and the choices made to reconcile them discussed. The paper ends with a discussion of the challenges facing adult basic education (ABE) in the future and suggests some directions for development.
|
|
| 13. |
|
|
| 14. |
- Kerfoot, Caroline, 1955-
(författare)
-
Speaking of, for, and with others : Some methodological considerations
- 2016
-
Ingår i: Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics Plus. - : Stellenbosch University. - 1726-541X .- 2224-3380. ; 49, s. 331-341
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This is a brief reflection on two decades of work in NGOs and with trade unions from 1982 to 2001. For most of the time covered by this research note, I worked for a non-governmental organisation (NGO), one of several small, politically committed literacy organisations that sprang up in the aftermath of Soweto 1976 as part of a broader response to increasingly repressive state policies.
|
|
| 15. |
- Kerfoot, Caroline, 1955-, et al.
(författare)
-
Testing the Waters : Exploring the Teaching of Genres in a Cape Flats Primary School in South Africa
- 2015
-
Ingår i: Language and Education. - : Informa UK Limited. - 0950-0782 .- 1747-7581. ; 29:3, s. 235-255
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- 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.
|
|
| 16. |
|
|
| 17. |
|
|
| 18. |
- Kerfoot, Caroline, 1955-, et al.
(författare)
-
Towards epistemic justice : Transforming relations of knowing in multilingual classrooms
- 2022
-
Ingår i: Working Papers in Urban Language & Literacies. ; :294, s. 1-23
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This study of a postcolonial site engages with epistemic justice from the perspective of language. It understands epistemic justice as relating to issues of knowledge, understanding, and participation in communicative practices. It suggests that monoglossic language-in-education policies, often colonial in origin, constitute a form of epistemic injustice by denying learners the opportunity to learn in a familiar language and removing their ability to make epistemic contributions, a capacity central to human value. It further suggests that translanguaging in formal school settings is for the most part geared towards a monolingual outcome, that is, towards accessing knowledge in an official language. This unidirectional impetus means that translanguaging remains an affirmative rather than transformative strategy, leaving underlying hierarchies of value and relations of knowing unchanged. In contrast, this study presents linguistic ethnographic data from a three-year pilot project in Cape Town where primary school learners could choose their medium of instruction to Grade 6 and use all languages in subject classrooms. It analyses how a Grade 6 learner used laminated, multilingual, affective and epistemic stances to construct others as knowers, negotiate epistemic authority, and promote solidarity. It proposes that, in so doing, she constructed new decolonial relations of knowing and being. It further proposes that the shift from a monolingual to a multilingual episteme, which substantially improved educational performance overall, also enabled the emergence of politically fragile yet institutionally robust social, epistemic, and moral orders from below, orders that could lay the basis for greater epistemic justice.
|
|
| 19. |
- Kerfoot, Caroline, 1955-
(författare)
-
Transforming identities and enacting agency : the discourses of participatory development in training South African adult educators.
- 2008
-
Ingår i: Journal of Education. - Durban, South Africa : University of KwaZulu-Natal. - 0259-479X. ; 45, s. 95-128
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- 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 Northern Cape at a time of rapid social change and theorises the uneven realisation of reflexive agency in participants' practices. The analysis of interview data draws on Bourdieu's concepts of field, capital, habitus, legitimate language and reflexivity to probe the connections between local discursive practices and broader systemic relationships of power. The findings suggest that a key contribution of the programme was a set of discourses that enabled participants to engage with the processes engendered by new forms of governance and state/society/economy relations. However, the ability to bring about new identities and increased reflexive agency depended on the interaction of five framing factors. In this way, reflexivity emerges as contextual, embedded within differing sets of power relations, and not necessarily transformative.
|
|
| 20. |
|
|
| 21. |
- Volvach, Natalia, 1993-
(författare)
-
From Words to Voids : Absencing and Haunting in Crimean Semiotic Landscapes
- 2023
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis seeks to contribute to the body of ethnographically-oriented semiotic landscape research by addressing linguistic and non-linguistic signs in the landscapes of contemporary Crimea. It is based on research conducted in the region back in 2017 and 2019 after the Russian annexation but before the full-scale war against Ukraine, which started on 24 February 2022. It illuminates the ways in which the complex histories of conflict over the Crimean Peninsula are materialized in ‘absenced’ semiotic landscapes, both in the form of material effects in landscapes and as discursively realized in the narrated memories of the study participants. In this way, through a close theoretically informed analysis of absence in semiotic landscapes, this thesis illuminates the interrelationships between overwritten, erased and invisibilized voices.Each of the four studies in this thesis addresses the effects of different acts of dispossession which have led to the absencing of ethnic, linguistic and national differences in Crimea across time and space. Study I engages with multilingual representations displayed in the city of Sevastopol, illustrating the dominance of Russian discourses of nation and nationalism. Moving beyond the focus on visible signs, Study II sheds light on the invisibilized histories of Crimean Tatar territorial dispossession and displacement. By engaging with the participants’ voices, it illustrates the constructions of a space of otherwise, an indeterminate space full of potentiality and marginality that remains hidden yet persistent in Crimean landscapes. Study III engages to a greater extent with acts of struggle for voice and visibility by attending to memories of citizens’ resistance through the lens of turbulence. Finally, Study IV attempts to disentangle the materially manifested effects of absence in the landscapes. This interrogation goes beyond words and captures voids and their haunting effects on the researcher’s subjectivities. Overall, this thesis contributes to the study of absencing and haunting in Crimean semiotic landscapes, understanding them as a historically layered and yet temporally dynamic, affective and vibrant social phenomenon. As evident from the emic perspectives presented in the thesis, absenced semiotic landscapes are intricately tied to people and events, and can therefore be treated as manifestations of human displacement and dispossession. Further, an (auto)-ethnographic account shows how embodied experiences of absenced semiotic landscapes matter as they further allow the illumination of memory, space and the production of situated knowledge woven into the individual’s body and subjectivity. In sum, the thesis offers a new lens on semiotic landscapes, one that explores the mutual co-constitution of material-discursive processes hidden behind words and voids. In this way, it opens up an endless web of interconnections that informs the ways in which we make sense of social life.
|
|
