Challenging Whiteness in Europe: Linguistic Citizenship and Social Inclusion

The Platform for Linguistic and Epistemic Justice (PLEJ [pledʒ]) is pleased to announce its inaugural symposium, a joint event hosted by UCL SSEES and the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies, with the generous support of the UCL Centre for Humanities Education’s Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion grant.

Join us for this working launch that marks the establishment of PLEJ, a research centre dedicated to the socio-cultural study of language in contexts of uneven power alignments and in interactional settings which require aesthetic and ethical encounters and responses. Part of PLEJ’s mission in its UK and European context is to promote broader social engagement with questions such as:

• How are forms of domination and resistance conveyed through discourse and multi-modal communicative acts?
• What are the new pathways that open up for the analytic study of language and communication through the practitioners’ commitment to social and epistemic justice, the acknowledgement of the equal value of diverse knowledge practices, and an inclusive and collaborative approach to research methods?
• How can we address through socio-linguistically informed cross-disciplinary research the impact of uneven local and global power dynamics on social mobility, diversity, equity and inclusion?
• What are the forms of marginalisation that we as researchers, linguists, teachers, educators, policy makers, and activists have an ethical obligation to address in our work while acknowledging the bias that is inherent in our position and in the personal and social affects that underpin our thinking?

An opening panel discussion will centre on these questions in SSEES’s regional contexts, with special focus on bilingual Roma living in Central and Eastern Europe. While showcasing work and publications by SSEES researchers on linguistic and social stigmatisation in Scandinavia and Central and Eastern Europe, speakers will focus on issues of coloniality, vulnerability, and resistance in multilingual settings in Europe. A collaborative ethnographic project and the book Translanguaging for Equal Opportunities: Speaking Romani at School will serve to introduce the methodological and ethical challenges of collaborative research and writing, while promoting translanguaging pedagogies and inclusive education for bilingual Roma. The discussion will address the productive complications of building linguistic citizenship in tripartite research which involves minoritised speakers, members of local elites, and university-based researchers and students.

A roundtable discussion in the second part of the symposium will look at these questions from a broader geographic and multidisciplinary angle. A prestigious panel of multidisciplinary scholars from the fields of applied linguistics, critical discourse studies, political science, and economics will address the key questions of the launch and elucidate the ways in which issues of linguistic and epistemic justice impact on their work as researchers and educators. The discussion will sketch the productive complications arising from new epistemologies of research into multilingualism, language endangerment, linguistic citizenship, and the socio-political entanglements of language.

The phrase challenging whiteness in the title of PLEJ’s launch event is deliberately ambiguous. Depending on our understanding of both its constituents and their relationship within the phrase, it highlights different sides of the coin in our grappling with affects, theories, and practices that maintain systemic social, economic, and linguistic marginalisation. Whiteness that is challenging and elusive refers to the circulation of ideas and affects which help us maintain white privilege in regional contexts which have traditionally been represented as exempt from colonial historicities such as Central and South-East Europe and Scandinavia. A broad, intersectional understanding of whiteness and perceptive openness to the stories told by linguistically minoritised speakers in these regions allows us to develop (self-)reflexive insight which challenges whiteness.

Both the opening panel and the roundtable will include distinguished scholars and their students such as invited speakers Professor Yaron Matras, Professor Tommaso M. Milani, Dr János Imre Heltai, Dr Bojana Petrić, and Sára Szakál

and contributions from SSEES staff Dr Jelena Ćalić, Dr Elodie Douarin, Dr Piro Rexhepi, Dr Eszter Tarsoly, and Dr Riitta-Liisa Valijärvi.

This event will take place in-person and will also be livestreamed online.

Image credit: Robert Czibi