Whadjuk Noongar Boodja (Perth) WA
Australia
Call for Papers for a Thematic Colloquium at the 25th Sociolinguistics Symposium, Curtin University, Whadjuk Noongar Boodja (Perth, Australia), 24-27 June 2024. Both online and on-site participation are possible.
Colloquium Convenor: Jaspal Naveel Singh, The Open University, U.K.
Colloquium Description:
Recent drives to decolonise sociolinguistics often intertwine with ideologies of progress and innovation, and sometimes even with desires to undo colonial injustice by returning to a precolonial imaginary in which the world was still in good cosmic order. Paradoxically, decolonial sociolinguistics may therefore reproduce coloniality’s temporal myth of modernity, understood as a linear march of (European) history. Merely framing our discipline as decolonial, while keeping our colonial-temporal methodologies, epistemologies and ontologies intact, may undermine any well-intended project of decolonisation. To not get trampled by the stampede of European history, or to not get crushed by the wheels of the universalising world clock - in other words, to not get devoured by Kronos/Chronos -, it seems important to imagine a decolonial sociolinguistics that is decisively nonmodern. The “nonmodern is a necessary concept to illuminate the coexistence of temporalities and modes of living and thinking that are neither premodern nor postmodern” (Mignolo 2018: 130). A nonmodern sociolinguistics must critically interrogate canonical concepts in our discipline, such as “sociolinguistic innovators”, “NORMS”, “language change” or “colonial lag”, and begin to thoroughly theorise concepts like “stasis”, “presencing”, “being now”, “non-linear co-temporality” and “pluriversal ordinariness”. In this colloquium, we will collaborate to discuss what a nonmodern sociolinguistics might look like and how it can help to intercept modernity’s myth of linear time. Both empirically grounded and southern theoretical studies are invited. Please send your ideas about nonmodern sociolinguistics in a 200-300 words abstract by 21 August 2023 to Jaspal at jaspal.singh@open.ac.uk
Reference
Mignolo, Walter D. (2018) What does it mean to decolonize? In: Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh. On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 105-134.