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At @theGSA in Oct 2021, @AZChantelle and I are going to be gathering a seminar on linguistic indifference and its impact on teaching, research, and curriculum, which seems to me an even greater problem than when we first proposed the seminar in November. 1/20
I think I heard the phrase "linguistic indifference" first from @charlesforsdick, when he talked about linguistically indifferent disciplines, i.e. disciplines that think they can get at their objects of inquiry without much worry about the role of language(s) 2/20
'linguistically indifferent research assertions' CAN easily crop up in anthropocene discourse, diversity/accessibility/DEI discourse, intellectual history, health care communication, finance, macroeconomics, international relations, political science 3/20
without much difficulty, forms of linguistic indifference can creep into multilingualism discourse, language pedagogy, translation, ling. ethnography, etc. This happens when attending to one charismatic feature of language results in neglecting many other important ones. 4/20
for instance when literary translators choose a certain aesthetic norm (that they presume their readers will be looking for) over the varying linguistic practices and particularities of the characters and voices they are translating (Note: I've done this!) 5/20
or when strategic reliance on a fictional national language like "German" suppresses attention and inquiry about polycentric or truly variationist views on the German languages, ranging from Hungary to Texas (see: https://cms.arizona.edu/index.php/multilingual) 6/20
or when histories of Indigenous disposession, Jim Crow, enslavement, intersectional oppressions, and white male supremacy are told without care for the ways language(s) and translation have been wielded to tighten and enforce these structures 7/20
I understand ling. indifference as a range of phenomenaâfrom the vapid ritual celebrating of lang. diversity, to the encasement & minimization of lang. diversity in institutional settings, to hatred of langs. (linguamisia/misolingualism) H/T @silkiestmaria & @SharonDoduaOtoo 8/20
One interesting form of linguistic indifference, I think, is the tendency since Rawls to conceive "linguistic turn" as a matter of Language rather than language(s). Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, and Bourdieu didn't exactly help us undo this tendency. Chomsky definitely not. 9/20
Monolingualism, like the monolingualism of these tweets, is a form of ling. indifference. Is it a strategic indifference? An affective-psychical one? A political one? What motivates such enduring forms of ling. indifference? What would actually motivate doing otherwise? 10/20
Computational engineering of languages/translation & AI, an absolute gold-rush industry at the moment, is linguistically indifferent when it encounters a feature of embodied, human language that it cannot or will not treat as counter-evidence for its models / methods. 11/20
Language/literature departments have a lot of their own linguistic indifference to account for. Strategic indifference to other languages besides the ones in their departments' names (see Kramsch and Zhang 2017) 12/20
And of course the hierarchical division of labor that relies on "language courses" vs. "content courses" where compensation / courseload / continuing status redound to the content side of the staff. (13)20)
No wonder, then, that upper administrators and policy-makers have found all of these forms of linguistic indifference utterly appealing, even in the same breath as they insert "multilingualism" etc. into their strategic plans without thinking much about what it means 14/20
Ling. indifference in university strategic planning means relying on the languages that students already show up to their classes with, without actually working with those languages, cultivating them, accrediting them, querying them for knowledge, and indeed teaching them 15/20
This emboldened ling. indifference in university admin is tantamount to the wholesale offshoring of language onto immigrant / post-migrant families and students, while the actual curriculum gets briskly monolingualized in the name of inclusivity. 16/20
And the notion, that instruction in Mohawk and ASL are naturally replacing French and Latin to suit local and decolonial purposes, is cynical and unworthy of credence, because the funding and institutional leadership toward those decolonial languages are meager at best. 17/20
We lang depts readily blame students' ling. indifference (i.e. "they're voting w/ their feet") instead of doing what all other disciplines do: insist on students' attention to questions that we have the standing to call crucial for civic "strong objectivity" (Harding 1995) 18/20
And, at the moment, despite @MLAnews's choice of multilingualism as its 2022 convention theme, there is currently next to no institutional imagination/leadership in North America around what a multilingual university curriculum ought to look/sound like in 2030. 19/20
So please come join me and @azchantelle with our seminar on linguistic indifference at @TheGSA! It will be practice/project based, collaborative, talkative, and solution-oriented! Proposals are due in less than 48 hours! 20/20 https://www.xcdsystem.com/gsa/member/index.cfm?CFID=57799545&CFTOKEN=ed76e636f0288e47-1655AA3D-CE6F-11D5-841553A1036890B3
