Linguistic Citizenship in spaces of otherwise

The lack of affordance in mainstream Western understandings of language for entertaining diversity of thought and life, and a frail ethics for living with difference through linguistic encounters suggest that our conceptual frameworks of language are ill-suited to the complexities of living in an increasingly entangled but silenced world. Ideas and practices of language, specifically multilingualism, although ostensibly promising a trope for linguistic (and cultural) diversity, must rather be understood, in common with other forms of neoliberal technology, as a mechanism whereby essential features of colonial social logics are reconfigured in contemporary 'postcolonial' societies. In this sense, multilingualism has predominantly served to silence, sort and 'Other' speakers and languages hierarchically. In this talk, I will explore the idea of language/multilingualism as a technology in the conceptualization of alternative, competing futures. I build on the notion of Linguistic Citizenship (LC) (Stroud 2001) as a blueprint for thinking differently about language, and multilingualism as a 'site' where we might relate ethically to others – and ourselves. A language/multilingualism rethought through the lens of Linguistic Citizenship offers a 'utopian dynamic' for reconstituting encounters with Others as arenas for the productive engagement of difference and vulnerability, can comprise a space of otherwise where colonial power dynamics of languages and speakers are troubled, and where the potential for new empowering linguistic mediations of the mutualities of our common humanity with different others are worked out, although the material and objective condition for fulfilment may not yet exist, other than as a 'potential'.