This paper reports ethnographic research on English at a madrasa in rural Bangladesh, and argues that in applied linguistics, Southern theories need to be critically informed by empirical work, not only engaging with heterogenous experiences but also reflecting on the processes involved in accessing these realities.
Drawing on ethnographic research at a madrasa in rural Bangladesh, carried out as part of a PhD in London (funded with a Commonwealth studentship), this paper argues (a) for the importance to Southern thinking of empirical insights from the global South, and (b) addresses some of the methodological processes involved. Owing to its global status, English is promoted by donors and governments for the economic development of countries in the global South (Erling and Seargeant 2013). In Bangladesh, English is also taught in madrasas (which are attended by approximately 10 million students), but at the rural Qawmi madrasa where the research was conducted, people resisted economic development, interrogated western programmes, and mostly rejected the idea of English as a language of development. These views were shaped by alignment with Islam and Arabic, which formed a geo-economic alternative to English and the West, and English was learnt within Islamic comfort and control, warranted within a different geopolitical ideology. Accessing these madrasa discourses involved a trajectory in which the researcher shifted from commissioned to independent research. As well as drawing on Southern theories (e.g. Connell 2007; Santos 2012), understanding the heterogenous realities of sites like madrasa required a good deal of slow, flexible and reflexive engagement, in a process in which the research participants became intellectual interlocutors about the ideas motivating the research, not just the focus of empirical description. References Connell, R. (2007) Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science. Cambridge: Polity. Erling, E. J. and Seargeant, P. (eds) (2013) English and Development: Policy, Pedagogy and Globalization. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Santos, B. de S. (2012) Public sphere and epistemologies of the South., Africa Development, 37(1), pp. 43.67. doi: 10.4314/ad.v37i1.
