Language, Decoloniality, and Sustainability: Decolonizing Theories and Practices in Times of Devastation
Cláudia Hilsdorf Rocha (Language Studies Institute, University of Campinas, Brazil)
Simone Hashiguti (Language Studies Institute, University of Campinas, Brazil)
Edina Krompák (University of Teacher Education Lucerne, Switzerland)
Language is a powerful tool to create a better world (UNESCO MGIEP, 2017, p 158). In this sense, language practices, from a decolonial perspective, can foster social transformation and nurture possibilities for the insurgence of a more peaceful, just, and sustainable way to inhabit this planet.
For many decades, we have been facing uncontrolled planetary devastation. The capitalist and neoliberal policies, discourses and practices have been promoting mass destruction in social, cultural, political, economic, and environmental sense. Such massive, human-made destruction results from the colonial matrix of power in which the Western-modern subjectivity emerged, heavily marked by an ideal of rationality, progress, and development. The modern subject exists as an individual who is subsumed into colonial, hierarchical categories of identification from which they have to strive to succeed and to survive.
In this context, we lost our capacity to think collectively, to connect with the planet and with all the beings that are implicated with life on and beyond it (Krenak, 2020). If there is a way to face and help minimize such a planetary crisis, it should probably be a product of the interruption of such a modernity/rationality mindset and wild capitalist movement. Changes would then be nurtured by actual, profound transformation, and would imply looking into our inner selves, so that we can build new conceptions of what it is to be human and of how we can open paths to an ancestral future (Krenak, 2022). In other words, we are now, more than ever, challenged to defy an egocentric mindset (Silva, 2021) and to recognize that humanity, if there is any such a concept that could be sustained, can only be understood as integrated and inherently connected to every other being on the planet, many of which have been left aside in the name of development.
To go on in inhabiting this planet from a more peaceful, just, and sustainable perspective, it is high time we interrupted the anthropocentric orientation of life to resist the silencing and the destroying of non-Eurocentric epistemologies, and to fight more intensely against the mechanisms that promote all sorts of deprivation, of complete depletion of natural organisms, of massive destruction (Silva, 2021). Such a movement would involve our fighting for economic, social, and environmental sustainability (Silva, 2021, Fuence, 2022, Barbas-Rhoden, 2022), as well as our engagement in linguistic educational programs and actions that could challenge linguistic injustice as well as other related linguistic epistemicides. As Krenak (2022) would argue, surviving in our present times calls for our commitment to creating alternative, multilayered cartographies, so very rich in terms of plurality that they make the dispute for foundational histories obsolete.
In this sense, we believe that insurgency, change, epistemological reconstitution, intercultural and theoretical liberation, disobedience are examples of assertive decolonial propositions in favor of life and sustainability.
References to nurture the insurgence of a broader involvement to fight neoliberal forces (Krenak, 2020, 2022) can come from social movements of resistance, from philosophies and knowledge that are peripheralized or rarely covered by canons, from collectives and bodies that are minoritarian and silenced, from epistemes of oral tradition. Likewise, with them, we become aware of how the nefast discourses of capitalism (Chun, 2017) work and how certain concepts and theoretical constructs created by Western philosophy, modern sciences, originate from an inherently colonial uncritical whiteness, favoring a colonial, egocentric, and environmentally destructive mindset. Resisting the hegemonic power calls for disrupting oppressive forces by collectively reinventing the grounds for a more just, equitable, and sustainable society.
From these sources, we have built new lenses in and out of academia, refined our listening and learned to resist. Also from them, we have understood more clearly the need to change our academic language and question our role in and for social transformations. In fact, in the process of decolonizing ourselves, we sometimes lack words, terms and concepts that make it possible, at some level, to detach ourselves from power/knowledge coloniality, as proposed by Aníbal Quijano (Quijano, 2000, 2013). Portuguese, like other Western languages that participated in European expansion in the Americas, has maintained expressive traditions, inside and outside the academy, that enunciate the weight of the modern/rational/colonial logic described by Quijano himself and other authors of the decolonial turn (Castro-Gomez & Grosfoguel, 2007, Maldonado-Torres, 2006, 2008, Mignolo & Escobar, 2010, Walsh, 2005, among others). Linked to these references, we believe we can bring many others, which foster sustainability as a decolonial movement and praxis.
Given this, the objective of this Special Issue is to bring together articles that expand the debate on Language, Decoloniality, and Sustainability, so that we can contribute to the expansion of discourses and practices more evidently involved and implicated with decolonizing theories and (educational) practices in times of devastation.
We encourage the submission of articles that deal with topics such as: sustainable language education; Indigenous knowledge production and transformation; body and language in postcolonial context; discursive strategies of oppression and resistance; digital practices to combat disinformation; (trans)languaging and educational practices of resistance; Applied Linguistics based on ancestral, Indigenous, Afro-Brazilian or other philosophies from the Global South; Applied Linguistics and confrontations against planetary destruction, racism; applied linguistics in favor of social justice, human rights and (social/economic/environmental/linguistic) sustainability. Through a set of articles that are united by the focus on language, decoloniality, and sustainability, we hope to be able to contribute to the development in these fields, as well as to the expansion of powerful voices in/from the North and the Global South.
References
Barbas-Rhoden, Laura. (2022). Sustainability and the Pluriverse: From Environmental Humanities Theory to Content-Based Instruction in Spanish Curricula. In: Fuente, María J. de la (Ed.). Education for Sustainable Development in Foreign Language Learning (Routledge Research in Language Education). Routledge/Taylor and Francis. Kindle. Edition.
Castro-Gómez, Santiago & Ramón Grosfoguel (eds). El giro decolonial: reflexiones para una diversidade epistémica más allá del capitalismo global. Bogotá, Col.: Universidad Javeriana y Siglo del Hombre Editores.
Chun, Christian W. (2017). The discourses of Capitalism: Everyday economics and the production of common sense. Routledge.
Fuente, María J. de la. (2022). Introduction: Toward Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in Foreign Languages. In: Fuente, María J. de la (Ed.). Education for Sustainable Development in Foreign Language Learning (Routledge Research in Language Education). Routledge/Taylor and Francis. Kindle. Edition.
Krenak, Ailton. (2020). A vida não é útil. Companhia das Letras. Edição do Kindle.
Krenak, Ailton. (2022). Futuro ancestral. Companhia das Letras. Edição do Kindle.
Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. (2007). Sobre la colonialidad del ser: contribuiciones al desarrollo de um concepto. In: Castro-Gómez, Santiago, and Ramón Grosfoguel (eds). El giro decolonial: reflexiones para una diversidade epistémica más allá del capitalismo global. Bogotá, Col.: Universidad Javeriana y Siglo del Hombre Editores.
Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. (2008). La descolonización y el giro des-colonial, Tabula Rasa, Bogotá - Colombia, No.9: 61-72.
McEntee-Atalianis, Lisa.J., Tonkin, Humphrey (eds) (2023) Language and Sustainable Development. Language Policy. Cham: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24918-1_4
Mignolo, Walter. & Escobar, Arturo. (eds.). (2010). Globalization and the Decolonial Option. London: Routledge.
UNESCO MGIEP (2017). Textbooks for sustainable development. A guide to embedding. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000259932
Quijano, Aníbal. (2000). "Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America." Nepantla: Views from South 1.3, 533-80.
Quijano, Aníbal (2013). Coloniality and modernity/rationality. In: Mignolo, Walter & Escobar, Arturo (Eds.). Globalization and the colonial option. London/New York: Routledge. p. 22-32.
Silva, Simone Batista (2021). Implicated Literacies: Life Begetting Life in Linguistic Education, Rev. Bras. Linguíst. Apl., v. 21, n. 2, p. 605-626. http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/1984-6398202117950
Walsh, C. (2005). Pensamiento crítico y matriz (de)colonial: reflexiones latinoamericanas. Quito, Editorial Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar.
Timetable:
Call for papers: from December 20th, 2023.
Abstract submission (250 words): up to April 30th, 2024.
The abstracts should be sent to: tlaesp25@unicamp.br
Abstract acceptance: up to May 30th, 2024.
Full paper submission of accepted abstracts: up to June 30th, 2024.
Articles acceptance: up to August 30th, 2024.
Papers will be accessible online (Scielo Preprint) from October 2024.
Special Issue Release: March 2025.