Monolingualism, In/Justice
Date: Thursday, April 14th, 2022, 4:00 PM
Location: Wang Center, Lecture Hall 2
Watch: Monolingualism, In/Justice
Lecture Abstract
This talk starts with a few premises, to be expanded upon in collaboration with listeners:
a) that multilingualism is itself a primary and profound method for seeking justice
in the real world, b) that monolingualism is an analytically and empirically deficient
system for pursuing truth and justice, c) that monolingualism vastly predominates
in the meting and envisioning of justice today, and d) that promising visions of multilingual
justice are indeed beginning to emerge around us. Sadly, the models of multilingualism
that predominate in the Global North have emphasized commerce and transparency at
the expense of politics, precision of meaning, standpoint, and subjectivity—all of
which are crucial for a just reckoning with the world. In 2021, we are witnessing
a retrenchment into monolingualism, rather than the opening into the kinds of multilingual
knowing and being that were foreseen in the 1990s. The talk will conclude with some
practical strategies for countering and hospicing monolingualism in moments of social
in/justice.
About the Speaker: David Gramling
David Gramling is Professor and Chair of the Department Central, Eastern and Northern European Studies
at University of British Columbia. His major work includes The Invention of Multilingualism (Cambridge University Press 2021) and The Invention of Monolingualism (American Association for Applied Linguistics Book Award, 2018), Palliative Care Conversations: Clinical and Applied Linguistic Perspectives (co-author, De Gruyter 2019), Linguistic Disobedience: Restoring Power to Civic Language (co-author, Palgrave 2019) and Germany in Transit: Nation and Migration 1955–2005 (co-author, University of California Press 2007).
