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Resisting linguistic marginalization in professional spaces: Constructing multi-layered oppositional stances

  • Priti Sandhu

    Priti Sandhu is an Assistant Professor in the English Department of the University of Washington. She works with narrative data collected in interviews. In addition to chapters in book anthologies, her articles have been published in Applied Linguistics, Journal of Language, Identity and Education, and Multilingua.

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Published/Copyright: August 19, 2015
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Abstract

This paper analyzes the resistant stances enacted by six recently-graduated, Hindi medium educated (HME) Indian women against the primacy accorded to English medium educated (EME) individuals in urban professional hiring practices. The data were collected in face-to-face, audio-recorded interviews by the researcher in the summer of 2013 from New Delhi. Aligning with Jaffe’s (2009) argument that a salient role of stance-based research is to theorize the relationship between stancetaking and sociocultural conditions and adopting a critical constructivist perspective (while withholding claims about participants’ inner psychological states), this paper shows that within the postcolonial context of urban India, the liminal, hybrid, third spaces of participants’ locations are discursively connected to the exigencies and inequalities characteristic of their local social structures. Analysis of participants’ resistant stances demonstrates their complex, multi-layered, and context-specific characteristics elucidating the ways in which these stance performances are achieved by variously intertwining discourses about linguistic prejudices, nationalism, colonialism, gender and socioeconomic conditions. Specifically, these sociopolitical issues are related to (i) gender-based personal safety anxieties, (ii) neoliberal discourses about India’s demographic dividend (i.e. the public celebration of the increase in the country’s ‘young’ population), (iii) arguments about justice, citizenship and national language, (iv) discourses of colonialism and government apathy, (v) group rights, ethics and responsibilities, and (vi) an unvarnished shaming of the ubiquity of EME preference in local hiring practices. The paper argues that HME-associated linguistic exclusionary practices, whether driven by economic necessities or by biased linguistic ideologies, perpetuate and deepen existing class-based divides, fail the aspirational needs of a growing urban, youthful, and vernacular medium educated population while further complicating the challenges faced by women in a historically patriarchal society.

About the author

Priti Sandhu

Priti Sandhu is an Assistant Professor in the English Department of the University of Washington. She works with narrative data collected in interviews. In addition to chapters in book anthologies, her articles have been published in Applied Linguistics, Journal of Language, Identity and Education, and Multilingua.

Transcription key

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edited transcription

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micro pauses

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indicate lengthened production

following word/sound has rising intonation

following word/sound has falling intonation

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speech within these symbols is spoken slower than its surrounding utterances

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speech within these symbols is spoken quicker than its surrounding utterances

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Published Online: 2015-8-19
Published in Print: 2015-9-1

©2015 by De Gruyter Mouton

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