Volume 2024, Issue 287 - Special Issue: ‘Spaces of otherwise’? Towards a sociolinguistics of potentiality; Issue Editors: Caroline Kerfoot and Christopher Stroud

In writing of the economies of abandonment of late liberal globalization, Elizabeth Povinelli also points to the potential for SPACES OF OTHERWISE, those spaces of “curiosity and risk, potentiality and exhaustion” which open possibilities for more ethical becoming and the emergence of new forms of sociality and social life (2012. The will to be otherwise/the effort of endurance. South Atlantic Quarterly 111(3). 453–475: 454). This Special Issue aims to contribute to an expanded, southernized sociology of language and sociolinguistics by exploring what role sociolinguistics can play in thinking through and with these spaces. It brings together a set of papers from southern contexts rarely represented in sociolinguistic research (Crimea, Mozambique, Palestine) spaces of grim endurance where suffering is chronic rather than catastrophic, and a study of the metaphorical south in the north, where migration imperatives land people in situations of precarity, in this case, Sweden. An illuminating invited commentary offers a novel perspective on the key theme QUASI-EVENT threading across all the papers. In exploring the construction of spaces of otherwise, authors use the southern concept of Linguistic Citizenship that construes language as a site of political struggle. This framing offers an alternative approach to a politics of language where potentialities for otherwise can be attended to. The papers show how, through acts of Linguistic Citizenship, participants bring potential worlds into existence, however fleetingly. From the chronicling of these ‘quasi-events’ emerges a sociolinguistics of potentiality, one which contributes to an understanding of what enables some emergent forms of life to endure and others not. The sociolinguistics of potentiality is an invitation to listen beyond and within ‘noise’ to those who inhabit discounted bodies and speak unvalued languages, to move beyond ‘community’ and ‘selfhood’ to becoming otherwise with others in projects of world-building, simultaneously prompting research which seeks to be ‘ethically otherwise’.

This article presents an analysis of Rana Bishara’s installation Roadmap for Elimination , which is semiotically and materially interesting due to the skillful combination of language, maps of Palestine, and other key symbolic elements of Palestinian resistance such as cactus leaves. The article illustrates how, in the artwork, space and time fold into each other for political purposes in such a way that the European colonial past is visually overlaid with the present Israeli occupation, and the vision of a different future. Ultimately, the argument mounted in the article is that the installation is a defiant act of linguistic citizenship through which Bishara engendered a momentary space of otherwise. The spatio-temporal elements in the artwork, in turn, activate a plethora of emotions that affectively interpellate a European viewer into complex discursive positions of implicated subject vis-à-vis the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. On a theoretical level, the article seeks to demonstrate how Povinelli’s notion of spaces of otherwise, coupled with Stroud’s linguistic citizenship, can be relevant to sociolinguistics and the sociology of language, giving us a conceptual apparatus for better understanding the nexus of agency, space and time. On a more empirical level, the article also seeks to bring more precision to the spatio-temporal dimensions of both Stroud’s and Povinelli’s work.

This paper aims to make visible the alternative social projects hidden beneath everyday Crimean Tatar landscapes. Drawing on audio recordings and field data from interviews and narrated walking tours led by young citizens, it illuminates how these spaces of otherwise emerge and are co-constructed through participants’ re-readings of material artifacts, resemiotisation of place semiotics and resignification of communal spaces. Participants navigate among such spaces, negotiating the legacies of historical acts of material, cultural, and linguistic dispossession and disruption as well as the contemporary forms that such acts take. In narrating semiotic landscapes, participants perform acts of Linguistic Citizenship, a concept that recognizes that speakers express agency, voice, and participation through a variety of semiotic means; they engage or disengage with political institutions of the state and advance claims for alternative forms of belonging. This paper thus expands semiotic landscape research through its design as a linguistic ethnography, using interactional data to account for individuals’ perceptions of place. It also adds to research on Linguistic Citizenship by foregrounding invisibilized linguistic repertoires and performative acts of meaning-making in a charged political context.

This paper suggests that a sociolinguistics of potentiality is an “ethical” sociolinguistics that will grapple with the difference of others. Drawing on a linguistic ethnography of Social Sciences classrooms in a Swedish university, it illuminates how students and teachers work to foster improved sociality and mutual responsibility across social and linguistic difference in internationalising university life. The paper develops through a consideration of Levinasian “ethical events”, defined as interactions involving that which is not known, normative or ordinarily visible, but for which all involved are called upon to take responsibility. Analysis of the ethical events involving instances of embodied interdiscursive performance brings to light how late liberal values such as individualism and competition could be disrupted in favour of collaborative and mutually responsible academic and social practice. Yet, as is characteristic of “spaces of otherwise”, the task of shaping such new relations in and around the classroom spaces involved risk and exhaustion. The study concludes by arguing that constructing university spaces as open to different ways of engaging, learning and knowing involves an orientation in response to others’ desire for mutuality and reciprocity.

Using a broad decolonial approach and taking the bilingual education field as reference, in this article I analyse the intersection of language ideology, education and social order in Mozambique. More, specifically, I combine transformative notions of “Linguistic Citizenship” and “spaces of otherwise” to uncover “coloniality of language” in education and in other fields, and to understand how spaces of possibility are being created and maintained. The combination of these notions allows us to understand the politics of language in diverse multilingual contexts and how alternative modes of languaging, thinking and being may emerge and endure over time or be silenced. I argue that, in addition to the current “enabling” legislative and policy framework in Mozambique, there is a need to transform institutional structures as well as the positionality of the vulnerable and marginalised citizens, as these are necessary conditions for fostering “diversity of voice” and “mutuality and reciprocity” of engagement across difference. In this regard, I discuss how agency and transformation within bilingual education have the potential to trigger ethical transformations in other societal fields.

Twenty-first century Bolivia witnessed indigenous resurgence and state promotion of indigenous languages. This article ethnographically examines the impact of these processes on indigenous language revitalization and ethnolinguistic identities in urban spaces. It reveals that language attrition continues because indigenous resurgence occurred at a time when language shift from Aymara to Spanish had already occurred in most households and schools were considered the spaces for learning Aymara. Moreover, although indigenous identity continues to be linked to language, linguistic proficiency no longer determines Aymara identity in a reductionist sense. Most contemporary Aymaras deploy a rhetoric that historically contextualizes the process of language attrition, thereby, asserting an anti-essentialist ethnolinguistic identity. This enables learning Aymara to be an aspiration that is highly valued but can be endlessly postponed. The article points out the limitations of state-led language revitalization policies and calls for creating synergies between state planning from above and communitarian initiatives from below.