Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research - Paperback

by Heidi Bojsen (Editor), Petra Daryai-Hansen (Editor), Anne Holmen (Editor)

Using data from multilingual settings in universities and adjacent learning contexts in East Asia, North Africa, Central and North America and Europe, this book provides examples of the heuristic value of translanguaging and epistemological decentring. Despite this and other theoretical and empirical work, and ever stronger calls for the inclusion of other languages, epistemologies and constructions of culture in higher education, decentring and translanguaging practices are often relegated to the margins or suppressed in research and education because of the organisational structures of education institutions and prevailing language norms, policies and ideologies. The authors draw on research on pluri- and multilingualism within education studies, as well as post- and decolonial theoretical contributions to the research on the role of language in education and knowledge production, to provide evidence that decentring cannot happen until learners have been given the tools to identify which sorts of centring dynamics and conditions are salient to their learning and (trans)languaging.

Author Biography

Heidi Bojsen is Associate Professor at Roskilde University, Denmark. Her research in plurilingual learning and communication, and its ties with epistemological decentring is inspired by the works of Caribbean, Maghrebian and West African intellectuals. With Ismaël Compaoré she directs the international research network Media, Security Crises and Youth in West Africa.

Petra Daryai-Hansen is Associate Professor and coordinator of cross-disciplinary courses and degrees at the Department of English, German and Romance Studies, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Her main research area is foreign language education with specific focus on plurilingual education, Content and Language Integrated Learning, intercultural education and teacher/student cognition.

Anne Holmen is Professor and Head of the Centre for Internationalisation and Parallel Language Use, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. She took part in the first longitudinal Danish study on the development of bilingualism in school-age children (the Koege-project) and in a number of Nordic collaborative projects, including school-related projects in Greenland.

Karen Risager is Professor Emerita in Cultural Encounters, Roskilde University, Denmark. Her research field is language and intercultural education from a transnational and global perspective. She has published widely, including Representations of the World in Language Textbooks (Multilingual Matters, 2018; re-published in China by Foreign Language Teaching and Research Publishing, 2021).