Language Policies and (Dis)Citizenship: Rights, Access, Pedagogies

Vaidehi Ramanathan

This volume brings together some leading female scholars writing in areas relating to language policies, globalization, citizenship and pedagogic practices. While each of these domains is well researched, only recently has scholarship begun to address them in relational terms, where implications of investigations in one domain spill into and have consequences for the others. My primary aim with bringing these scholars together under the covers of one book is to probe the borders of our collective understandings about 'citizenship'. Seeking to go beyond viewing 'citizenship' in terms of the passport one holds or one's immigration or visa status, the volume posits that this concept needs to be understood in terms of 'being able to participate fully'. The fuller implications of this phrase, needless to say, depend on local conditions – policies, pedagogic engagements and borders – that do and do not create equitable conditions. In this sense, then, 'citizenship' needs to be understood in very much more than the usual teleological terms – where it is a goal to be attained (to 'become' a citizen or acquire citizenship) – to where it gets understood in terms of what it allows one to do, and where it is viewed as a process amidst tensions, fluid contexts and diverse meanings. Doing so means turning our gaze to where everyday instances of teaching practices, institutionalized discourses and rights awareness become more salient, and where our conjoined sense of civic citizenship gets attired differently. It also means becoming acutely alert to ongoing contexts of (dis)citizenship (Pothier & Devlin, 2006).

While applied linguistics has produced scholarship in citizenship testing and nations (McNamara & Roever, 2006; Shohamy & Kanza, 2009; Stroud, 2001; Stroud & Heugh, 2004; Wodak, 1998) and language policies (DeFina & King, 2011; Hornberger, 2008; Lane, 2009; McCarty, 2011; Menken, 2008; Ramanathan, 2005), the concept of '(dis)citizenship' has tended to remain underexplored. The term itself raises a variety of questions: under what local conditions does 'dis-citizenship' happen? What roles do language policies and pedagogic practices play? What kinds of margins and borders keep humans from fully participating? Embedded in such questions are concerns about access and rights. With this in mind, it seems fitting to have this volume consist primarily of women scholars, since women, the world over, know 'dis-citizenship' or have strong historical understandings of what it means to not be able to participate fully. While the volume does not specifically address issues of gender, it draws on what the female gender across our planet collectively knows, and we bring this varied and complex understanding to how (dis)citizenship gets enacted, reproduced, questioned, and changed in our multivalent realms of engagements (see my Afterword in this volume for more details on gender and (dis)citizenship).

Searching for a More Inter-related Understanding of Citizenship

Passages from feudal, colonized subjects to modern, agentive citizens are the world over muddled and untidy passages, tense with unfinished conversations about rights and obligations, personal and public lives, individual autonomy and group identities. Our various cultures – institutional, local, national and international – promulgate these distinctions in very particular narratives, which tend to elicit only a narrow range of interpretations (Gee, 1990). These narratives are, and ought to be, open to contestation and retellings. How do we conceptualize our current transnational belongings in ways that go beyond paying lip service to calls for international treaties and global solidarity? The corporeal realities of extreme poverty, exclusions and repressions still remain. Our thinking seems to still be stuck at countering these distinctions on their terms.

My search for a path ahead, then, begins from this difficult, sometimes unpalatable benchmark, and seeks to move our cognitions to another plane so as to complicate our current understandings about citizenship. The world is full of so-called 'undocumented' people. They are the shadowy masses that we do not want to acknowledge, whose grievances we do not want to hear lest they counter our own narratives, whose existence on the peripheries of fuller participation are threatening to us because we are caught up with our stories of limited resources. If we allow ourselves to think of these 'shadowy figures' differently – where histories and languages are foregrounded – a very different picture of citizenship emerges. However, we would need to take a few early steps to re-cognize ourselves. As a start, first we would need to be open to the possibility of a more historicized understanding of our places in the world. We are, each of us, a point in history, with connections to our pasts and a look towards the future. Second, we would need to be open to what translation theory has to offer us about in-between spaces. We are always between languages and meanings. Third, we would have to take account of how language policies in the various realms of our existences serve to draw borders and exclude. At first glance, these might seem like most flimsy guides with which to address citizenship. Yes, you say, of course, we are products of the tellings and retellings of our national...