there is no justice without linguistic justice
— April Baker-Bell
Honoring our Friend, Dr. Jon Henner, who departed our material world too soon and is sorely missed. Much of what we hope to embody in our dialogues and work is grounded in his stances and lived experiences.
The Need for Languaging in the Work of Liberation
The construct of ‘liberation’ is itself an invitation to create worlds and systems that do not yet exist - those in which “equity, fairness, and the implementation of systems for the allocation of goods and services, benefits, and rewards…support the full participation of each human and the promotion of their full humanness.” (Love, DeJong, Hughbanks, 2007; p. 1)
It is in this context of being our whole human selves that our language/ing* is positioned. Through languaging, we put our intellect on display, redefine our competence, create art in rhymes, invite outsiders to experience our narratives, and signal our need for help. Languaging transverses all socially constructed identities and the isms that impact their intersections. Languages are objectified, analyzed, and considered inert, or static, sets of structures, independent of the bodies of culture that manipulate them. Yet, languages and languaging are inextricably linked to meaning-building and establishing communities of belonging.
Despite the inextricable connection between language, thought, and social connection, explicit discussions about language (and public agreement of an “standardized level” to languaging) are omitted from most justice work. In fact, many forms of linguistic discrimination that had their roots in historical events dating back to the colonial era remain socially acceptable now-a-days. We remain radically hopeful that we can, together, co-create an imaginative space where languaging and liberation are intertwined.
~María Rosa Brea
*Languaging (lenguajear; Garcia, 2010; Maturana, 1985)- We are choosing to center language as action and embodiment to signify that people redefine their communication to represent ‘what it is they want to be’ (Garcia, 2010; p.519). To that end, our stance is that language is neither an object nor a standardized objective. It is recursive and dynamic; its connotations and iterations live and are co-created in interactions. We live language.
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The need for this space stems from our own need to engage in communities that together re-imagine variability as a feature in all languaging and multi-modality in communicative repertoires as assets in schools and communities.
Legacies of Colonialism and Imperialism
Linguistic Genocide Repression of indigenous people in the Western hemisphere and enslaved Africans and their descendants who become targets of linguistic eradication and assimilation, as part of federal policies, boarding schools, and/or being transported away from their original communities in other global spheres.
Linguistic Oppression- English-only, academic English-only, and mainstream English-only policies that continue to inferiorize and silence people’s lenguas maternas (mother tongues), (home) languaging practices, and non-speaking modalities of communication.
Past and Present Dominant Ideologies Beliefs that uphold the myth of the supremacy of a standardized, academic, spoken language find residence in our curricula, assessment tools, and pedagogical practices, directly impacting communities of immigrants, refugees, incarcerated, disabled, LGBTQ+, and racialized learners
Birth and Mainteance of a “Culture of Forgetting” - The disregard of rituals, roots, routines, ways of understanding and making sense of the world; the forgetting of ourselves. Through this invisible curriculum, all individuals and especially minoritized youth in academic institutions are expected to uncritically reject their linguistic roots, rituals, and routines, while being rendered invisible in the histories they learn and, more critically, being intentionally overlooked in contexts that involve human rights (due process under the law, access to health care, active participation in cultural democracy) (Darder, 2016).
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Our Center for LiberatED Languaging (CLL) aims to:
(a) interrogate and dismantle learned beliefs about what constitutes ‘good ability in language use’ that are infiltrated in historical documents, empirical frameworks, curricula, and classroom practices and materials.
(b) engage in generative exploration, innovation, and integration of a variety of frameworks and pedagogical approaches in co-learning sessions
(c) invite the co-construction of our own linguistic liberation.
Language negotiates the way I know myself–what I believe I am capable of, how I know myself in relationship to others, what I can offer others, what I deserve from others in return. Language is where I am constructed as either possible or impossible.
To lose a language is to lose many things other than vocabulary. To lose a language is also to lose the body, the bodies of our ancestors and of our futures. What I mean is: Language is more than an extension of the body; it is the body energy and electricity, developed to carry the body’s memories, desires, needs, and imagination.
When a word is silenced, what happens to the bodies who spoke it? What happens to the bodies once carried in those erased words?
"Hear our languages, hear our voices"; McCarty, Nicholas, Chew, Diaz, Leonard, & White, 2018
To crip language is to embrace disabled ways of languaging. (see Henner and Robinson, 2023).