Racist ideas about language, which have discursively denigrated the speech of minoritised communities, are historically embedded in schools and society in England. In this talk, I traced some of the histories of these ideas, in terms of how language and race have been co-constructed to craft notions of il/legitimate personhood under the logics of raciolinguistic ideologies. Using a raciolinguistic genealogy to show how the present is shaped by the past, I showed how raciolinguistic ideologies were a foundational tenet of British colonialism and chattel slavery, where bestial, infantilising, and criminalising discourses about language were deployed to justify the categorisation of racialised bodies as sub-human and threatening. I demonstrated how contemporary education policy in England is closely tied to these very same discourses, for example, in policies related to the so-called ‘word gap’, and in the work of Ofsted, the schools inspectorate. Through a genealogical approach, I uncovered how these contemporary policies are shaped by raciolinguistic ideologies of the ‘past’, which continue to position racialised speakers under sonic surveillance, marking them out for remediation and punishment.
There was time at the end of the talk for group discussion, and there was an opportunity to explore how raciolinguistic ideologies might relate to our own educational contexts and lived experience.
Dr Ian Cushing is a Senior Lecturer in English and Education at Edge Hill University, UK. His research examines how language ideologies are employed in the production and perpetuation of inequality, with a particular focus on schools.
For further information, please contact William.Hardman@liverpool.ac.uk.
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