The purpose of the sabbatical was to produce a monograph ‘Postracial potentials: Language, identity, and epistemic justice in multilingual schools’ which synthesizes research on language, identity, and epistemic justice conducted over the last ten years in Cape Town schools. The monograph will be published by Bloomsbury Academic Publishing.

The postracial in South Africa is both an aspiration and a condition that allows racism to persist, a descriptor for a new set of racial arrangements shaped by shifts in the political economy and broader geopolitics. While race is still a key marker of privilege, the forms of social division are becoming increasingly complex. The new subaltern population includes those whose everyday life is extremely precarious, among them immigrants from elsewhere in Africa who are increasingly positioned as the new ‘other’. Along with formations of race, class, and other social categories, linguistic hierarchies and patterns of distribution of linguistic resources are rapidly changing. Schools are microcosms of these realities, of the daily encounters across difference and of the resulting frictions and creative dynamisms.

This monograph analyses the ways in which 10- to 14-year-olds in primary schools on the peripheries of Cape Town used their multilingual repertoires to forge new ways of living and learning together. A large body of recent sociolinguistic and educational research in the North has addressed the ways in which linguistic practices and repertoires constitute, reproduce or reconstruct social and classroom orders and enable or constrain access to knowledge. However southern contexts are hardly represented. Yet these contexts with long histories of encounters across difference and extensive experience of addressing diversity and multilingualism in classrooms have the potential to retrieve and reconstitute absences in theory, knowledge, representation, and forms of sociability.

The book illuminates the effects on learning and conviviality when learners are allowed to use all the linguistic resources at their disposal. It shows how a shift to a multilingual episteme enables the emergence of new ways of knowing and the strengthening of conviviality.

My original title contained the term ‘epistemic access’, that is, access to knowledge that institutions distribute. The term ‘epistemic access’ thus reflected a concern with the role of language in facilitating or constraining access to school disciplinary knowledge. Despite an enabling policy and decades of local and international research pointing to the crucial importance of the home language for learning in schools, the state follows colonial models and requires the 85% of learners in South Africa who do not speak English at home to switch to English as medium of instruction in Grade 4. This model combined with under-resourcing and -capacitation means that, twenty-five years after apartheid, educational reforms in South Africa have been unable to address systematic inequalities in education: the recent Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS 2016), an international benchmark test, found that 78% of South African Grade 4 children could not read for meaning. Moreover, only 1% of the 2006 cohort leaving school in 2017 obtained a pass sufficient for a Science degree. These figures suggest that the majority of learners have only the most superficial ability to engage with school knowledge, that is, to negotiate it, appropriate it, transform it or transmit it effectively to others. In this way, their ability to make epistemic contributions is both significantly reduced and invisibilized. This form of injustice perpetuates colonial ideologies of who it is that can legitimately know and through what language. It has significant implications for socio-economic and political participation as well as perceptions of self-worth.

Thus, as the project developed, it became apparent that ‘epistemic access’ was too narrow a term to capture the material consequences of inadequate educational provision. Building on the work of Miranda Fricker and Boaventura De Sousa Santos, among others, I reframed the issue as one of epistemic injustice, that is, a wrong done to someone in their capacity as a knower. I suggest that current language-in-education policies and practices remove from the majority of speakers of languages other than English their capacity to be recognized both as knowers and as givers of knowledge. For Fricker, this form of injustice constitutes exclusion from the core of what it is to know. In historically racialised contexts such as South Africa, it also constitutes an ethical dysfunction in that it perpetuates raciolinguistic perceptions of African languages and their speakers.

The title therefore now uses the term ‘epistemic justice’, defined here as an ethical project of reversing epistemic exclusions, mitigating epistemic harm, and seeking parity of epistemic authority for historically oppressed or marginalized speakers and knowers. My argument is that postcolonial contexts such as South Africa, in which multilingualism is seen as the norm rather than an anomaly, might point the way to constructing more egalitarian and ethical conditions for learning in all classrooms characterized by high levels of diversity and mobility.

A key result from the project is therefore to show what happens when a school changes from a monolingual to a multilingual episteme, recognizing multilingualism as an epistemic resource. Findings show how learners previously subjected to forms of epistemic harm, manifest in repeated grade failure and repetition along with silencing or ridicule in class, can flourish under these conditions, constructing new paths to knowledge and new relations of knowing.

A second major finding was the ways in which learners used their linguistic repertoires as identity-building resources and as a means of shaping new interaction orders, restructuring hierarchies of social and linguistic value, and sometimes resignifying racial categories in the interests of conviviality. Here, the contribution of the project is to show how, in learning and playing together, learners construct new social, moral and epistemic orders. It could be argued that these are examples of Fanon’s postcolonial cosmopolitanism ‘from below’: postcolonial in that it remembers the past, emerges from its contradictions and continues to be shaped by those contradictions. An example of such contradictions is that in some schools the transnationalism that was fundamental to Fanon’s humanism, the tolerance for difference and hospitality to strangers, was sometimes compromised. Nevertheless, these are forms of cosmopolitanism that hold the potential to create new terms for recognisability and ethical engagement.

Thirdly, as is apparent from the above, the project shows how linguistic, social and academic identities mutually constitute one another: how a radical shift in the values attached to languages enables new ways of knowing and also strengthens emergent ways of being human. This work thus shows the potential of more heteroglossic and less stratified sites to enrich the sociological imagination, to offer insights about possibilities for change. It points to invisibilized processes of cultural and educational production which could lay the basis for creating new conditions of epistemic justice, more socially just pedagogies, and a decolonial ethics of care.

A number of questions have been generated by the project, among them: how do we recognize, theorise and build on elements of emerging new orders? What are the conditions in which these new orders emerge? What new norms are possible, and how are they wrought? What kind of research can produce the new knowledges necessary to reconstitute absences in theory, knowledge and representation, to critique and replace destructive institutional structures, classifications, policies and the practical technologies that sustain them? These are the kinds of questions that I have taken up with local and international colleagues.
At the beginning of my sabbatical, I presented part of this research at the International Congress of Linguists ICL20, 2-6 July 2018, Cape Town. Here I was part of a workshop on raciolinguistics chaired by Prof John Rickford of Stanford University. This led to further meetings with Prof Rickford during my later visit to Berkeley University and introductions to other key scholars in the field.

In the spring of 2019, I was a visiting scholar at the Graduate School of Education, University of California, Berkeley which is at the forefront of developments in language, race, and migration and their entanglements with education. This visit was exceptionally valuable in making possible critical discussions of emergent theorizations in the monograph as well as expanding contacts with scholars from a number of others universities in the region. Towards the end of my stay, I presented a seminar on the research underpinning chapters 3 and 4 of my book and received invaluable feedback which helped me further develop my argument. At the end of this research stay, I presented a different part of the book in a paper ‘Linguistic ethnography and the public good: Constructing cosmopolitanism from below in South African primary schools’ at the Georgetown Roundtable on Linguistics and the Public Good, 29-31 March, in Washington DC. These interactions have enriched both my research and my teaching, refining and deepening my understanding of possibilities for transformative educational policies and practices.

An immediate outcome of these academic contacts and the questions emerging from this project is a symposium I have organized ‘Spaces of otherwise’? South-North dialogues on languaging, race, (im)mobilities’ to be held in Stockholm in May 2020, including scholars from Berkeley, Stanford and UCLA as well from universities in Australia, Brazil, India, Mexico, Mali, Mozambique, Sweden and South Africa. This symposium aims to bring into dialogue scholars of the global South and North concerned with the material consequences of language, race, and structurally induced (im)mobility in education and other contexts of engagement. It seeks to explore the transformative potential of multilingualism as ontology and epistemology, investigating, for example, how different forms of multilingualism may transform ethical engagements with others or alternatively may solidify and deepen inequality.

A Special Issue for the journal Language, Culture and Society is planned out of this symposium, as well as a second, follow-up symposium which has been accepted for the World Congress of Applied Linguistics (AILA) in Groningen, the Netherlands, in August 2020.