Unsettling Imperial Science: Centering Convivial Scholarship in Sociolinguistics

Abstract

<p>The universalizing posture of claims made by colonial approaches and their regimes of representation continues to inform most mainstream sociolinguistics research agendas and project designs. Such claims reflect an imperial scientific tradition that overlooks and marginalizes other ways of knowing, particularly those from communities of the global South. Decolonizing sociolinguistics entails doing at least three things. First, we must decolonize ourselves through critical reflection on our own practices and how such practices contribute to the continuation of inequalities in knowledge production and in society. Second is the need to develop new narratives, new words, new grammars, and new vocabularies for eliciting empirical data to support the suppositions and arguments we advance in our anti-conventional and anti-colonial theoretical approaches to language and society research. Such alternative trajectories require a decentering of the dominant (colonial/imperial) voice and an increase in other voices speaking from other equally valid approaches that are currently being overlooked. Third, decolonizing sociolinguistics entails developing new models that draw on a rich collection of thought from a broad spectrum of traditions of knowing. This is about promoting convivial scholarship through mobilizing diverse resources to advance collaborative engagements that link our academic pursuits to public interests, including the interests of marginalized, minority, and global Indigenous communities. Convivial scholarship says the paths we follow in doing sociolinguistics research must be those that are committed to re-membering and rehumanizing Indigenous and other Southern peoples subjected to more than 500 years of coloniality. Decolonizing sociolinguistics must, therefore, mean freeing the field from the colonial tradition of knowing by bringing back to the center historically marginalized Indigenous and Southern knowledge systems. The premise is that a sociolinguistics that works for all must open pathways and avenues for epistemic access and cognitive justice through valuing diverse founts of knowledges as key contours.</p>