The organizer of the symposium is the research network Multilingualism in Education for Epistemic Justice and the research project Interrogating Epistemic (In)justice in Language Education. 

The aim with the symposium is to interrogate epistemic (in)justice in education as a growing intersectional field, in order to open new avenues of inquiry. Via lectures and discussions with scholars and practicians, we will scrutinize complexities and opportunities, given that the broad notion of education simultaneously may converge on and diverge from epistemic (in)justice in various ways.

Our focus is on learners at the margins, who are marginalized based on ableism, linguicism, racism, sexism, etc., where a specific focus will be on the role of language in education for epistemic (in)justice.

Everyone interested in this topic is welcome to participate!

Speakers

José Medina. Photo: Private.

Dr. José Medina is Walter Dill Scott Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University, with affiliations in African American Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies. His primary fields of expertise are critical philosophy of race, feminist and queer theory, social epistemology, and political philosophy. Medina has published five monographs, five edited (or co-edited) volumes, and over eighty articles and book chapters. His latest book, The Epistemology of Protest: Silencing, Epistemic Activism, and the Communicative Life of Resistance, came out with Oxford University Press in 2023. Previous books include The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations (Oxford University Press, 2013), recipient of the North-American Society for Social Philosophy Book Award.

Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta. Photo: Private.

Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta, a senior scholar of colour, has an explicit multidisciplinary and multi-field background. She has been full-professor since 2007 at the departments of Education, Gender Studies and the Rehabilitation Research Center – all at Örebro University, Sweden, before joining her present position at Jönköping University, Sweden in 2017. Bagga-Gupta has held visiting professor and expert consultant positions at universities and research associations across northern-southern territories. Currently, she is visiting professor (2024-27) at both the SeDyL National Research Center (CNRS-IRD-INALCO), Paris, France, and MANUU National University, Hyderabad, India. 

Bagga-Gupta’s multidisciplinary research deals with issues pertaining to communication, identity, culture and learning from n/ethnographically framed, multi-scalar, sociocultural and decolonial framings. She is the editor of the forthcoming (spring 2025) Open Access 37-chapter Handbook PaDELS, The Palgrave Handbook of Decolonizing the Educational and Language Sciences. In addition to publishing extensively in different disciplinary and multidisciplinary areas, Bagga-Gupta is multilingual in oral, written and signed languages. Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta, ORCID

Johanna Ennser-Kananen. Photo: Private.

Johanna Ennser-Kananen is Associate Professor of English and Academy Research Fellow at the University of Jyväskylä’s Department of Language and Communication Studies. Her work focuses on linguistically and culturally sustaining language and teacher education, particularly on epistemic justice in educational contexts. This entails the deconstructing of white, Eurocentric, and anthropocentric norms and the search for more sustainable and community-guided ways of being an academic. Other areas of her interest and expertise include critical whiteness, intersections of environmental and language justice, and decolonial approaches to migration studies.

Irmelin Kjelaas. Photo: Private.

Irmelin Kjelaas is an applied linguist whose research concerns language and power in multilingual and multicultural educational contexts. Her research is mainly focused on newly arrived students in Norwegian schools, and encompasses studies of legislation and policy, textbooks, teachers' beliefs, teaching and assessment practices and students' experiences. Her work is situated within the field of critical sociolinguistics, and she primarily employs ethnographic methods.

Register by April 30

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