Doctoral level

Advanced Studies in Linguistic Ethnography

Linguistic Ethnography

Dynamics of Multilingualism

Bilingualism from an Educational Perspective

 

Masters level

Bilingualism in Society

Critical Sociolinguistic Approaches to Bi- and Multilingualism

Advanced Studies in Critical Sociolinguistics

MA thesis course

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

• Towards Epistemic Justice: Constructing Knowers in Multilingual Classrooms 

  2022. Caroline Kerfoot, Basirat Olayemi Bello-Nonjengele. Applied Linguistics

  Article

  In this study of a postcolonial school, we expand understandings of epistemic justice from the perspective of language, addressing issues of know-ledge, understanding, and participation in communicative practices. We suggest that monoglossic language-in-education policies constitute a form of epistemic injustice by diminishing learners’ ability to make epistemic contributions, a capacity central to human value. We further suggest that translanguaging in formal school settings generally promotes epistemic access rather than epistemic justice, leaving value hierarchies and relations of knowing unchanged. Conversely, this study presents linguistic ethnographic data from a three-year project where learners could choose their language of learning to Grade 6 and use all languages in subject classrooms. We analyse how a Grade 6 learner used laminated, multilingual stances to construct others as knowers, negotiate epistemic authority, and promote solidarity. We argue that she thereby constructed new decolonial relations of knowing and being. Moreover, the shift from monolingual to multilingual episteme, which substantially improved performance overall, enabled new social, epistemic, and moral orders to emerge from below, laying the basis for greater epistemic justice. 

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• Decolonizing Higher Education: Multilingualism, Linguistic Citizenship and Epistemic Justice

  2021. Christopher Stroud, Caroline Kerfoot. Language and Decoloniality in Higher Education, 19-46

  Chapter

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• Making absences present: Language policy from below

  2020. Caroline Kerfoot. Multilingual Margins 7 (1), 69-76

  Article

  A commentary on the Special Issue ‘Grassroots participation and agency in bilingual education processes in Mozambique’. This Special Issue continues the decolonial task of making absences present: of bringing into the frame the linguistic and other knowledges traditionally excluded from educational policy and curricula, and pointing the way to more ethical and equitable forms of knowledge exchange among community members, learners, teachers, researchers, and state actors.

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• Making and Shaping Participatory Spaces

  2018. Caroline Kerfoot. The Multilingual Citizen, 263-288

  Chapter

  In South Africa, democratic consolidation involves not only building a new state but also new interfaces between state and society. In order to strengthen the agency of citizens at these interfaces, recent approaches to development stress the notion of ‘participatory citizenship’ which recasts citizenship as practised rather than given. The purpose of this paper is to explore the links between such practices of participatory citizenship and possibilities for literacy and language education in state adult learning centres. It draws on an impact study of a capacity building programme for educators of adults in the Northern Cape Province and uses interviews and document analysis to explore the ways in which meaning-making unfolded in new participatory spaces. It argues that such processes can be seen as  a form of ‘linguistic citizenship’ in which individuals and groups re-shaped the multilingual representational resources available to them to validate the authority of subaltern actors and mobilise collective agency. It uses the concept of resemiotisation (Iedema 1999) to investigate how the choice of different semiotic complexes enabled or constrained participation and to offer a set of principles for reconceptualising the provision of adult basic education.

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• Entangled discourses

  2017. Caroline Kerfoot, Kenneth Hyltenstam.

  Book (ed)

  This book uniquely explores the shifting structures of power and unexpected points of intersection – entanglements – at the nexus of North and South as a lens through which to examine the impact of global and local circuits of people, practices and ideas on linguistic, cultural and knowledge systems. The volume considers the entanglement of North and South on multiple levels in the contemporary and continuing effects of capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism, in the form of silenced or marginalized populations, such as refugees, immigrants, and other minoritised groups, and in the different orders of visibility that make some types of practices and knowledge more legitimate and therefore more visible. It uses a range of methodological and analytical frames to shed light on less visible histories, practices, identities, repertoires, and literacies, and offer new understandings for research and for language, health care, education, and other policies and practices.

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• Game changers? Multilingual learners in a Cape Town primary school

  2016. Caroline Kerfoot, Basirat Bello-Nonjengele. Applied Linguistics 37 (4), 451-473

  Article

  This article engages with Bourdieu’s notion of field as a ‘space of play’ to explore what happens to the educational field and the linguistic regimes operating within it in a site in which new discourses and practices of identity, language, ‘race’, and ethnicity become entangled with local economies of meaning. The context is a primary school in a low-income neighbourhood in Cape Town, South Africa. We draw on multilingual classroom and playground data from observations, interviews, and audio-recorded peer interactions among Grade 6 learners to illuminate the strategic mobilization of linguistic repertoires in encounters across difference: as identity-building resources and as means of shaping new interaction orders, restructuring hierarchies of value, subverting indexicalities, and sometimes resignifying racial categories. We further draw attention to a set of circumstances in which local actors have the potential to change, not only the rules of the game, but the game itself.

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Show all publications by Caroline Kerfoot at Stockholm University