Ryuko Kubota’s research while affiliated with University of British Columbia and other places

Since the 1990s Ryuko Kubota has extensively researched race, identity, and critical approaches to teacher development in the area of Applied Linguistics (AL). More recently, her last publications include the relevance of translanguaging and ongoing work with the Sister Scholars. As the result of our interest in Kubota’s extremely significant discussions, in this interview, Kubota points out the challenges AL has faced in the last years, as well as the complexities of working in the Global North. Besides, she provides compelling insights in antiracist pedagogy and the role of Freire in English language teaching.

This chapter re-examines the role of world Englishes (WE) in today's English language teaching, highlighting its pedagogical applications. It first provides a brief overview of the theoretical development of WE and neighboring/overlapping fields. This is followed by a summary of WE's pedagogical foci, after which it identifies major stumbling blocks that impede the actualization of WE-informed pedagogy. It then highlights classroom innovations that challenge those obstacles while contextually applying WE elements to instruction. The chapter concludes by responding to the critique of WE, and advocates strategic use of the WE framework that utilizes its theoretical limitations for pedagogical purposes.

During the last 20 years, Critical Inquiry in Language Studies has played an important role in advancing research on critical applied linguistics. Although the level of scholarly interest in critical research and its visibility have increased, issues that critical research has attempted to problematize, such as normative ideologies of language and language education, continue to dominate policies, practices, and ordinary people’s consciousness in the real world. Critical approaches to research should be grounded in praxis, namely, committed reflection and action for transformation. In order to further promote critical language studies with a vision of praxis, it is necessary to amplify a synergy between producing scholarly knowledge within academe and making efforts to put the knowledge into practice through concrete actions for transformation in the real world. This article examines some challenges that scholars face in forging the synergy, including institutional constraints and neoliberal expectations that dissociate research from local impact. Proposed ideas for praxis-oriented scholarly work include, but are certainly not limited to, decolonizing our minds, paying attention to and intentionally making a commitment to transformation, actively engaging with public scholarship for knowledge mobilization, legitimizing and encouraging multilingual scholarship, changing institutional expectations and practices, and actively connecting with communities.

The field of language education has mobilized diversity paradigms during the last several decades. Paradigms, such as world Englishes, English as a lingua franca, and translanguaging, have illuminated how linguistic forms and practices vary across locations, contexts, and individual linguistic repertoires. Although they aim to raise teachers’ and students’ engagement with linguistic heterogeneity, they are largely founded on the postmodern/poststructuralist valorization of linguistic hybridity and fluidity, which tends to neglect language users and thus overlooks the human differences that also inform that heterogeneity. True linguistic diversity and justice can be attained by both problematizing structural obstacles and recognizing that ideologies and structures are entrenched in unequal and unjust relations of power regarding race, gender, class, and sexuality, which influence diverse language users to communicate in certain ways. This conceptual paper problematizes the conventional focus on language in the discourse of linguistic diversity within language education, especially English language teaching, and proposes that we pay greater attention to language users. While recognizing that social justice is not a universal notion, we endorse an antiracist justice-informed contextualized approach to teaching about linguistic diversity by illuminating how diversity and power among language users as well as broader structures impact the nature of communication.

Issues of race, racialisation, and racism have been increasingly raised in the field of applied linguistics and language education especially in the contexts of North America and other English-dominant regions. This special issue contributes to this scholarly and professional discussion by focusing on English language teaching (ELT) in Asian contexts, where ELT is aggressively promoted with the prevalence of White native-English-speakerism which is not only brought by many sojourner teachers but also endorsed by Asian learners and teachers themselves. It presents qualitative studies that critically examine how racialisation, racism, and raciolinguistic ideologies influence racially diverse teachers’ identities, desires, experiences, and resistance. This introductory article provides an overview of the topic and general themes of the articles in the special issue that illuminate contact zones between local Asian learners/teachers and sojourner teachers from diverse racial backgrounds, including Black, Asian, and bi-racial. These identities are positioned vis-à-vis Whiteness that reinforces native speakerism. The articles collectively draw our attention to intersectionality, identify challenges, and envision possible approaches for educational transformation.

Antiracism constitutes an important component of social justice in ELT. Yet, discussing racism is often evaded, leaving the concept of racism inadequately understood. This article aims to illuminate racism and invite readers to engage in race-aware discourses and enact critical antiracism. I first outline key issues, including what race is, how race and language are related, and what different forms of racism exist. The complex nature of racism invites ELT professionals to engage in critical antiracist pedagogy, which requires de-essentializing, de-simplifying, de-silencing, and decolonizing antiracism. Critical antiracist pedagogy recognizes intersectionality, different forms of racism, the need for explicit discussion, and the privilege that settlers of color possess in settler colonialism, the latter of which indicates the need for forging solidarity among racialized groups. It also requires critical reflexivity of complicity and privilege involved in antiracist enactment. I provide pedagogical recommendations founded on a dialogic approach with situational ethics and reflexivity.1

Recent scholarship in sociolinguistics and language education has examined how race and language intersect each other and how racism influences linguistic and educational practices. While racism is often conceptualized in terms of individual and institutional injustices, a critical examination of another form of racism—epistemological racism—problematizes how racial inequalities influence our knowledge production and consumption in academe. Highlighting the importance of the intersectional nature of identity categories, this conceptual article aims to draw scholars’ attention on how epistemological racism marginalizes and erases the knowledge produced by scholars in the Global South, women scholars of color, and other minoritized groups. In today’s neoliberal culture of competition, scholars of color are compelled to become complicit with white Euro-American hegemonic knowledge, further perpetuating the hegemony of white knowledge while marginalizing women scholars of color. Valorizing non-European knowledge and collectivity as an alternative framework also risks essentialism and male hegemony. Conversely, the ethics promoted by black feminism emphasizes a personal ethical commitment to antiracism. Epistemological antiracism invites scholars to validate alternative theories, rethink our citation practices, and develop critical reflexivity and accountability.

The impact of neoliberalism on language education has recently attracted scholars' attention. Linguistic entrepreneurship is a conceptual lens through which neoliberal implications for language learning and use can be investigated. This commentary offers comments on common threads of themes running through the four articles in this special issue. While neoliberal ideas provide people with hopes and desires to socioeconomically succeed through management of their linguistic resources, the neoliberal system reproduces inequalities for language learners, teachers, and users as well as for multiple languages. However, the perceived superior status of English that often serves as the foundation for linguistic entrepreneurship is considered to be a social imagination, given the complexity of global geopolitics and the multiple directions of global human mobility. Also, the neoliberal engagement with linguistic entrepreneurship-such as commodified language learning or writing in English for academic publication-often deviates from the genuine aims of learning and research. Such deviation also applies to our own scholarly activities. This recognition encourages us to explore how subversive actions can be made possible for not only language learners/users but also researchers ourselves.