Troubling circulating discourses on planet earth. Attending to complexities through a mobile-loitering gaze

Abstract

This paper highlights the erasures of normal-languaging and normal-diversities that mark the contemporary human condition. Its aim is to make visible North-centric assumptions regarding the nature of language by asking what, when, why and where language exists and how it plays out in global-local, analogue-digital timespaces. In particular, the study presented in this paper troubles the interrelated ‘webs-of-understandings’ regarding language, identity and culture that are embedded in both traditional concepts and neologisms. It illuminates the looped taken-for-grantedness of established and emerging discourses in the Social Sciences and Humanities. Drawing attention to boundary-markings in scholars languaging that have become naturalized, the paper critically appraises how conceptual epistemic hegemonies continue to flourish across northern-southern places-spaces. It thus, also discusses the relevance of such questions in doing research itself. Inspired by an overarching reflection on various ‘turns’ (like the multilingual-, boundary – and mobility-turns), this paper calls for moving from North-centric knowledge regimes to engaging analytically with global-centric epistemologies where gazing from a mobile-loitering stance is key. This means that this paper poses uncomfortable and revised analytical–methodological questions that potentially destabilize existing global/universal understandings related to language, identity and culture.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 17 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.