Translanguaging for more-than-English sustainability transitions

Abstract

Critical sustainability research pays insufficient attention to the need for language justice in action toward sustainable cities. Addressing this gap can increase inclusive action competence in sustainability. Including diverse languages, along with the work that goes into communicating effectively across languages, can counter the disproportionate dominance of English in sustainability. This is an underexamined aspect of the sustainability knowledge-action gap. Language diversity is large and growing in cities and professions pursuing sustainable development. While English is the lingua franca of sustainability science, learners and actors engage in translanguaging or moving across languages to inform their understanding and communication in culturally and personally relevant ways. Recognising the effort that goes into translanguaging and highlighting language-specific entry points to sustainability transition can deepen the meaningfulness of local sustainability efforts. We designed a workshop to engage the translanguaging competencies of interdisciplinary sustainability learners. Results demonstrate that students were able to build shared understanding through different languages and relate the concepts across languages. This was inclusive of cultural values and personally rewarding for participants. The workshop additionally exposed students to sustainability terms in a language foreign to all of them, Finnish. Students were able to relate meanings to a spectrum of sustainability-related actions that were more readily accessible to them than conventional English language action agendas for sustainability. This workshop demonstrates a replicable methodology to increase attention to diverse languages for activating sustainability agendas. The process of translanguaging, moving across languages to communicate and convey meaning, holds unrecognised value for inclusive sustainability action competence.

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 — 2 citations exist upstream.

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