Linguistic Ideologies: The Politics of Language and Worker's Resistance

Linguistic Ideologies:The Politics of Language and Worker’s

Resistance

Khaled Islaih OISE / University of Toronto

Dissent and Resistance in the Workplace Conference Canadian Association for Work and Labour Studies

McMaster University, HamiltonOct 3-4, 2014

ObjectivesHighlight links between language

politics and organization of workRethink human labour as

multimodal phenomenaCritique official Canadian

language policies and ideologiesOffer suggestions to resist

dominant neoliberal monolinguistic ideologies in Canadian workplaces.

Linguistic Biography

Sociolinguistic Superdiversity

Globalization, immigration and new technologies are creating superdiversity within communities and workplaces.

New sociolinguistic order Challenging native

speakerism? Bakhtin’s dialogic

perspectives on language Challenging neoliberal

ideologies on language and multilingualism.

Multimodal Labour: The Politics of Language

Print literacy and Taylorization of work

Text mediates people’s ways of knowing and acting (Zurawski, 2012)

Multimodality is breaking body/landscape dichotomy (Davies, 2000)

Language is constitutive of work (Putnam, Nicotera 2009)

Worker’s Resistance Strategies

Translation is a key dimension of social life. Translate differently!

Information and media literacy for workers

Maker movement

Peer labour movement

Khaled Islaih

khaled.islaih@mail.utoronto.ca