Social structures, everyday interactions, and subjectivity—where (and how) does decolonizing begin?—Attending to desires, fears, and pains
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When ‘decoloniality’ and ‘decolonizing’ have become words frequently used in conferences and journal publications in our field of Applied Linguistics/Language and Education, as well as on many academics’ lips, we start to worry about how they too can be easily co-opted as buzz words emptied of their critical meaning and actional potential and become appropriated as discourses with symbolic capital to add to one’s portfolio for academic promotion. What Kubota (2016) has cautioned about translanguaging can be equally true of the scholarship on decoloniality: … its knowledge is becoming another canon – a canon which is integrated into a neoliberal capitalist academic culture of incessant knowledge production and competition for economic and symbolic capital (p. 475). In this paper, we write about the pains, memories, fears, hopes and desires associated with experiencing colonizing acts across different timescales: in one’s everyday life (e.g. micro aggressions in social interactions), in how one’s own sense of self and the world (subjectivity) is shaped and reshaped (e.g. through academic socialization), and in embarking on what can be done to change the various social structures of (both colonial and other kinds of) domination and subordination. The journey is never purely academic or intellectual as it is always embodied, evoking painful memories, fears and discomfort. And from this journey of sorting out what has happened to us (and many people like us) who have been subjected to the exercising of colonial power mediated through many diverse agents, across many shorter-timescales happenings as well as longer-timescales events and processes (Lemke, 2000, 2008), we aim at finding a pathway ahead that is over and beyond just research publications and presentations. No doubt, research publications and presentations are important as a starting point, but they must lead to some further actions for them to be truly decolonizing (and not just ‘knowledge about decolonizing’). Then we’ll propose a tentative thinking and planning tool to work with teachers, students, administrators, policy makers and most importantly ourselves, to grasp what it means/what it takes, and simultaneously begin to work, to ‘decolonize’ ourselves, our curriculum, our pedagogy, our scholarship and then gradually our field of Language Studies and Education.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it