Language and Education Reading Group

This network was funded from March 2023 to July 2023.

Language is an integral part of identity formation and educational institutions are crucial sites where this process unfolds. How are students socialised through language? What role does language play in creating hierarchies or challenging the status quo within educational institutions? How do nation-states navigate language politics within vastly multilingual landscapes and what impact do these have on their populations? These were some of the questions we hoped to explore in the Language and Education Reading Group.

The Language and Education Reading Group aimed to bring together scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds to foster dialogue between the different ways in which language and education are studied and understood, with perspectives from sociology, anthropology, education research and policy, and linguistic and sociolinguistic studies, among others. The Group encouraged participation from diverse regions.

The Group met every alternate week in Oxford and map out key literature on language and education through collaborative work. This reading group aimed to produce three distinct outputs 1) produce an annotated and thematically organised Reading List, which can serve as a research and teaching resource; 2) initiate a network of scholars from different regions of the Global South working in the fields of language and education, and form a long-term and meaningful collaboration; and 3) work towards future academic and non-academic publications (e.g. ThinkPieces for the Education South Asia Initiative).

Convenors: 

Abhishek Ranjan Datta abhishek.datta@lincoln.ox.ac.uk, Mohini Gupta mohini.gupta@mansfield.ox.ac.uk

Community member: Dr Uma Pradhan 

Language and Education Reading Group was part of the TORCH Critical-Thinking Communities