The political economy of language education research (or the lack thereof): Nancy Fraser and the case of translanguaging

ABSTRACT

This article problematizes the politics of language education research with regard to social injustice, which is not only cultural, but also material. Its starting position is that most language education research today is, following Nancy Fraser, recognition oriented, in that it takes on culture- and identity-based injustices such as racism, gender bias, religious bias, and LGBTQ-phobia. It does not, however, have much to say about more economic and class-based injustices—redistribution issues—and it does not draw on the political economy literature essential to any attempt to explore such issues. The author develops these arguments and then applies them to a specific area of language education research that has become popular in recent years, translanguaging. It concludes that while translanguaging research may deal with recognition issues, in particular ethnolinguistic racism, it is not likely to alter in any way the underlying the current capitalist order that is causing deep and profound damage to the social fabric of societies worldwide and surely is the most likely cause of the poverty in which many translanguagers live. Language education research thus needs to work at the level of recognition, as it already does, while also taking on redistribution issues.

KEYWORDS:

• Nancy Fraser
• political economy
• redistribution
• transformative education
• translanguaging

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Adriana Patiño, John Gray, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Notes

1. Fraser explains what she means by the political as a third kind of justice as follows:“I mean political in a more specific, constitutive sense, which concerns the scope of the state’s jurisdiction and decision rules by which it structures contestation. Then political in this sense furnishes the stage on which struggles over distribution and recognition are played out. Establishing criteria of social belonging, and thus determining who counts as a member, the political dimension of justice specifies the reach of these other dimensions: it tells us whom is included in, and who excluded from, the circle of those entitled to a just distribution and reciprocal recognition” (Fraser, 2010, p. 17).

2. Although it is by no means uncommon. See Davis and Phyak (2017), who wrote about translanguaging in a similar way from a language policy perspective.