Language Policy, (Anti)Racism, and Solidarity

• In Event: Language, Policy, and Resistance: Negotiating Linguistic Preservation and Integration in U.S. and Canadian Schools

Abstract

This paper is about building solidarity in language-policy activism. If racialized hierarchies of languages—and of the people who speak them—are so stable, then under what conditions is it possible to unite across difference and combat racial and linguistic stratification? The arguments in this paper are based on analysis of the Heritage Languages Program (HLP) in Ontario, Canada and the racialized conflicts over it between 1977–1987. Designed as a policy genealogy (Gale, 2001; Garland 2014; Haque, 2019), the project draws on materialist, anti-racist (Flores & Chaparro, 2018) and political-economic (Bale, 2015) approaches to language policy to examine how heritage-language policies served as sites for renewed racial ordering of, but also of anti-racist resistance, in Ontario schools.

Author

• Jeff Bale, OISE/University of Toronto
  Presenting Author