Reclaiming Voice: Translanguaging as Resistance to the white Listening Subject

• In Event: Disrupting the Language of Power: Translanguaging, Whiteness, and Educational Futures

Abstract

Objectives

This paper positions translanguaging as a form of resistance to the white listening subject, emphasizing how dominant listening practices in language education reflect and reproduce raciolinguistic ideologies. Focusing on classrooms—particularly those centered on English—this analysis critiques how assessments of listening and comprehension routinely privilege proximity to white, standardized norms, reinforcing racialized hierarchies under the guise of linguistic objectivity.

Theoretical Perspective(s)

Rather than treating translanguaging as a neutral communicative strategy, the paper frames it as a political act—one that challenges the logics of clarity, fluency, and legitimacy embedded in white listening expectations. Translanguaging unsettles dominant notions of what it means to “make sense,” foregrounding the ways racialized speakers are often over-interpreted, misheard, or selectively understood in order to preserve existing power structures.

Methods/Modes of Inquiry

Engaging Gerald’s (2022) work on raciolinguistic justice and Matias’s (2016) critiques of whiteness in educational practice, the paper interrogates how the demand to be “understood” is itself fraught—tied to settler colonial values of legibility, order, and control. Who gets to decide what counts as understanding? What forms of linguistic expression are deemed legitimate, and which are dismissed as incoherent or incomplete?

Scholarly Significance

Ultimately, this paper calls for a reimagining of pedagogical approaches to listening—ones that do not position understanding as a unidirectional process of decoding racialized speech through white frameworks, but rather as a shared, contested, and relational practice. In doing so, it centers linguistic agency, opens space for epistemic disobedience, and advocates for liberatory language practices that resist assimilationist pressures.

Connection to Conference Theme

By foregrounding translanguaging as a disruptive force rather than a merely inclusive one, the paper engages in the work of unforgetting the monolingual and colonial histories that shape dominant notions of language and comprehension. In doing so, it imagines new possibilities for pedagogies that challenge the ideological underpinnings of comprehension itself and push toward a more just and expansive vision of what language education can be, aligning with a reimagined future for education research.

Author

• JPB Gerald, Hunter College