Symbolic annihilation: processes influencing English language policy and teaching practice

Abstract

Using a critical approach, I discuss the socioeconomic power impact of capitalism, neoliberalism, and globalization in the teaching of English as a foreign language (EFL) in Colombia, described as a symbolic annihilation process. I argue how these three constructs have influenced language policy-decisions making processes and classroom practices by providing documentation from an 8-month critical ethnographic study. This research was interested in understanding participants’ experiences, as well as exposing the inequalities they faced in a marginalized context in which ‘death’ seems to be the norm. This article theorizes that a necropolitical process has been enacted not only on the human bodies of teachers and students but as a subtle source of political power that operates to eliminate, transform and dismantle the possibilities for teacher autonomy, employment possibilities and choice of languages to be learned. I conclude by describing how teachers counter this necropolitical power by responding to their school realities.