Nodal frontlines and multisidedness. Contemporary multilingualism scholarship and beyond

Abstract

At an overarching level this paper attempts to draw attention to emerging trends in the humanities where alternative ways of doing science reconfigure epistemological traditions and research methodologies, the role of intellectuals and their engagement with current conditions of the world, including ways in which scholars gazes are constituted. Drawing on what we call a Second Wave of Southern Perspectives (SWaSP), that sees the entanglements of two clusters–the first of which comprises contemporary ways of reading anticolonial, postcolonial and decolonial thinkers with offerings of Southern perspectives, and a second where contemporary theories about language and communication that considers their cultural and social dimensions, this paper calls for a mobile global-centric gazing. More specifically this paper actualises ontoepistemological trajectories that feed into the scholarship about multilingualism, looking at its different possible beings and becomings that enable a variety of ways of conceptualising multilingual practices. We do this by first presenting a brief review about recent discussions related to the concept of repertoires in the field of multilingualism and pathways that can move these debates in different directions. After this, we present possible ways to go beyond the sociolinguistics of multilingualism, by considering contemporary challenges in the knowledge production enterprise.