African Studies Global Virtual Forum 2021-2022: Decoloniality and Southern Epistemologies
October 29, 2021, 7:00 am to 7:00 am
About the Forum
The Africa Studies Virtual Forum 2021-22, led by Dr. Sinfree Makoni, seeks to decenter hegemonic epistemologies and to decolonize the Western canon to facilitate other ways/waves of knowing. Through a series of online conversations, participants in the forum will challenge the notion of the "universal truth" and discuss how the only truth that is universal is the truth of complexity. To decolonize knowledge, epistemic perspectives need to be pluralistic in ontologies, cosmologies, and insights, and the emergence of Epistemologies of the South is one such response to the decolonial turn.
Join us from around the world, our speakers will discuss the multiple approaches taken in the humanitieis and social science scholarship to decolonize knowledges by paying attention to complexities, heterogeneities, and multiple ontologies.
Register in advance for this virtual forum here.
Identity, Linguistic Citizenship, and the African Storybook Initiative: A Decolonial Project?
Dr. Bonny Norton from the University of British Columbia will be presenting, "Identity, Linguistic Citizenship, and the African Storybook Initiative: A Decolonial Project?" on October 29 at 7:00am PST (10:00am EDT).
"As multilingual learners navigate these challenging times, they need to negotiate new identities in an increasingly digital world. Drawing on the conception of linguistic citizenship as "a Southern and decolonial concept" (Stroud, 2018, p. 18), my presentation invites conversation on two questions: What is the relationship between identity, linguistic citizenship, and the African Storybook Initiative? To what extent can the African Storybook initiative and the Global Storybooks project help in "recentering silenced voices from the Global South?" (Ndhlovu and Makalela, 2021).
In the presentation, I seek to make the case that while there are social structures that may constrain the development of multilingual learners' linguistic citizenship, digital stories in multiple languages may help learners claim the right to speak and be heard. Drawing on my work on the African Storybook Initiative (Norton and Welch, 2015) and the Global Storybooks project (Norton, Stranger-Johannessen, and Doherty, 2020), I discuss how freely available African stories in multiple languages can harness the linguistic capital of learners in homes and schools, with exciting implications for the promotion of linguistic citizenship in communities worldwide."
Register in advance for this virtual forum here.
Dr. Bonnie Norton
Dr. Bonnie Norton (FRSC) is a University Killam Professor and Distinguished University Scholar in the Department of Language and Literacy Education, the University of British Columbia, Canada. As research advisor of the African Storybook and project lead of Global Storybooks, her research addresses identity, digital storytelling and open technology. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the American Educational Research Association. Her website can be found here.
Read: Translation, identity, andtranslanguaging: Perspectives from a global literacy initiative