Protecting English in an Anglophone Age

Bianco, Joseph Lo

doi:10.1007/978-0-387-46301-8_13

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 22 publications

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“…Representing English as a basic skill has the effect of reducing its foreignness and even of representing English as purely an instrument of communication, or a postidentity language (Lo Bianco, 2005). These labels and ways of talking about English are the discursive accompaniment to its material attractiveness as a commodity (Lo Bianco, 2007b;Tan and Rubdy, 2008).…”

Section: Globalization and Lingua Mundimentioning

confidence: 99%

Globalization, Universities and Medium of Instruction

Bianco

2010

International Encyclopedia of Education

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With the benefit of a millennium of hindsight, it appears ironical the University of Bologna came into being offering trade in secular expertise, including the ius gentium, the Roman law of peoples. These legal principles were useful in advancing the incipient right of nations, and defending nation-states against the predatory claims of their contemporary rivals, the transnational polities of Empire and Church. Bologna's self-narration (Czarniawska, 1997) today revolves around its special historic claim as Alma Mater Studiorum, the oldest continuously operating degree-awarding autonomous institution (Rüegg, 2003), not a college of scholars but a teaching institution independent of state power and religious authority (Huff, 2003: 179; Makdisi, 1981). Its origins demonstrate the truism that knowledge (its creation and transfer) and the skilled competence that knowledge generates are intimately tied to power. Although the social effects of such knowledge-power links are usually indirect and long term, they can be world changing. The mother university emerged from scholarly effort to assemble and disseminate extranational authoritative knowledge. An ironical outcome was to promote national institutions and even nationality itself. Today, the name Bologna is a code word for procedures and structures in support of global higher education, returning it to its extranational origins. This is appropriate rather than ironical, since from its inception, organized higher learning has been international in content and aspiration. It is fitting too that the Constitutio Habita of 1158, Bologna's academic constitution (1155, according to Rüegg, 2003: 12), enshrines scholastic privilege, later venerated as the documentary origin of academic freedom (Watson, 2005: 373) in the struggle between the Pope and the Holy Roman Empire. This too became international, when on 18 September 1988, 430 university rectors signed the Magna Charta Universitatum, marking the 900th anniversary of the university's foundation. All institutions engage in storytelling to solidify their constituents and define their distinctiveness (Gabriel, 2000; Boje, 2001). Bologna's self-narration tells a story of universalism, principles of institutional autonomy, and academic freedom a narrative that is today widely endorsed.

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Section: Globalization and Lingua Mundimentioning

confidence: 99%

Globalization, Universities and Medium of Instruction

Bianco

2010

International Encyclopedia of Education

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Exploring Language Problems through Q‐Sorting

Bianco¹

2015

Research Methods in Language Policy and Planning

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Making English local

Flowers

2016

JLP

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This study examines the role of chronotopes in a municipal campaign to make English the official language. Drawing on theories of scale, localism, and chronotopes in discourse, this article traces how 30 town residents situated the English language in local and US history through talk and gesture. By evoking two contrasting chronotopes as they created and interpreted the language policy, people positioned monolingualism as a local tradition and multilingualism as a new, outside threat. Yet these chronotopes of local time and distant time were also recursive and fluid in two key ways. First, the US could be aligned with or against the local, which allowed English-only advocates to simultaneously criticize the nation and appeal to an idealized US past. Second, some critics of the policy reconfigured the chronotopes in order to posit multilingualism as the more authentic local tradition. These moves allowed the people involved to support, redefine and resist the English-only movement.

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Protecting English in an Anglophone Age

Cited by 3 publications

References 22 publications

Globalization, Universities and Medium of Instruction

Globalization, Universities and Medium of Instruction

Exploring Language Problems through Q‐Sorting

Making English local

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