Schooling and development: global discourses and women’s narratives from Nepal

Producing the disciplined English-speaking subjects: Language policing, development ideology, and English medium of instruction policy

“…As the production of the ‘disciplined English-speaking subjects’ become their goal, schools create linguistic hierarchies and erase the use of ‘local’ mother tongues, including Nepali. The disciplinary power exercised to create a monolingual environment where English is heard and used supports a deficit view of local languages as an inappropriate resource for bikās (Caddell 2007; Castellsagué & Carrasco 2021). This view eventually reproduces ‘epistemic injustice’ (Fricker 2007) and ‘discursive violence’ (McMillian 2022) against the multilingual students who cannot fully participate in classroom activities without fluid and multilingual languaging practices.…”

“…As a mechanism of power, discipline in the EMI schools comprises diverse tools, rules, and procedures that institutions exercise as ‘an essential instrument for a particular end’ and ‘a means of reinforcing or reorganizing their internal mechanisms of power’ (Foucault 1977:215). Schools frame EMI policy as ‘an explicit symbol of bikās ’ (Castellsagué & Carrasco 2021), thereby reconfiguring themselves as a policed space where students and teachers are disciplined and punished to produce the ‘disciplined English-speaking subjects’ (see Thebe Limbu 2021). Such subjects are surveilled using both panoptic and post-panoptic technologies that represent what Foucault (1977:167) calls tactics ‘the art of constructing, with located bodies, coded activities and trained aptitudes, mechanisms in which the product of the various forces is increased by their calculated combination’.…”