Vaidehi Ramanathan
Biographic Data
| ID | 160504 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Vaidehi Ramanathan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Vaidehi |
| FAMILY NAME | Ramanathan |
| SIGNATURE | RAMANATHAN V |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Davis |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 64 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
National Language and English in India
This short entry focuses on a small cluster of issues relating to English instruction in India.
English and the Vernaculars from a Postcolonial Perspective
This entry examines the dynamic relationship between English and vernacular literacy practices in India through a postcolonial lens. It traces how colonial educational policies and ideologies established enduring hierarchies of language, literacy, and power that continue to shape India's multilingual landscape. English, introduced as a language of administration and prestige, now functions both as a tool of social mobility and as a marker of ineq…
Publishing in the Language and Public Policy section of Language
Let’s talk about pain and opioids: Low pitch and creak in medical consultations
In recent years, the opioid crisis in the United States has sparked significant discussion on doctor-patient interactions concerning chronic pain treatments, but little to no attention has been given to investigating the vocal aspects of patient talk. This exploratory sociolinguistic study intends to fill this knowledge gap by employing prosodic discourse analysis to examine context-specific linguistic features used by the interlocutors of two di…
Language, Immigration and Naturalization: Legal and Linguistic Issues
This volume focuses on the everyday legalities and practicalities of naturalization, bringing together scholars from a wide range of specialities all accentuating language. The book raises issues that often remain unarticulated or masked in the media and will be of interest to scholars of policy and politics as well as linguists.
Refugee Resettlement in the United States: Language, Policy, Pedagogy
This volume brings together scholars from various disciplines to discuss how language is used by, for and about refugees in the United States in order to deepen our understanding of what ‘refugee’ and ‘resettlement’ mean. The book will be of interest to researchers of applied linguistics and sociolinguistics, anthropology and cultural studies.
Language Policies and (Dis)Citizenship: Who Belongs? Who Is a Guest? Who Is Deported
This Forum brings together some scholars writing in areas relating to language policies, language ideologies, and citizenship. While each of these domains is well researched, only recently has scho
English and the Vernaculars From a Postcolonial Perspective
This entry offers a situated account of English and vernacular literacy practices from a postcolonial perspective.
Language, Body, and Health
This edited book addresses ways in which bodies-conceived broadly- get languaged, and ways in which ideas of normalcy and normal bodies are held in place and reproduced. The articles show how it is through this medium that people with ailments or unusual bodies get positioned and slotted in certain ways. Calling attention to a host of discourses- biomedical, societal, poststructuralist- the chapters pierce the general veil of silence that we have…
Scripting Selves, Stalling Last Shadows: (Auto) Biographical Writing of Alzheimer Patients and Their Caregivers
This article offers a critical discussion of notions of self as they emerge in the diaries kept by Alzheimer patients and their caregivers. It explores ways in which diary writing becomes simultaneously an agentive way by which a sense of ‘self’ gets scripted since memory is fast slipping away, while also pointing to the fluid nature of identities as patients struggle with diminishing language and remembering skills. Specifically, the article exp…
Texting Doppelgangers: Repetition, Signs, and Intentionalities in (Auto)biographical Alzheimer Writing
The paper offers a critical discussion of notions of self as they emerge in texts written by Alzheimer patients and their caregivers. It explores how diary-writing becomes a means of agency by which some ontological sense of ‘self’ gets scripted in the process of memory’s slipping away. Specifically, the paper explores how two themes—namely, sure signs and repetition, and intentionality and experience—can be seen to crucially inform the patients’…
Introduction to thematic issue: Language policies and health
Lang Policy (2010) 9:1–7 DOI 10.1007/s10993-009-9154-7 Introduction to thematic issue: language policies and health Vaidehi Ramanathan Published online: 23 October 2009 O The Author(s) 2009. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Where do our disciplinary concepts come from? What are the processes by which they begin to garner particular associations and take root? In what ways do policies—understood most broadly in a vari…
Outsourcing, globalizing economics, and shifting language policies: Issues in managing Indian call centres
Silencing and Languaging in the Assembling of the Indian Nation-State: British Public Citizens, the Epistolary Form, and Historiography
Taking the case of postcolonial India, this paper explores ways in which present temporal junctures permit a probing of historical boundaries to speak of voices largely silenced from Indian historiography, namely those of British (Indian) public citizens who were committed to the assembling of “an India.” In particular, the paper discusses ways in which letters to and by Charles Andrews, Edward Thompson and John Amery debated ideas about carving …
Poverty, Tesol’s Narratives and “Other Languages”: Hermeneutic Tensions in Texting-Researching Practices
Bringing The Body Back: The (Mis)Languaging Of Bodies In Bio-Medical, Societal And Poststructuralist Discourses On Diabetes And Epilepsy
Recent scholarship on ‘disabilities ’ and bodies has tended to be extreme in its orientation and has, on the whole, not been able to speak of chronic disabilities and bodily breakdown in humanistic ways. In its verve toward finding ‘cures,’ biomedical discourses, from which societal discourses draw their strength, have emphasized malfunctioning body parts and have made little room for bodily breakdown. Likewise, some strains of poststructuralist …
Non—Language Policies and ESL: Some Connections
Tesol and Policy Enactments: Perspectives From Practice
Prior research in the area of language policy and planning (LPP) has been focused primarily on macro decision‐making and the impact of national, local, and institutional policies in educational settings. Only recently have scholars begun examining the everyday contexts in which policies are interpreted and negotiated in ways that reflect local constraints and possibilities. The redirection of inquiry toward situated policy enactments in TESOL is …
Boyd Davis, Alzheimer talk, text and context: Enhancing communication
Boyd Davis, Alzheimer talk, text and context: Enhancing communication. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. I picked up Boyd Davis's edited volume with some anxiety. I had let go of my Alzheimer's research for a number of painful reasons in graduate school and had, over the past 10 years, invented myself in the sociopolitics of language learning and teaching. When I spotted the volume at a book exhibit, I thought: Would I be able to connect to any…
The Vernacularization of English: Crossing Global Currents to Re-dress West-based Tesol
Based on a long-term, evolving exploration regarding English language teaching and learning in English-and vernacular-medium settings in Gujarat, India, this paper offers a discussion of two key points: 1) the degree to which English is vernacularized in multilingual postcolonial contexts, and 2) ways in which vernacular pedagogic practices are effective ways of learning and teaching English. The paper then moves into discussing the implications …
Of Texts and Translations and Rhizomes: Postcolonial Anxieties and Deracinations and Knowledge Constructions
This article uncovers some problems involved in culling and translating non-western texts—written in other languages, at particular times, for spe-cific audiences, and rooted in particular local milieus—before assembling them into academic arguments in English in the west. Based on my long-term, evolving endeavour regarding English- and vernacular-language teaching in Gujarat, India, I argue that the seamless ways in which aca-demic knowledge—whi…
Gandhi, Non-Cooperation, and Socio-civic Education in Gujarat, India: Harnessing the Vernaculars
This article offers an interconnected, grounded understanding of how two Gandhian endeavours in the city of Ahmedabad in Gujarat, India, make us rethink the notion of “education ” in terms of civic and communal engagement. Drawing on local, vernac-ular ways of living, learning, being, reasoning, and believing—in this case Guja-rati—I show how these endeavours engage in civically minded projects in the wake of two devastating events in the city, n…
The Vernacularization of English: Crossing Global Currents to Re-dress West-based Tesol
TheEnglish-Vernacular Divide: Postcolonial Language Politics and Practice
This book explores the role of English in postcolonial communities such as India. It focuses on some local ways in which the language falls along the lines of a class-based divide. It argues that issues of inequality, subordination and unequal value revolve around the general positioning of English in relation to vernacular languages.
Ambiguities About English: Ideologies and Critical Practice in Vernacular-Medium College Classrooms in Gujarat, India
Situated amid tertiary-level institutions in the city of Ahmedabad, in Gujarat, India, this article explores how particular ideologies countering English inform pedagogic choices made by language teachers teaching in "vernacular-medium" (VM) college classrooms. The ideologies under discussion are two linked "thought structures." The first, the Gandhian ideology, is distinctly pro-vernacular and anti-English in its stance, embedded as it is in Gan…
Rethinking Language Planning and Policy from the Ground Up: Refashioning Institutional Realities and Human Lives
At a time when connections between English and globalisation seem stronger than ever, and at a time when the ‘dominant ’ status of English vis-à-vis other languages is very prominent, it seems imperative for the LPP scholarship to make room for grounded explorations regarding English and its relationship to vernacular languages in non-Western educational contexts. Drawing on an eight-year ethnographic study of English-and-vernacular-medium educat…
Language Policies and (Dis)Citizenship: Who Belongs? Who Is a Guest? Who Is Deported
This Forum brings together some scholars writing in areas relating to language policies, language ideologies, and citizenship. While each of these domains is well researched, only recently has scho
Tesol and Policy Enactments: Perspectives From Practice
Prior research in the area of language policy and planning (LPP) has been focused primarily on macro decision‐making and the impact of national, local, and institutional policies in educational settings. Only recently have scholars begun examining the everyday contexts in which policies are interpreted and negotiated in ways that reflect local constraints and possibilities. The redirection of inquiry toward situated policy enactments in TESOL is …
Ambiguities About English: Ideologies and Critical Practice in Vernacular-Medium College Classrooms in Gujarat, India
Situated amid tertiary-level institutions in the city of Ahmedabad, in Gujarat, India, this article explores how particular ideologies countering English inform pedagogic choices made by language teachers teaching in "vernacular-medium" (VM) college classrooms. The ideologies under discussion are two linked "thought structures." The first, the Gandhian ideology, is distinctly pro-vernacular and anti-English in its stance, embedded as it is in Gan…
Let’s talk about pain and opioids: Low pitch and creak in medical consultations
In recent years, the opioid crisis in the United States has sparked significant discussion on doctor-patient interactions concerning chronic pain treatments, but little to no attention has been given to investigating the vocal aspects of patient talk. This exploratory sociolinguistic study intends to fill this knowledge gap by employing prosodic discourse analysis to examine context-specific linguistic features used by the interlocutors of two di…
Outsourcing, globalizing economics, and shifting language policies: Issues in managing Indian call centres
Situating the Researcher in Research Texts: Dilemmas, Questions, Ethics, New Directions
(2005). Situating the Researcher in Research Texts: Dilemmas, Questions, Ethics, New Directions. Journal of Language, Identity & Education: Vol. 4, No. 4, pp. 291-293
Introduction to thematic issue: Language policies and health
Lang Policy (2010) 9:1–7 DOI 10.1007/s10993-009-9154-7 Introduction to thematic issue: language policies and health Vaidehi Ramanathan Published online: 23 October 2009 O The Author(s) 2009. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Where do our disciplinary concepts come from? What are the processes by which they begin to garner particular associations and take root? In what ways do policies—understood most broadly in a vari…
Some Impossibilities Around Researcher Location: Tensions Around Divergent Audiences, Languages, Social Stratifications
(2005). Some Impossibilities Around Researcher Location: Tensions Around Divergent Audiences, Languages, Social Stratifications. Journal of Language, Identity & Education: Vol. 4, No. 4, pp. 293-297
Non—Language Policies and ESL: Some Connections
Gandhi, Non-Cooperation, and Socio-civic Education in Gujarat, India: Harnessing the Vernaculars
This article offers an interconnected, grounded understanding of how two Gandhian endeavours in the city of Ahmedabad in Gujarat, India, make us rethink the notion of “education ” in terms of civic and communal engagement. Drawing on local, vernac-ular ways of living, learning, being, reasoning, and believing—in this case Guja-rati—I show how these endeavours engage in civically minded projects in the wake of two devastating events in the city, n…
Seepages, Contact Zones, and Amalgam: Internationalizing Tesol
TESOL Quarterly publishes brief commentaries on aspects of English language teaching. For this issue, the editor asked a teacher educator the following question: How has your experience as a global citizen informed your work in local contexts
TheEnglish-Vernacular Divide: Postcolonial Language Politics and Practice
This book explores the role of English in postcolonial communities such as India. It focuses on some local ways in which the language falls along the lines of a class-based divide. It argues that issues of inequality, subordination and unequal value revolve around the general positioning of English in relation to vernacular languages.
Ambiguities About English: Ideologies and Critical Practice in Vernacular-Medium College Classrooms in Gujarat, India
Situated amid tertiary-level institutions in the city of Ahmedabad, in Gujarat, India, this article explores how particular ideologies countering English inform pedagogic choices made by language teachers teaching in "vernacular-medium" (VM) college classrooms. The ideologies under discussion are two linked "thought structures." The first, the Gandhian ideology, is distinctly pro-vernacular and anti-English in its stance, embedded as it is in Gan…
Some Impossibilities Around Researcher Location: Tensions Around Divergent Audiences, Languages, Social Stratifications
(2005). Some Impossibilities Around Researcher Location: Tensions Around Divergent Audiences, Languages, Social Stratifications. Journal of Language, Identity & Education: Vol. 4, No. 4, pp. 293-297
Situating the Researcher in Research Texts: Dilemmas, Questions, Ethics, New Directions
(2005). Situating the Researcher in Research Texts: Dilemmas, Questions, Ethics, New Directions. Journal of Language, Identity & Education: Vol. 4, No. 4, pp. 291-293
Rethinking Language Planning and Policy from the Ground Up: Refashioning Institutional Realities and Human Lives
At a time when connections between English and globalisation seem stronger than ever, and at a time when the ‘dominant ’ status of English vis-à-vis other languages is very prominent, it seems imperative for the LPP scholarship to make room for grounded explorations regarding English and its relationship to vernacular languages in non-Western educational contexts. Drawing on an eight-year ethnographic study of English-and-vernacular-medium educat…
Seepages, Contact Zones, and Amalgam: Internationalizing Tesol
TESOL Quarterly publishes brief commentaries on aspects of English language teaching. For this issue, the editor asked a teacher educator the following question: How has your experience as a global citizen informed your work in local contexts
The Vernacularization of English: Crossing Global Currents to Re-dress West-based Tesol
Based on a long-term, evolving exploration regarding English language teaching and learning in English-and vernacular-medium settings in Gujarat, India, this paper offers a discussion of two key points: 1) the degree to which English is vernacularized in multilingual postcolonial contexts, and 2) ways in which vernacular pedagogic practices are effective ways of learning and teaching English. The paper then moves into discussing the implications …
Of Texts and Translations and Rhizomes: Postcolonial Anxieties and Deracinations and Knowledge Constructions
This article uncovers some problems involved in culling and translating non-western texts—written in other languages, at particular times, for spe-cific audiences, and rooted in particular local milieus—before assembling them into academic arguments in English in the west. Based on my long-term, evolving endeavour regarding English- and vernacular-language teaching in Gujarat, India, I argue that the seamless ways in which aca-demic knowledge—whi…
Gandhi, Non-Cooperation, and Socio-civic Education in Gujarat, India: Harnessing the Vernaculars
This article offers an interconnected, grounded understanding of how two Gandhian endeavours in the city of Ahmedabad in Gujarat, India, make us rethink the notion of “education ” in terms of civic and communal engagement. Drawing on local, vernac-ular ways of living, learning, being, reasoning, and believing—in this case Guja-rati—I show how these endeavours engage in civically minded projects in the wake of two devastating events in the city, n…
The Vernacularization of English: Crossing Global Currents to Re-dress West-based Tesol
Bringing The Body Back: The (Mis)Languaging Of Bodies In Bio-Medical, Societal And Poststructuralist Discourses On Diabetes And Epilepsy
Recent scholarship on ‘disabilities ’ and bodies has tended to be extreme in its orientation and has, on the whole, not been able to speak of chronic disabilities and bodily breakdown in humanistic ways. In its verve toward finding ‘cures,’ biomedical discourses, from which societal discourses draw their strength, have emphasized malfunctioning body parts and have made little room for bodily breakdown. Likewise, some strains of poststructuralist …
Non—Language Policies and ESL: Some Connections
Tesol and Policy Enactments: Perspectives From Practice
Prior research in the area of language policy and planning (LPP) has been focused primarily on macro decision‐making and the impact of national, local, and institutional policies in educational settings. Only recently have scholars begun examining the everyday contexts in which policies are interpreted and negotiated in ways that reflect local constraints and possibilities. The redirection of inquiry toward situated policy enactments in TESOL is …
Boyd Davis, Alzheimer talk, text and context: Enhancing communication
Boyd Davis, Alzheimer talk, text and context: Enhancing communication. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. I picked up Boyd Davis's edited volume with some anxiety. I had let go of my Alzheimer's research for a number of painful reasons in graduate school and had, over the past 10 years, invented myself in the sociopolitics of language learning and teaching. When I spotted the volume at a book exhibit, I thought: Would I be able to connect to any…
Poverty, Tesol’s Narratives and “Other Languages”: Hermeneutic Tensions in Texting-Researching Practices
Scripting Selves, Stalling Last Shadows: (Auto) Biographical Writing of Alzheimer Patients and Their Caregivers
This article offers a critical discussion of notions of self as they emerge in the diaries kept by Alzheimer patients and their caregivers. It explores ways in which diary writing becomes simultaneously an agentive way by which a sense of ‘self’ gets scripted since memory is fast slipping away, while also pointing to the fluid nature of identities as patients struggle with diminishing language and remembering skills. Specifically, the article exp…
Texting Doppelgangers: Repetition, Signs, and Intentionalities in (Auto)biographical Alzheimer Writing
The paper offers a critical discussion of notions of self as they emerge in texts written by Alzheimer patients and their caregivers. It explores how diary-writing becomes a means of agency by which some ontological sense of ‘self’ gets scripted in the process of memory’s slipping away. Specifically, the paper explores how two themes—namely, sure signs and repetition, and intentionality and experience—can be seen to crucially inform the patients’…
Introduction to thematic issue: Language policies and health
Lang Policy (2010) 9:1–7 DOI 10.1007/s10993-009-9154-7 Introduction to thematic issue: language policies and health Vaidehi Ramanathan Published online: 23 October 2009 O The Author(s) 2009. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Where do our disciplinary concepts come from? What are the processes by which they begin to garner particular associations and take root? In what ways do policies—understood most broadly in a vari…
Outsourcing, globalizing economics, and shifting language policies: Issues in managing Indian call centres
Silencing and Languaging in the Assembling of the Indian Nation-State: British Public Citizens, the Epistolary Form, and Historiography
Taking the case of postcolonial India, this paper explores ways in which present temporal junctures permit a probing of historical boundaries to speak of voices largely silenced from Indian historiography, namely those of British (Indian) public citizens who were committed to the assembling of “an India.” In particular, the paper discusses ways in which letters to and by Charles Andrews, Edward Thompson and John Amery debated ideas about carving …
Language, Body, and Health
This edited book addresses ways in which bodies-conceived broadly- get languaged, and ways in which ideas of normalcy and normal bodies are held in place and reproduced. The articles show how it is through this medium that people with ailments or unusual bodies get positioned and slotted in certain ways. Calling attention to a host of discourses- biomedical, societal, poststructuralist- the chapters pierce the general veil of silence that we have…
English and the Vernaculars From a Postcolonial Perspective
This entry offers a situated account of English and vernacular literacy practices from a postcolonial perspective.
Language Policies and (Dis)Citizenship: Who Belongs? Who Is a Guest? Who Is Deported
This Forum brings together some scholars writing in areas relating to language policies, language ideologies, and citizenship. While each of these domains is well researched, only recently has scho
Refugee Resettlement in the United States: Language, Policy, Pedagogy
This volume brings together scholars from various disciplines to discuss how language is used by, for and about refugees in the United States in order to deepen our understanding of what ‘refugee’ and ‘resettlement’ mean. The book will be of interest to researchers of applied linguistics and sociolinguistics, anthropology and cultural studies.
Language, Immigration and Naturalization: Legal and Linguistic Issues
This volume focuses on the everyday legalities and practicalities of naturalization, bringing together scholars from a wide range of specialities all accentuating language. The book raises issues that often remain unarticulated or masked in the media and will be of interest to scholars of policy and politics as well as linguists.
Sociology (21 works) · Linguistics (20 works) · Philosophy (16 works) · Multilingual Education and Policy (14 works) · Political science (14 works) · Psychology (12 works) · Second Language Learning and Teaching (10 works) · Pedagogy (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works)