Christopher Stroud
Biographic Data
| ID | 432069 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Christopher Stroud |
| GIVEN NAMES | Christopher |
| FAMILY NAME | Stroud |
| SIGNATURE | STROUD C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of the Western Cape |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7692-0362 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 36 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 369 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 35 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1990 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Fanonian “Radical Empathy” for a Politics of Ethics
This contribution takes up the Dialogue's question of the politics of ethics in sociolinguistics from a Fanonian perspective. Taking Sweden as an illustrative case of Euro‐Northern de/recolonization, it argues that ostensibly emancipatory discourses of liberal humanist inclusion can remain bound to colonial and racializing formations of speakership, legitimacy, and belonging. Such discourses risk conserving the colonial status quo by leaving inta…
Towards a sociolinguistics of potentiality
In writing of the economies of abandonment of late liberal globalization, Elizabeth Povinelli also points to the potential for SPACES OF OTHERWISE, those spaces of "curiosity and risk, potentiality and exhaustion" which open possibilities for more ethical becoming and the emergence of new forms of sociality and social life (2012. The will to be otherwise/the effort of endurance. South Atlantic Quarterly 111(3). 453-475: 454). This Special Issue a…
Colonial creep
This commentary engages with the book’s chapters on colonial linguistics by highlighting that in their struggles to maintain their ancestral sovereignty, Indigenous peoples remind all of us that, for most of our histories as human beings on the Earth, we have exercised and cultivated our individual and collective powers to set in motion dynamic relationships of well-being and mutual benefit. The commentary argues that Indigenous peoples also remi…
Talking Parts, Talking Back
One of the greatest challenges of our times is that of lack of voice for abused bodies. These are the bodies of children and men and women who have inherited the brutalities of colonialism, plantation servitude and slavery and now re-live these miseries in the belly of a rampant global neoliberal and patriarchal capitalism. They are the racialized, sexualized, genderized and godless bodies that first took form in coloniality-modernity in conjunct…
Multilinguismo na África do Sul
TheMultilingual Citizen
In this ground-breaking collection of essays, the authors develop a notion of Linguistic Citizenship, highlighting practices whereby vulnerable speakers themselves exercise control over language, and detailing ways in which alternative voices can be inserted into processes and structures that often alienate those they were designed to support.
Diversities, affinities and diasporas
We frame multilingualisms through a growing interest in a linguistics and sociology of the ‘south’ and acknowledge earlier contributions of linguists in Africa, the Américas and Asia who have engaged with human mobility, linguistic contact and consequential ecologies that alter over time and space. Recently, conversations of multilingualism have drifted in two directions. Southern conversations have become intertwined with ‘de-colonial theory’, a…
Spaces of exception
In this paper we draw attention to people who journey from one temporal and spatial setting towards another in the ‘South’, who aspire to a reconfigured sense of belonging, prosperity and wellbeing, and their multilinguality and multilingualisms. Through three vignettes of journeys we illustrate how in changing of place that linguistic diversities are encountered and mediated. During moments of North–South and South–South entanglement and excepti…
Multilingualism as utopia
The challenge of contemporary South Africa is that of building a (post)nation of postracial equity in a fragmented world of a globalized ethical, economic and ecological meltdown. In this paper, we seek to explore the idea of multilingualism as a technology in the conceptualization of alternative, competing futures. We suggest that multilingualism is understood in terms of how encounters across difference are mediated and structured linguisticall…
Fanon in drag
In focus in this paper is the genre of drag, and the uses to which it is put by its proponents in subverting conventional and repressive (Western) models of gender, sexuality and race. We raise the question of to what extent performances of drag, while arguably disrupting gender stereotypes, nevertheless continue to reproduce colonialities of race and sexuality. Framing an analysis of a drag king performance in a sociolinguistics of subjectificat…
Skinscapes
The paper argues for extending linguistic landscape studies to also encompass the body as a corporeal landscape, or ‘moving discursive locality’. We articulate this point within a narrative of a developing field of landscape studies that is increasingly attentive to the mobility and materiality of spatialized semiotics as performative, that is, as partially determining of how we come to understand ourselves ‘in place’. Taking Cape Town’s tattooin…
Linguistic citizenship
A major challenge facing South Africa is that of reconstructing a meaningful and inclusive notion of citizenship in the aftermath of its apartheid past and in the face of narratives of divisiveness that reach back from this past and continue to reverberate in the present. Many of the problems confronting South African social transformation are similar to the rest of the postcolonial world that continues to wrestle with the inherited colonial divi…
Semiotic landscapes and mobile narrations of place
In this article, we explore some of the practices and mechanisms behind the multiple constructions of place and its meanings, focusing specifically on the diverse ways in which signage is read and incorporated into personal narratives of place. We employ a methodology of narrated walking that allows insights into how our informants actively construct the significance of local place as they navigate and move through space, and that also illustrate…
Battling the Race
In the last 19 years of post-apartheidSouthAfrican democracy, race remains an enduring and familiar trope, a point of certainty amid the messy ambiguities of transformation. In the present article, we explore the malleable, permeable, and unstable racializations of contemporarySouthArica, specifically the way in which coloured and white racializations are negotiated and interactionally accomplished in the context ofCapetonian hip-hop. The analysi…
Multilingualism Remixed
Among the many challenges posed by contexts of social transformation and extensive mobility is the question of how multilingual voice may carry across media, modalities and context. In this article, we suggest that one approach to this complex problem may be to look at multilingual voice from a sociolinguistic perspective of performance. Our focus here is thus on how marginalised voices on the periphery of Cape Town become mainstreamed within the…
Multilingualism remixed
Among the many challenges posed by contexts of social transformation and extensive mobility is the question of how multilingual voice may carry across media, modalities and context. In this paper, we suggest that one approach to this complex problem may be to look at multilingual voice from a sociolinguistic perspective of performance. Our focus here is thus on how marginalised voices on the periphery of Cape Town become mainstreamed within the c…
Multilingualism in transformative spaces
Style, Identity and Literacy
Style, Identity and Literacy: English in Singapore is a qualitative study of the literacy practices of a group of Singaporean adolescents, relating their patterns of interaction – both inside and outside the classroom – to the different levels of social organization in Singaporean society (home, peer group and school). Combining field data gathered through a series of detailed interviews with available classroom observations, the study focuses on…
Multilingualism
Performing rap ciphas in late-modern Cape Town
The study of hip-hop in Cape Town, and indeed South Africa, has traditionally focused on the narratives and poetics of resistance, race and counter-hegemonic agency in the context of apartheid and the early days of post-apartheid. Despite this attention, hip-hop cipha performances remain relatively under-researched. The aim of this paper is to suggest that cipha performances display linguistic and discursive features that not only are of particul…
Performing rap ciphas in late-modern Cape Town
The study of hip-hop in Cape Town, and indeed South Africa, has traditionally focused on the narratives and poetics of resistance, race and counter-hegemonic agency in the context of apartheid and the early days of post-apartheid. Despite this attention, hip-hop cipha performances remain relatively under-researched. The aim of this paper is to suggest that cipha performances display linguistic and discursive features that not only are of particul…
Multilingual signage
The paper explores how global commercial discourses and the politics of aspiration in post-apartheid South Africa may be seen as contributing to the restructuring of spaces of multilingualism and the refiguring of indexical values of English and South African languages. The analysis takes its point of departure in how late-modern lifestyles, identities, aspirations and imaginations are represented across local and transnational commercial signage…
Towards a material ethnography of linguistic landscape
The study of multilingual landscapes promises to introduce a new perspective into theories and policies of multilingualism, and to provide essential data for a politics of language. However, the theorization of space and language underlying the notion of linguistic landscape is not able to capture the manifold complexities of (transnational) multilingual mobility that is characteristic of many late-modern multilingual societies. Basing our argume…
Introduction
10.2167/beb112e.0
Language policy and linguistic markets in Singapore
A perennial issue in language planning and policy theorization concerns the tensions between policy and practice, since people quite simply seldom act in accordance with government design vis a vis language and multilingualism. In this paper, we suggest that these tensions may comprise the very essence of the modus operandi of language policies in the heterogeneous and ever changing communities that constitute the sites of language policy in late…
Towards a material ethnography of linguistic landscape
The study of multilingual landscapes promises to introduce a new perspective into theories and policies of multilingualism, and to provide essential data for a politics of language. However, the theorization of space and language underlying the notion of linguistic landscape is not able to capture the manifold complexities of (transnational) multilingual mobility that is characteristic of many late-modern multilingual societies. Basing our argume…
African Mother-tongue Programmes and the Politics of Language
10.1080/01434630108666440
Semiotic landscapes and mobile narrations of place
In this article, we explore some of the practices and mechanisms behind the multiple constructions of place and its meanings, focusing specifically on the diverse ways in which signage is read and incorporated into personal narratives of place. We employ a methodology of narrated walking that allows insights into how our informants actively construct the significance of local place as they navigate and move through space, and that also illustrate…
Rinkeby Swedish and semilingualism in language ideological debates
The focus of this paper is on the mechanisms whereby liberal and well-meaning democratic societies propagate a cycle of disposession where immigrants are constructed as least resourced while the powerful retain their power. Specifically discussed is the semiotic management of traditional hierarchies of privilege and access through language ideological discourses pertaining to second language acquisition, multilingualism and heterogeneity. One not…
Skinscapes
The paper argues for extending linguistic landscape studies to also encompass the body as a corporeal landscape, or ‘moving discursive locality’. We articulate this point within a narrative of a developing field of landscape studies that is increasingly attentive to the mobility and materiality of spatialized semiotics as performative, that is, as partially determining of how we come to understand ourselves ‘in place’. Taking Cape Town’s tattooin…
The problem of intention and meaning in code-switching
Multilingualism in transformative spaces
Christianity, Cargo and Ideas of Self
Literacy in a small, rural, newly literate Papua New Guinean village is analysed by placing it in the context of local notions of Christianity, the self and language. Villagers' interpretations of the relationship between Catholicism and the written word are based on their Cargo-oriented world-view and on their pre-Christian beliefs about language as a powerful means by which individuals could bring about transformations in their world. Local ide…
Linguistic citizenship
A major challenge facing South Africa is that of reconstructing a meaningful and inclusive notion of citizenship in the aftermath of its apartheid past and in the face of narratives of divisiveness that reach back from this past and continue to reverberate in the present. Many of the problems confronting South African social transformation are similar to the rest of the postcolonial world that continues to wrestle with the inherited colonial divi…
Consuming identities
Diversities, affinities and diasporas
We frame multilingualisms through a growing interest in a linguistics and sociology of the ‘south’ and acknowledge earlier contributions of linguists in Africa, the Américas and Asia who have engaged with human mobility, linguistic contact and consequential ecologies that alter over time and space. Recently, conversations of multilingualism have drifted in two directions. Southern conversations have become intertwined with ‘de-colonial theory’, a…
Multilingual signage
The paper explores how global commercial discourses and the politics of aspiration in post-apartheid South Africa may be seen as contributing to the restructuring of spaces of multilingualism and the refiguring of indexical values of English and South African languages. The analysis takes its point of departure in how late-modern lifestyles, identities, aspirations and imaginations are represented across local and transnational commercial signage…
Battling the Race
In the last 19 years of post-apartheidSouthAfrican democracy, race remains an enduring and familiar trope, a point of certainty amid the messy ambiguities of transformation. In the present article, we explore the malleable, permeable, and unstable racializations of contemporarySouthArica, specifically the way in which coloured and white racializations are negotiated and interactionally accomplished in the context ofCapetonian hip-hop. The analysi…
Fanon in drag
In focus in this paper is the genre of drag, and the uses to which it is put by its proponents in subverting conventional and repressive (Western) models of gender, sexuality and race. We raise the question of to what extent performances of drag, while arguably disrupting gender stereotypes, nevertheless continue to reproduce colonialities of race and sexuality. Framing an analysis of a drag king performance in a sociolinguistics of subjectificat…
A Pedagogical Application of Liminalities in Social Positioning
A growing body of research recognizes the pervasive difficulties involved in accommodating multilingual practices in the English language classroom and acknowledges that one aspect of this conundrum is the role that languages play in the constitution of student identities. Such studies point to how students use off‐stage spaces to covertly engage identities that are devalued in on‐stage classroom interaction that comes under the teacher's authori…
Framing Bourdieu socioculturally
Multilingua
Towards a sociolinguistics of potentiality
In writing of the economies of abandonment of late liberal globalization, Elizabeth Povinelli also points to the potential for SPACES OF OTHERWISE, those spaces of "curiosity and risk, potentiality and exhaustion" which open possibilities for more ethical becoming and the emergence of new forms of sociality and social life (2012. The will to be otherwise/the effort of endurance. South Atlantic Quarterly 111(3). 453-475: 454). This Special Issue a…
Language policy and linguistic markets in Singapore
A perennial issue in language planning and policy theorization concerns the tensions between policy and practice, since people quite simply seldom act in accordance with government design vis a vis language and multilingualism. In this paper, we suggest that these tensions may comprise the very essence of the modus operandi of language policies in the heterogeneous and ever changing communities that constitute the sites of language policy in late…
Christianity, Cargo and Ideas of Self
Literacy in a small, rural, newly literate Papua New Guinean village is analysed by placing it in the context of local notions of Christianity, the self and language. Villagers' interpretations of the relationship between Catholicism and the written word are based on their Cargo-oriented world-view and on their pre-Christian beliefs about language as a powerful means by which individuals could bring about transformations in their world. Local ide…
The problem of intention and meaning in code-switching
The Development of Metropolitan Languages in Post-Colonial Contexts
This article explores briefly some phenomena of potential indigenization of the Portuguese spoken in Mozambique. Data for the study has been taken from work that is currently underway in Maputo, Mozambique, that was originally initiated to investigate contact varieties of Portuguese and to probe their educational implications. Speech samples comprise formal interviews and non-formal encounters from a socio-demographically representative sample of…
Portuguese as ideology and politics in Mozambique
African Mother-tongue Programmes and the Politics of Language
10.1080/01434630108666440
Framing Bourdieu socioculturally
Multilingua
Postmodernist Perspectives on Local Languages
Globalisation carries a number of implications for developing communities. Although the extended use of African vernaculars would be one way for these communities to counteract some of the more negative effects of globalisation, educational uses of local languages are not the panacea they are thought to be. In fact, the way that local languages are managed and provided for in education tends more to reinforce the negative effects of globalisation…
The performativity of codeswitching
Many problems in codeswitching theory point to a lack of fit between linguistic data and a sufficiently elaborated theory of social life. In this paper, codeswitching will be viewed as one type of socioculturally informed discourse mediating speakers' responses to social, cultural, economic and symbolic capital. The conversational data for this study comprise an informal meeting between women comerciantes in postcolonial Mozambique, a community c…
Rinkeby Swedish and semilingualism in language ideological debates
The focus of this paper is on the mechanisms whereby liberal and well-meaning democratic societies propagate a cycle of disposession where immigrants are constructed as least resourced while the powerful retain their power. Specifically discussed is the semiotic management of traditional hierarchies of privilege and access through language ideological discourses pertaining to second language acquisition, multilingualism and heterogeneity. One not…
Consuming identities
A Pedagogical Application of Liminalities in Social Positioning
A growing body of research recognizes the pervasive difficulties involved in accommodating multilingual practices in the English language classroom and acknowledges that one aspect of this conundrum is the role that languages play in the constitution of student identities. Such studies point to how students use off‐stage spaces to covertly engage identities that are devalued in on‐stage classroom interaction that comes under the teacher's authori…
Introduction
10.2167/beb112e.0
Language policy and linguistic markets in Singapore
A perennial issue in language planning and policy theorization concerns the tensions between policy and practice, since people quite simply seldom act in accordance with government design vis a vis language and multilingualism. In this paper, we suggest that these tensions may comprise the very essence of the modus operandi of language policies in the heterogeneous and ever changing communities that constitute the sites of language policy in late…
Towards a material ethnography of linguistic landscape
The study of multilingual landscapes promises to introduce a new perspective into theories and policies of multilingualism, and to provide essential data for a politics of language. However, the theorization of space and language underlying the notion of linguistic landscape is not able to capture the manifold complexities of (transnational) multilingual mobility that is characteristic of many late-modern multilingual societies. Basing our argume…
Performing rap ciphas in late-modern Cape Town
The study of hip-hop in Cape Town, and indeed South Africa, has traditionally focused on the narratives and poetics of resistance, race and counter-hegemonic agency in the context of apartheid and the early days of post-apartheid. Despite this attention, hip-hop cipha performances remain relatively under-researched. The aim of this paper is to suggest that cipha performances display linguistic and discursive features that not only are of particul…
Performing rap ciphas in late-modern Cape Town
The study of hip-hop in Cape Town, and indeed South Africa, has traditionally focused on the narratives and poetics of resistance, race and counter-hegemonic agency in the context of apartheid and the early days of post-apartheid. Despite this attention, hip-hop cipha performances remain relatively under-researched. The aim of this paper is to suggest that cipha performances display linguistic and discursive features that not only are of particul…
Multilingual signage
The paper explores how global commercial discourses and the politics of aspiration in post-apartheid South Africa may be seen as contributing to the restructuring of spaces of multilingualism and the refiguring of indexical values of English and South African languages. The analysis takes its point of departure in how late-modern lifestyles, identities, aspirations and imaginations are represented across local and transnational commercial signage…
Style, Identity and Literacy
Style, Identity and Literacy: English in Singapore is a qualitative study of the literacy practices of a group of Singaporean adolescents, relating their patterns of interaction – both inside and outside the classroom – to the different levels of social organization in Singaporean society (home, peer group and school). Combining field data gathered through a series of detailed interviews with available classroom observations, the study focuses on…
Multilingualism
Multilingualism in transformative spaces
Multilingualism remixed
Among the many challenges posed by contexts of social transformation and extensive mobility is the question of how multilingual voice may carry across media, modalities and context. In this paper, we suggest that one approach to this complex problem may be to look at multilingual voice from a sociolinguistic perspective of performance. Our focus here is thus on how marginalised voices on the periphery of Cape Town become mainstreamed within the c…
Semiotic landscapes and mobile narrations of place
In this article, we explore some of the practices and mechanisms behind the multiple constructions of place and its meanings, focusing specifically on the diverse ways in which signage is read and incorporated into personal narratives of place. We employ a methodology of narrated walking that allows insights into how our informants actively construct the significance of local place as they navigate and move through space, and that also illustrate…
Battling the Race
In the last 19 years of post-apartheidSouthAfrican democracy, race remains an enduring and familiar trope, a point of certainty amid the messy ambiguities of transformation. In the present article, we explore the malleable, permeable, and unstable racializations of contemporarySouthArica, specifically the way in which coloured and white racializations are negotiated and interactionally accomplished in the context ofCapetonian hip-hop. The analysi…
Multilingualism Remixed
Among the many challenges posed by contexts of social transformation and extensive mobility is the question of how multilingual voice may carry across media, modalities and context. In this article, we suggest that one approach to this complex problem may be to look at multilingual voice from a sociolinguistic perspective of performance. Our focus here is thus on how marginalised voices on the periphery of Cape Town become mainstreamed within the…
Skinscapes
The paper argues for extending linguistic landscape studies to also encompass the body as a corporeal landscape, or ‘moving discursive locality’. We articulate this point within a narrative of a developing field of landscape studies that is increasingly attentive to the mobility and materiality of spatialized semiotics as performative, that is, as partially determining of how we come to understand ourselves ‘in place’. Taking Cape Town’s tattooin…
Multilingual Education and Policy (29 works) · Sociology (27 works) · Linguistics (22 works) · Political science (20 works) · Law (15 works) · Multilingualism (14 works) · Politics (13 works) · Social science (11 works) · Aesthetics (10 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (10 works)