Bal Krishna Sharma
Biographic Data
| ID | 750205 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Bal Krishna Sharma |
| GIVEN NAMES | Bal Krishna |
| FAMILY NAME | Sharma |
| SIGNATURE | SHARMA B K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Idaho |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2365-3253 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 78 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Rape discourse and slut shaming in Nepali social media
Analyzing the chronology of the events that ensued in relation to a statuary rape case between a film actor and a juvenile singer in Nepal, this article examines how discourse on social media was employed to perpetrate violence against the rape survivor and women in general. We focus on how participation in online media reinforces beliefs associated rape culture and gender-based sexual abuse. Specifically, the analysis demonstrates four key discu…
Neoliberalism in Multilingual Education
This entry explores the impact of neoliberalism on multilingual education. Neoliberalism, an economic ideology that prioritizes market competition and individualism over government intervention and public welfare, has reshaped the way bi/multilingual education functions in different parts of the world. Multilingual education, which promotes the teaching of multiple languages in schools, is seen as a tool for promoting social and linguistic justic…
Translingual Englishes, participatory hip‐hop and social media in Nepal
This article discusses some key functions and features of English in participatory popular culture and social media in Nepal. Analytical attention is paid to how English use in rap battles is entangled with other local languages and semiotic modes to create translingual practices and how online metapragmatic comments about the rap battles give rise to diverse language ideologies. The study shows that by creating their social life offline and onli…
Anthropocentric engagement with the elephant in a tourist town
This article examines human-elephant engagements in the tourist town of Sauraha, Nepal, by focusing on the semiotic, spatial, and embodied practices that shape its eco-semiotic landscape. Using the heuristic of sites of engagement and ethnographic data, it analyzes how neoliberal conservation materializes through signage, sculptures, media, and corporeal performances. Findings show that the multispecies encounters are shaped by the political econ…
Masculinity and violence in Kathmandu’s Raw Barz rap battles on YouTube
Existing research on global rap has extensively documented the creative appropriation of Western popular music and its potential for progressive politics. Little attention has been paid to exploring the less favorable aspect of this phenomenon — how rap can potentially perpetuate discriminatory societal ideologies. With this concern, the present study aims to examine the darker side of the genre, with a focus on free style rap battles. We present…
Sexual abuse, celebrity bhaktas , and counterpublics in the digital sphere
This study examines social media discourse in connection with two separate high-profile statutory rape cases involving two male celebrities in Nepal: film and music video actor Paul Shah and cricket icon Sandeep Lamichhane. In the first case, we analyze the discursive actions of the actor’s fans and supporters, who uncritically back him by disputing the credibility of the rape allegation to protect him, all of which appear to further elevate his …
A new materialist perspective to studying L2 instructional interactions in engineering
This article responds to a call for applied linguistics and bilingualism research from a spatial repertoires perspective informed by new materialism. It focuses on the ways international faculty members carry out instructional interactions in STEM using English as an additional language. Using video data, the analysis demonstrates how visual technology, material space and human bodies collectively shape instructional interactions in a structural …
Spatial repertoires in the disciplinary communication of international STEM scholars
The overall goal of this special issue is to understand how bi-/multilingual STEM scholars navigate and deploy spatial repertoires for professional communication. The articles present contextualized, empirical cases from various genre contexts: instructional practices, scholarly writing, language proficiency tests, and research group meetings. While all the articles adopt a spatial orientation to understanding STEM communication, the authors draw…
Developing teacher awareness and action plans for teaching English as an international language
Researchers have made pedagogical suggestions regarding how to incorporate international varieties of English in teacher education, but the amount of research on how novice teachers develop such knowledge and pedagogies and put them into practice is noticeably inadequate. This study presents a two-part case study in order to address this concern. In the first part, the study reports how four pre-service teachers in a teacher education program dev…
A rhetorical-political framework for multilingual and translingual scholarship
Societies around the world are multilingual, but scholarship is increasingly monolingual. Dominant global languages, which serve as link languages for scholars who share them, can restrict access to and application of knowledge in life and society for the majority of the world population. This article seeks to answer how scholars might be able to advance multilingual and translingual scholarship, making knowledge more accessible. We use the case …
Citizen Linguistic Landscape, bordering practices, and semiotic ideology in the Covid-19 pandemic
This article examines how Linguistic Landscapes in the Covid-19 pandemic construct the borders of place and people. We build on ‘semiotic ideology’ ( Keane, 2018 ) and ‘semiotopology’ ( Peck, Stroud & Williams, 2018 ) to analyze the bordering practices in citizen Linguistic Landscapes during the pandemic in Nepal. Our analysis shows that citizens combine multiple semiotic resources, both linguistic and non-linguistic, to create physical boundarie…
Reflexivity in Applied Linguistics Research in the Tourism Workplace
Linguistic ethnographers largely agree that engaging in self-reflexivity enables researchers to identify how their actions, subjectivities, and motivations influence research. In this article, I argue for a discourse-oriented ethnographic account as an alternative method for documenting and reporting such reflexivity. The overall goal of this article is to examine reflexive research practices in the study of tourism communication. Presenting illu…
Discourses of professional identities and linguistic capital formation of international STEM faculty
Introduction: Tourism spaces at the nexus of language and materiality
This special issue builds on sociolinguistic research in tourism, semiotic landscapes, language materiality, and multilingual and multimodal practices to explore how spaces for tourism are formed at the nexus of language and the material world
The scarf, language, and other semiotic assemblages in the formation of a new Chinatown
This article closely examines how both linguistic and non-linguistic objects and inscriptions emplaced in the built environment transform the traditional residential-business street into a space of consumption for a new generation of Chinese tourists. The data consists of observation notes, photographs, and interviews obtained from an ethnographic fieldwork in Kathmandu, Nepal. The article makes three major arguments. First, the semiotic shift an…
Regimes of linguistic entrepreneurship: Neoliberalism, the entanglement of language ideologies and affective regime in language education policy
This article explores how the ideologies of neoliberal linguistic entrepreneurship have created ethical tensions and contentious affects among Indigenous communities in promoting multilingualism and multilingual education. Taking the case of Nepal, our goal is to show how imperatives and characteristics that are articulated as key parts of neoliberalism are systematically perpetuated and appropriated in language education policies and discourses.…
Retelling Stories of Desire in Tesol: English, Imagination, and Encounters in Tourism
This article investigates the language learning desire of multilingual tourism workers. The data were drawn from two sites in Nepal: an English for occupational purposes class and workplace interactions during treks. The article shows that the male tourism workers use their claims of heterosexual relationships with foreign female tourists as resources to build and boast their masculine identity and homosociality among their peers. The workers’ ab…
Negotiating professional authority and power in tourist-guide communication in guided village tour
The article examines the linguistic, material, and multimodal aspects of professional communication in guided tours in the Himalayas in Nepal. Using an ethnography-informed interactional sociolinguistics, the study analyses the key instances of miscommunication between an American tourist and an ethnic Tamang guide to understand how various identities are invoked by the participants. As the article considers the complexity of working for tourists…
Nepal
Nepal is a country of over 28 million people, a multi-ethnic nation of more than 125 languages and a great variety of cultures. Hinduism is the major religion. Buddhism and animism also have a strong presence. Islam and Christianity are minority faiths, the latter of which is a growing religion but it is still not fully recognised by the government and suffers persecution. Christianity arrived in Nepal in 1662, when Italian Capuchin priests passe…
Discursive representations of difference and multilingualism in Himalaya with Michael Palin
In this article, I discuss how mediatised tourism constructs various discourses of othering through representations of the ‘tourist self’ vis-à-vis the ‘local other’. In order to do so, I analyze a six-hour travelogue Himalaya with Michael Palin broadcast by the BBC in 2004. The analysis shows that despite the forces of globalisation that have made national and cultural boundaries more porous than ever before, common stereotypes about otherness c…
Training workers for intercultural communication in tourism
This article provides an ethnographic discourse analysis of an intercultural communication training course for tourism workers in Nepal, and investigates the communicative practices Nepali tour guides are socialized into as part of the development of their professional competence. Their work competence and skills include learning some tactics of self-presentation to create a certain kind of persona so that the guides can enhance positive affect i…
English and discourses of commodification among tourism workers in the Himalayas
In this article, I investigate commodification discourses and ideologies of English from the perspective of Nepali tourism workers. Drawing data from interviews with porters and trekking guides in Nepal, I argue that English is not seen as merely a transactional means to convey meaning; it works in combination with the traditional form of labor and care in the local economy, establishing itself as a powerful tool to establish closer interpersonal…
Criticality as Ideological Becoming: Developing English Teachers for Critical Pedagogy in Nepal
This article presents a discussion of how criticality is constructed and implemented for English as a foreign language (EFL) teacher development in Nepal. The authors draw on Freire’s (1970) notion of conscientization to discuss how Nepali EFL teachers develop critical awareness in incorporating local sociopolitical issues in their lessons. Building on Bakhtin’s (1981) concept of ideological becoming, they analyze these teachers’ ideological beco…
Neoliberalism, linguistic commodification, and ethnolinguistic identity in multilingual Nepal
This article examines the consequences of neoliberalism in two separate domains of multilingual language use in the context of Nepal: language education and tourism. We show that institutions and individuals have appropriated and reproduced this ideology with their creative tactics, agency, and practices that both help them promote and commodify their ethnolinguistic identity and language skills while also allowing them to acquire multilingual re…
Stylizing Dialects and Restructuring the Nation of Nepal in Stand-Up Comedy
This study presents an analysis of a Nepali comedian’s dialect stylization in a stand-up comedy show performed for the diasporic Nepali community in Bochum, Germany. The analysis shows that through creative deployment of diverse linguistic practices of Nepali speakers, the comedian, Manoj Gajurel, engages in important identity work both in the narrating and in the narrated world of the comedy act. In the narrating world, he discursively construct…
Neoliberalism, linguistic commodification, and ethnolinguistic identity in multilingual Nepal
This article examines the consequences of neoliberalism in two separate domains of multilingual language use in the context of Nepal: language education and tourism. We show that institutions and individuals have appropriated and reproduced this ideology with their creative tactics, agency, and practices that both help them promote and commodify their ethnolinguistic identity and language skills while also allowing them to acquire multilingual re…
Beyond social networking: Performing global Englishes in Facebook by college youth in Nepal1
Until recently, scholarship on online social networking has mostly focused on issues of social relationship, privacy, identity and literacy. Research on the interface between multilingualism, multimodality and online social networking from a discursive perspective is relatively limited. This ethno-graphic study draws data from Facebook pages composed and hosted over two years by three economically and educationally privileged undergraduate studen…
English and discourses of commodification among tourism workers in the Himalayas
In this article, I investigate commodification discourses and ideologies of English from the perspective of Nepali tourism workers. Drawing data from interviews with porters and trekking guides in Nepal, I argue that English is not seen as merely a transactional means to convey meaning; it works in combination with the traditional form of labor and care in the local economy, establishing itself as a powerful tool to establish closer interpersonal…
On high horses: Transnational Nepalis and language ideologies on YouTube
Retelling Stories of Desire in Tesol: English, Imagination, and Encounters in Tourism
This article investigates the language learning desire of multilingual tourism workers. The data were drawn from two sites in Nepal: an English for occupational purposes class and workplace interactions during treks. The article shows that the male tourism workers use their claims of heterosexual relationships with foreign female tourists as resources to build and boast their masculine identity and homosociality among their peers. The workers’ ab…
Training workers for intercultural communication in tourism
This article provides an ethnographic discourse analysis of an intercultural communication training course for tourism workers in Nepal, and investigates the communicative practices Nepali tour guides are socialized into as part of the development of their professional competence. Their work competence and skills include learning some tactics of self-presentation to create a certain kind of persona so that the guides can enhance positive affect i…
Regimes of linguistic entrepreneurship: Neoliberalism, the entanglement of language ideologies and affective regime in language education policy
This article explores how the ideologies of neoliberal linguistic entrepreneurship have created ethical tensions and contentious affects among Indigenous communities in promoting multilingualism and multilingual education. Taking the case of Nepal, our goal is to show how imperatives and characteristics that are articulated as key parts of neoliberalism are systematically perpetuated and appropriated in language education policies and discourses.…
A rhetorical-political framework for multilingual and translingual scholarship
Societies around the world are multilingual, but scholarship is increasingly monolingual. Dominant global languages, which serve as link languages for scholars who share them, can restrict access to and application of knowledge in life and society for the majority of the world population. This article seeks to answer how scholars might be able to advance multilingual and translingual scholarship, making knowledge more accessible. We use the case …
Negotiating professional authority and power in tourist-guide communication in guided village tour
The article examines the linguistic, material, and multimodal aspects of professional communication in guided tours in the Himalayas in Nepal. Using an ethnography-informed interactional sociolinguistics, the study analyses the key instances of miscommunication between an American tourist and an ethnic Tamang guide to understand how various identities are invoked by the participants. As the article considers the complexity of working for tourists…
Stylizing Dialects and Restructuring the Nation of Nepal in Stand-Up Comedy
This study presents an analysis of a Nepali comedian’s dialect stylization in a stand-up comedy show performed for the diasporic Nepali community in Bochum, Germany. The analysis shows that through creative deployment of diverse linguistic practices of Nepali speakers, the comedian, Manoj Gajurel, engages in important identity work both in the narrating and in the narrated world of the comedy act. In the narrating world, he discursively construct…
Hinduism and Tesol: Learning, Teaching and Student-Teacher Relationships Revisited
This historical and philosophical survey provides an overview of 'learning''teaching' and 'student-teacher relationships' as espoused in Hindu philosophy and its ancient educational practices. It shows that some of what have been regarded as the standard practices and innovations in language pedagogy in the Western world today, especially in Anglo-American educational contexts, were in existence in the traditional Hindu educational ethos found in…
Beyond social networking: Performing global Englishes in Facebook by college youth in Nepal1
Until recently, scholarship on online social networking has mostly focused on issues of social relationship, privacy, identity and literacy. Research on the interface between multilingualism, multimodality and online social networking from a discursive perspective is relatively limited. This ethno-graphic study draws data from Facebook pages composed and hosted over two years by three economically and educationally privileged undergraduate studen…
Hinduism and Tesol: Learning, Teaching and Student-Teacher Relationships Revisited
This historical and philosophical survey provides an overview of 'learning''teaching' and 'student-teacher relationships' as espoused in Hindu philosophy and its ancient educational practices. It shows that some of what have been regarded as the standard practices and innovations in language pedagogy in the Western world today, especially in Anglo-American educational contexts, were in existence in the traditional Hindu educational ethos found in…
On high horses: Transnational Nepalis and language ideologies on YouTube
Stylizing Dialects and Restructuring the Nation of Nepal in Stand-Up Comedy
This study presents an analysis of a Nepali comedian’s dialect stylization in a stand-up comedy show performed for the diasporic Nepali community in Bochum, Germany. The analysis shows that through creative deployment of diverse linguistic practices of Nepali speakers, the comedian, Manoj Gajurel, engages in important identity work both in the narrating and in the narrated world of the comedy act. In the narrating world, he discursively construct…
Criticality as Ideological Becoming: Developing English Teachers for Critical Pedagogy in Nepal
This article presents a discussion of how criticality is constructed and implemented for English as a foreign language (EFL) teacher development in Nepal. The authors draw on Freire’s (1970) notion of conscientization to discuss how Nepali EFL teachers develop critical awareness in incorporating local sociopolitical issues in their lessons. Building on Bakhtin’s (1981) concept of ideological becoming, they analyze these teachers’ ideological beco…
Neoliberalism, linguistic commodification, and ethnolinguistic identity in multilingual Nepal
This article examines the consequences of neoliberalism in two separate domains of multilingual language use in the context of Nepal: language education and tourism. We show that institutions and individuals have appropriated and reproduced this ideology with their creative tactics, agency, and practices that both help them promote and commodify their ethnolinguistic identity and language skills while also allowing them to acquire multilingual re…
Discursive representations of difference and multilingualism in Himalaya with Michael Palin
In this article, I discuss how mediatised tourism constructs various discourses of othering through representations of the ‘tourist self’ vis-à-vis the ‘local other’. In order to do so, I analyze a six-hour travelogue Himalaya with Michael Palin broadcast by the BBC in 2004. The analysis shows that despite the forces of globalisation that have made national and cultural boundaries more porous than ever before, common stereotypes about otherness c…
Training workers for intercultural communication in tourism
This article provides an ethnographic discourse analysis of an intercultural communication training course for tourism workers in Nepal, and investigates the communicative practices Nepali tour guides are socialized into as part of the development of their professional competence. Their work competence and skills include learning some tactics of self-presentation to create a certain kind of persona so that the guides can enhance positive affect i…
English and discourses of commodification among tourism workers in the Himalayas
In this article, I investigate commodification discourses and ideologies of English from the perspective of Nepali tourism workers. Drawing data from interviews with porters and trekking guides in Nepal, I argue that English is not seen as merely a transactional means to convey meaning; it works in combination with the traditional form of labor and care in the local economy, establishing itself as a powerful tool to establish closer interpersonal…
Nepal
Nepal is a country of over 28 million people, a multi-ethnic nation of more than 125 languages and a great variety of cultures. Hinduism is the major religion. Buddhism and animism also have a strong presence. Islam and Christianity are minority faiths, the latter of which is a growing religion but it is still not fully recognised by the government and suffers persecution. Christianity arrived in Nepal in 1662, when Italian Capuchin priests passe…
Negotiating professional authority and power in tourist-guide communication in guided village tour
The article examines the linguistic, material, and multimodal aspects of professional communication in guided tours in the Himalayas in Nepal. Using an ethnography-informed interactional sociolinguistics, the study analyses the key instances of miscommunication between an American tourist and an ethnic Tamang guide to understand how various identities are invoked by the participants. As the article considers the complexity of working for tourists…
Reflexivity in Applied Linguistics Research in the Tourism Workplace
Linguistic ethnographers largely agree that engaging in self-reflexivity enables researchers to identify how their actions, subjectivities, and motivations influence research. In this article, I argue for a discourse-oriented ethnographic account as an alternative method for documenting and reporting such reflexivity. The overall goal of this article is to examine reflexive research practices in the study of tourism communication. Presenting illu…
Discourses of professional identities and linguistic capital formation of international STEM faculty
Introduction: Tourism spaces at the nexus of language and materiality
This special issue builds on sociolinguistic research in tourism, semiotic landscapes, language materiality, and multilingual and multimodal practices to explore how spaces for tourism are formed at the nexus of language and the material world
The scarf, language, and other semiotic assemblages in the formation of a new Chinatown
This article closely examines how both linguistic and non-linguistic objects and inscriptions emplaced in the built environment transform the traditional residential-business street into a space of consumption for a new generation of Chinese tourists. The data consists of observation notes, photographs, and interviews obtained from an ethnographic fieldwork in Kathmandu, Nepal. The article makes three major arguments. First, the semiotic shift an…
Regimes of linguistic entrepreneurship: Neoliberalism, the entanglement of language ideologies and affective regime in language education policy
This article explores how the ideologies of neoliberal linguistic entrepreneurship have created ethical tensions and contentious affects among Indigenous communities in promoting multilingualism and multilingual education. Taking the case of Nepal, our goal is to show how imperatives and characteristics that are articulated as key parts of neoliberalism are systematically perpetuated and appropriated in language education policies and discourses.…
Retelling Stories of Desire in Tesol: English, Imagination, and Encounters in Tourism
This article investigates the language learning desire of multilingual tourism workers. The data were drawn from two sites in Nepal: an English for occupational purposes class and workplace interactions during treks. The article shows that the male tourism workers use their claims of heterosexual relationships with foreign female tourists as resources to build and boast their masculine identity and homosociality among their peers. The workers’ ab…
Citizen Linguistic Landscape, bordering practices, and semiotic ideology in the Covid-19 pandemic
This article examines how Linguistic Landscapes in the Covid-19 pandemic construct the borders of place and people. We build on ‘semiotic ideology’ ( Keane, 2018 ) and ‘semiotopology’ ( Peck, Stroud & Williams, 2018 ) to analyze the bordering practices in citizen Linguistic Landscapes during the pandemic in Nepal. Our analysis shows that citizens combine multiple semiotic resources, both linguistic and non-linguistic, to create physical boundarie…
A new materialist perspective to studying L2 instructional interactions in engineering
This article responds to a call for applied linguistics and bilingualism research from a spatial repertoires perspective informed by new materialism. It focuses on the ways international faculty members carry out instructional interactions in STEM using English as an additional language. Using video data, the analysis demonstrates how visual technology, material space and human bodies collectively shape instructional interactions in a structural …
Spatial repertoires in the disciplinary communication of international STEM scholars
The overall goal of this special issue is to understand how bi-/multilingual STEM scholars navigate and deploy spatial repertoires for professional communication. The articles present contextualized, empirical cases from various genre contexts: instructional practices, scholarly writing, language proficiency tests, and research group meetings. While all the articles adopt a spatial orientation to understanding STEM communication, the authors draw…
Developing teacher awareness and action plans for teaching English as an international language
Researchers have made pedagogical suggestions regarding how to incorporate international varieties of English in teacher education, but the amount of research on how novice teachers develop such knowledge and pedagogies and put them into practice is noticeably inadequate. This study presents a two-part case study in order to address this concern. In the first part, the study reports how four pre-service teachers in a teacher education program dev…
A rhetorical-political framework for multilingual and translingual scholarship
Societies around the world are multilingual, but scholarship is increasingly monolingual. Dominant global languages, which serve as link languages for scholars who share them, can restrict access to and application of knowledge in life and society for the majority of the world population. This article seeks to answer how scholars might be able to advance multilingual and translingual scholarship, making knowledge more accessible. We use the case …
Neoliberalism in Multilingual Education
This entry explores the impact of neoliberalism on multilingual education. Neoliberalism, an economic ideology that prioritizes market competition and individualism over government intervention and public welfare, has reshaped the way bi/multilingual education functions in different parts of the world. Multilingual education, which promotes the teaching of multiple languages in schools, is seen as a tool for promoting social and linguistic justic…
Translingual Englishes, participatory hip‐hop and social media in Nepal
This article discusses some key functions and features of English in participatory popular culture and social media in Nepal. Analytical attention is paid to how English use in rap battles is entangled with other local languages and semiotic modes to create translingual practices and how online metapragmatic comments about the rap battles give rise to diverse language ideologies. The study shows that by creating their social life offline and onli…
Anthropocentric engagement with the elephant in a tourist town
This article examines human-elephant engagements in the tourist town of Sauraha, Nepal, by focusing on the semiotic, spatial, and embodied practices that shape its eco-semiotic landscape. Using the heuristic of sites of engagement and ethnographic data, it analyzes how neoliberal conservation materializes through signage, sculptures, media, and corporeal performances. Findings show that the multispecies encounters are shaped by the political econ…
Sociology (26 works) · Political science (22 works) · Linguistics (17 works) · Multilingual Education and Policy (16 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (11 works) · Pedagogy (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies (9 works) · Gender Studies (9 works) · Psychology (9 works)