Resisting linguistic marginalization in professional spaces

Constructing multi-layered oppositional stances

Bibliographic Data

ID21196350
AuthorsPriti Sandhu (University of Washington, corresponding author)
Year2015
Volume6
Issue3
Pages369-391
Publication date2015-09-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueApplied Linguistics Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1868-6303 • E-ISSN: 1868-6311
PublisherWalter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1515/applirev-2015-0017
OpenAlexW2561398355
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited32

This paper analyzes the resistant stances enacted by six recently-graduated, Hindi medium educated (HME) Indian women against the primacy accorded to English medium educated (EME) individuals in urban professional hiring practices. The data were collected in face-to-face, audio-recorded interviews by the researcher in the summer of 2013 from New Delhi. Aligning with Jaffe’s (2009) argument that a salient role of stance-based research is to theorize the relationship between stancetaking and sociocultural conditions and adopting a critical constructivist perspective (while withholding claims about participants’ inner psychological states), this paper shows that within the postcolonial context of urban India, the liminal, hybrid, third spaces of participants’ locations are discursively connected to the exigencies and inequalities characteristic of their local social structures. Analysis of participants’ resistant stances demonstrates their complex, multi-layered, and context-specific characteristics elucidating the ways in which these stance performances are achieved by variously intertwining discourses about linguistic prejudices, nationalism, colonialism, gender and socioeconomic conditions. Specifically, these sociopolitical issues are related to (i) gender-based personal safety anxieties, (ii) neoliberal discourses about India’s demographic dividend (i.e. the public celebration of the increase in the country’s ‘young’ population), (iii) arguments about justice, citizenship and national language, (iv) discourses of colonialism and government apathy, (v) group rights, ethics and responsibilities, and (vi) an unvarnished shaming of the ubiquity of EME preference in local hiring practices. The paper argues that HME-associated linguistic exclusionary practices, whether driven by economic necessities or by biased linguistic ideologies, perpetuate and deepen existing class-based divides, fail the aspirational needs of a growing urban, youthful, and vernacular medium educated population while further complicating the challenges faced by women in a historically patriarchal society

Citizenship · Geography · Ideology · Political science · Politics · Sociology · EFL/ESL Teaching and Learning · Gender Studies · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Law · Multilingual Education and Policy

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