Activité sur Unsettling the critical in critical language education

2024 • livre de Luís Conti

Résumé : This dissertation explores the notion of the critical underlying much of critical education and critical language education. More specifically, the research investigates some of the assumptions on which this idea depends and which it inherits from eurocentrism, and the connections between some of the categories of thought that are central to eurocentered critique and modernity/coloniality. Challenging straightforward pathways leading to fixed conclusions and to univocity, this post-qualitative inquiry is inspired by rhizomatic understandings of academic research and writing, and opens up conversations about the presence and the enacted absence of the body in critique. The discussion takes shape at different "entry points", or entryways into the debate at hand, which don't intend to provide a thorough overview of the matter, nor to conclude the conversation by providing any "higher" or "deeper" truths. Overall, being situated as this critique is in my geo-body and political location, the dissertation embodies a self-reflexive examination of some of the suppositions I have, as a language teacher myself, accepted about the notion of the critical. The entry points in this work engage in explorations of different concepts such as modern rationality, dialogue, truth and ideology, and resistance to oppression. With a view to offering a decolonial perspective into the dichotomous order organizing and limiting our sense of possibilities for social change, the modern ideals of the human, justice, progress and emancipation are considered in relation to the European imperial/colonial project and to its long-standing racializing and dehumanizing effects. The presumed dilemmas that are posed by eurocentered critique also come into focus, as does the white, Christian European cosmovision from which these binary frameworks emerge. For the sake of provincializing that very particular cosmovision, and of de-universalizing its assumptions, the conversations highlight other(ed) onto-epistemologies and the embodied and complex strategies of re-existence disputing onto-epistemic univocity. They ask whose body ultimately benefits from the purist thinking that is inherent to eurocentered critique. By emphasizing "South-South" cross-pollinations in favor of learning from and with other(ed) bodies, as well as the deep coalitions-in-process that may emerge from these complex pollinations, this research calls for recentering the body in our understandings of the critical, and for plurivocal critiques of the coloniality of critique