Description:
This book looks at language in unexpected places. Through a series of personal and narrative accounts, it explores aspects of travel, mobility and locality to ask how languages, cultures and people turn up in unexpected places. What renders the unexpected so and how might we challenge our lines of expectation?
Brief description: Alastair Pennycook is Professor Emeritus at the University of Technology Sydney. His work has focused on language, colonialism and knowledge disparities, concerns highlighted in The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language (now a Routledge Linguistics Classic). Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows, Language and Mobility: Unexpected Places, and Posthumanist Applied Linguistics (all winners of the BAAL Book Prize). In Innovations and Challenges in Applied Linguistics from the Global South, (with Sinfree Makoni) - he has argued for the need for epistemological rethinking from the Global South. His most recent book - Language Assemblages (Cambridge University Press, 2024) - makes the case for a pluriversal and decolonial understanding of language and being.
Review Quotes:
This book offers Pennycook's always innovative theoretical insights in a brilliant, original blend of fine scholarship and personal narrative. It evocatively describes the author's retracing of his family's history in colonial India, draws on concepts from many disciplines, and makes unexpected and illuminating connections with language education.
--Stephanie Vandrick, University of San Francisco, USA