Pressing times, losing voice: critique and transformative spaces in higher education

Abstract

In this article, we examine our own doctoral supervisory dialogue as it has been institutionally interrupted due to Ahmad’s application for asylum in the UK. As we find ourselves lacking the conditions of recognisability required for our actions to be institutionally understood (or made intelligible) as part of a doctoral supervisory relationship, we are left with a sense of futility of how scholarly work preoccupied with social justice may confront, let alone transform, the larger sociopolitical realities with which we aim to engage. In the light of calls to turn precarity into a productive pedagogical space for ethical action – often regarded as a ‘pedagogy for precarity’, we draw from Blommaert’s (2005) sociolinguistic theory of voice to account for how we attempted to become recognisable to each other throughout the course of our supervisory meetings. In so doing, we reflect on the implications of our analysis for politically engaged academic research, while linking with wider language scholarship on the possibility for, and imaginability of, social transformation in higher education spaces.

The 120th anniversary of IOE: critical engagement with educational and social thought, practice and development

“…Our collection also celebrates the contributions of scholars from several disciplines whose passing in the twenty-first century has left a substantial gap, as well as a legacy of inspiration and institution building. These include: Jagdish Gundara, UNESCO chair and founding director of the International Centre for Intercultural Education, whose contribution is recognised by Namrata Sharma (2022); Jan Blommaert, whose concept of pedagogy for precarity from applied linguistics is illustrated in dialogic form involving Ahmad Jaber Benswait, a would-be doctoral researcher whose battle to establish his claim as an asylum seeker is supported by his IOE tutor Miguel Pérez-Milans, who notes that they are effectively losing voice (Benswait and Pérez-Milans, 2022); Roy Bhaskar, whose theoretical insights, conceptualised as critical realism, inspired a whole new field of research and scholarship, as celebrated by Priscilla Alderson (2022); Gunther Kress, who also established a new field of multimodal and social semiotic theory, which not only analyses communication through a linguistic lens, but also acknowledges many signifiers that inform fields, including education, museum studies and the humanities and social sciences. His considerable global influence is discussed by Elisabetta Adami et al (2022) using the example of his concept of design.…”