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This article opens a conversation between disability studies and linguistics from the author's positionality from the Global South. It argues that capacity building for both the abled and disabled in the North is implicated in the disablement of people in the Global South. A decolonial orientation to disability studies values vulnerability, relationality, and ethics which are less privileged in the academy. The article demonstrates how such a crip linguistics might facilitate a different understanding of language competence and analysis. Bringing out the ableism in dominant models of language competence, the article illustrates how linguistics might conceive communication as anomalous embodiment. Such an orientation will move from grammatical norms to nonnormativity, and diversity to multiplicity, as speakers engage with social networks and material ecologies for generating meanings in distributed practice motivated by relational ethics.

This paper explores language beliefs and writing practices of an international scholar in Biochemistry working at a large U.S. research university. Although the participant articulated monolingual ideologies and a desire to become like a 'native speaker,' he did not consider advanced writing skills in English a prerequisite for publishing in English in his field. Through 'talk-around-text' (Lillis 2008) and visits to his laboratory, we examine what resources the participant deemed valuable in the process of producing a scientific article. Adopting a spatial orientation to writing (Canagarajah 2018a), we pay particular attention to the spatial repertoires that shaped his recent first-author publication. We bring out the tensions between his language ideologies and actual communicative practices and discuss the theoretical and pedagogical implications of our research. Ultimately, we argue that a spatial orientation to communication expands the notion of bilingualism by urging us to consider people's actual creative practices of meaning-making in particular spaces rather than focus on isolated cognitive abilities.

Research on translingual repertoires has highlighted the diverse semiotic resources that individuals access in communication, but little research has considered how spatial factors permit or limit access to these resources. Furthermore, as translingual studies have predominantly focused on interactional analysis, there is a paucity of studies on how social networks shape the repertoires of users. To fill this gap, we examine the communicative practices of an international spouse temporarily living in the United States. Through interview data and mobility maps, we analyze the participant's subject positioning and its relation to his use of spatial resources in different spaces. Despite the participant's low English proficiency, he engaged in conversations in many spaces through strategic employment of semiotic resources, including multiple languages and material objects. He also adopted certain positionings that afforded him more opportunities to interact. Thus, we argue that the usefulness of semiotic resources is tied to the spaces in which they are employed and that access to these resources is shaped by subject positioning.

This interview presents the celebrated Kenyan writer Ngugi's changing orientations in decolonizing language. After adopting a Marxist approach to language in the 1980s, he now adopts an embodied and ecological orientation from his indigenous Gikuyu tradition. He articulates the importance of vernaculars and multimodal art forms in social transformation. He discusses the role of affective dispositions such as memory, pain, and hope in resistance.

Purpose: This essay-conversation brings together two literacy scholars who have worked with religious literacies: Suresh Canagarajah and Anne Elrod Whitney. They discuss not only the importance of religious literacies research but also their own experiences conducting such research as people of faith themselves. Design/methodology/approach: The essay is derived from a live interview conversation between the authors, which was later edited along with short introductory and closing material. Findings: Their conversation addresses religious literacies in disciplinary contexts, in teaching and in the careers of scholars. Originality/value: This essay offers researchers and practitioners in literacy education a perspective from two scholars whose recent work has treated their own faith explicitly.

This article takes the inquiry into semiotic repertoires beyond their classifications and inventories to analyse their interactions with each other and the way they gain indexicality in situated communication. As previous theorisation suggests that semiotic repertoires are deployed by agentive individuals, this article draws from New Materialism to focus on how social agents, semiotic repertoires, and material ecologies work together in distributed practice for meaning making. Expanding sociolinguistic constructs for this purpose, the article defines the relevant units and objects of analysis, and illustrates the framing of activities in indexing the values, meanings, and relationships of semiotic repertoires. The role of these repertoires in the interaction of an international community of scientists is analysed through the research group meeting of a team of microbiologists. The article demonstrates that though the focal participant from Korea claims limited English grammatical proficiency in his personal repertoire, he draws strategically from the repertoires in the physical setting and those of his disciplinary community to communicate successfully.

South Korean job seekers face pressure to produce high scores on standardized English tests, which leads to the prominence of test-oriented pedagogy. Though recent scholarship illustrates how materials reflect the values of society and how these are negotiated in classrooms it has mainly analyzed preexisting published books, leaving the potential of student-generated materials (SGMs) underexplored. By using a new materialist perspective (Canagarajah, 2018a; Toohey, 2019), this study: (1) investigates how language learning and teaching activities are distributed across SGMs, learners, and classroom resources; and (2) what emerges from the intra-actions of the participants and the resources during and after an 8-week SGM program. Two participants used business presentation materials, job interview questions, résumés, newspaper articles, and YouTube clips as SGMs. Qualitative thematic analysis of their SGMs, interviews, narratives, field notes, and classroom interaction indicated that the participants' second-language (L2) activities with SGMs were distributed across diverse material resources and communication strategies. Their pedagogical outcomes from the SGM-mediated activities were synergistic, and not reducible to a disembodied cause-and-effect analysis. The findings suggest the potential of SGMs for learners to take advantage of distributed L2 repertoires and create new learning opportunities.

This article is based on the engagement of a US-based scholar and faculty members in a non-Western university in a mentoring exercise on publishing. It demonstrates how the "list" constructed in a particular academic department in the university for ranking relevant journals for publication has reproductive effects on knowledge construction. The ranking of journals shapes scholarly interactions both inside and outside the academic department, offering limited possibilities for developing local knowledge. A micro-level orientation to publishing is first adopted to bring out how rhetorical and textual choices are influenced by the list of ranked journals. Next, a broad lens perspective is adopted to explore how academic interactions and communication among local scholars are also shaped by such productivity targets to reproduce dominant knowledge. In the final section, the article reports on the way mentoring was reconfigured to identify strategic textual spaces for representing local knowledge within existing publishing conventions.

Inadequate attention paid to understanding the complex relations between personal drives and situated social constraints means affect remains the least understood of language learning variables (Scovel, 2001). At a time when English is uncritically and universally treated as desirable, it is significant that its learning and use evokes shame in some communities. In this study, the authors analyze how Kiribati nationals and international development workers demonstrate conflicting orientations to shame relating to learning and using English. They consider whether shame of this nature might have positive value for learning, communication, and identity. Theorizing the productive significance of shame also helps deconstruct dominant notions of language competence, motivation, and pedagogical practice based on desire. The authors articulate policy and pedagogical options sensitive to local values and interests that might help resolve tensions in the perspectives of the powerful outsiders and dependent locals that lead to confusions in educational priorities and prove somewhat debilitating for local English language teaching (ELT) pedagogies. The authors conclude that ELT researchers and practitioners must proceed to distinguish different motivations for shame in English language learning contexts and identify the shame emerging from local community norms as deserving more recognition.

This paper seeks to expand the translingual tradition through a stronger focus on 'the political implications' -- a way to understand the ordinariness of everyday resistance. When people engage in linguistic resistance in everyday life, it might have mixed motivations; it might not be theoretically informed; it might draw from their cultures of resistance in their community history; it might need ideological analysis by scholars so that we can create more awareness among ordinary people. Drawing on the social media translingual practices of young people in different geographical contexts such as Mongolia and Japan, we consider the transgressive implications and the politics implicit in these young people's everyday language choices. We seek to interpret these politics in a situated manner, in relation to the local and geopolitical contexts that impinge on these practices and language choices.