Resisting Language Inequality/Resistir la Desigualdad Lingüística (ReDes_Ling) is a network of organizations whose goal is to research language inequality and propose innovative strategies to revert its pernicious social effects. By language inequality we mean an asymmetrical relationship among language groups that translates into social difference, economic disadvantages, uneven access to rights, lack of material and emotional well-being, or inability to fulfill one’s own potential. The consequences of linguistic barriers are extensive, particularly for vulnerabilized populations such as immigrant communities and ethnic minorities, and affect several crucial areas of social interest, among them education, health, justice, and work. However, language is often overlooked in strategic plans, despite its potential to either facilitate or hinder sociopolitical stability. ReDes_Ling’s goal is to call attention to language issues in our societies by better understanding and explaining how language contributes to the production and reproduction of social inequalities.
A deep understanding of the social, political, and historical processes that intertwine in the production of language inequality requires a collaborative team embodying different epistemologies, encompassing diverse social, demographic, and multilingual contexts, and looking at the object of study from multiple perspectives. In response to this need, ReDes_Ling brings together five academic and five non-academic institutions from Europe and Latin America that represent different fields of expertise and whose strength is to have extensive and diverse experience developing strategies to fight language inequality (see table “ReDes_Ling’s Partners” for a list of participants).
Through participatory action research and thanks to the mobility enabled by the MSCA Staff Exchange program, our action is sharing and refining the thorough theoretical and practical knowledge accumulated by the members of the network to further understand the role of language in producing and reproducing social inequality. Moreover, ReDes_Ling is going beyond description by designing and applying solutions to specific problems identified and analyzed as part of this research project. ReDes_Ling’s ultimate goal is to close the gap between scientific research and society’s take on language as well as to engage with policy-making at the local, national, and European levels in order to achieve fairer and more democratic societies.
ReDes_Ling is framed in a critical current that consolidated within language disciplines two decades ago, moving scholars to analyze social issues embedded in language, such as exclusion, stratification, and discrimination. Influenced by the work of philosopher Michel Foucault, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, and pedagogue Paulo Freire, among others, critical trends see language as a situated social practice that unfolds over time and across space and is, thus, inscribed in power dynamics resulting from historical processes such as the development of colonial projects, the constitution of nation-states or the spread of capitalism and, more recently, globalization.
In our theoretical effort to systematize the complexity and diversity of the sociolinguistic processes involved in the construction of inequality, ReDes_Ling follows North American philosopher Nancy Fraser, who has identified three dimensions of struggles in civil society: an economic dimension (a struggle for redistribution), a cultural dimension (a struggle for recognition), and a political dimension (a struggle for participation). On the basis of her work, we propose the following three objectives for our project:
1) Striving for an equal distribution of resources among different linguistic communities
2) Challenging the unfairness of the current sociolinguistic order
3) Promoting social and political participation in multilingual contexts
ReDes_Ling focuses on three key domains (education, health, and work) and three overarching dimensions (environment, gender, technology).
Our project proproses four main outcomes:
1) An innovative interdisciplinary and inter-sectoral framework that offers groundbreaking approaches and tools to understand and tackle language inequality.
2) Actions to respond to language inequality targeting linguistic issues previously identified by the partners in the three key areas of ReDes_Ling’s scope: education, health, and work.
3) Interventions to promote an alternative discourse on language to foster sociolinguistic justice.
4) Materials to bring the research and innovation produced by ReDes_Ling to society.
In sum, our goal is to apply our innovative theoretical framework and comprehensive methodological approach to design, implement, and assess well-defined actions and interventions to provide vulnerabilized populations access to material and symbolic resources, recognition for their linguistic practices, and voice to participate in social and political life (see table “Summary of Project”). ReDes_Ling will not only offer concrete models for action, together with guidelines to adapt and replicate them in other contexts, but also an alternative way of thinking about language and talking about language that will transform the way that we interpret linguistic discrimination at an individual and collective level. Our objectives are broad enough to have an impact on different spaces of our society, but they are also articulated in a manner that they are manageable, offering both general research principles to address a range of widespread challenges and concrete groundbreaking solutions to specific social problems.
