Papers by Miranda Weinberg
Current Issues in Language Planning, 2020
Analyzing three cases of school-level language policy decisionmaking
in Nepal shows that each sch... more Analyzing three cases of school-level language policy decisionmaking
in Nepal shows that each school had a pair of language
policy arbiters, actors with disproportionate power over language
policy decisions. The permissive but passive stance of Nepal’s
government toward providing multilingual schooling including
minoritized languages created a situation where inaction
maintained the language policy status quo. This ethnography of
language policy builds on theorizing of the language policy
arbiter to show that agency may require coordination of two
people, rather than being a slot filled by individuals. In a highly
centralized education bureaucracy, there were no crucial arbiters
between central policymakers and the school level. Shifting from
viewing scales as fixed to being produced by scale-making
practices clarifies how scale is employed politically. I argue that
identifying language policy arbiters may be important not only for
analysis but also for advocates interested in opening ideological
and implementational spaces for multilingual education.
In June 2012, student activists in Nepal declared a campaign against private, for-profit colleges... more In June 2012, student activists in Nepal declared a campaign against private, for-profit colleges with foreign names, simultaneously decrying the schools’ names and their exorbitant tuition fees. During the campaign, members of multiple student unions vandalized signboards, buildings, computers, and buses belonging to various colleges and filed a court case demanding stricter management of private schools. These activists claimed control of the linguistic landscape of Kathmandu, objecting not to English in the classroom but to the material emblems of branded educational institutions. This article explores the semiotic implications of this movement through analysis of newspaper coverage of the protests. The school names and talk about appropriate names delineate two competing cultural chronotopes that students employed to promote a particular vision of proper Nepali behavior and to contest what they depicted as inappropriate commodification of higher education.
The experiences of a community of people learning and teaching Lenape in Pennsylvania provide ins... more The experiences of a community of people learning and teaching Lenape in Pennsylvania provide insights into the complexities of current ways of talking and acting about language reclamation. We illustrate how Native and non-Native participants in a university-based Indigenous language class constructed language, identity, and place in nuanced ways that, although influenced by essentializing discourses of language endangerment, are largely pluralist and reflexive. Rather than counting and conserving fixed languages, the actors in this study focus on locally appropriate language education, undertaken with participatory classroom discourses and practices. We argue that locally responsible, participatory educational responses to language endangerment such as this, although still rare in formal higher education, offer a promising direction in which to invest resources.
How are new speakers of an endangered language created? In this paper we draw on a
three-year eth... more How are new speakers of an endangered language created? In this paper we draw on a
three-year ethnographic case study to explore the processes through which a group of
learners at a Pennsylvania college came to be identified as speakers of Lenape, a language indigenous to the eastern United States. Using a communities of practice framework, we analyze how language learning was facilitated and how the identities of community members were negotiated and contested through processes of authentication. A community of practice lens affords a useful framework for understanding how this successful learning community functioned, and for identifying factors that may benefit other language revitalization initiatives
Linguistics & Education
Building on contemporary approaches to narrative analysis, this article examines how one non-heri... more Building on contemporary approaches to narrative analysis, this article examines how one non-heritage learner of an endangered Native American language described his experiences of learning Lenape in a college course. Analysis of a multimodal digital narrative created as a course project demonstrates the ways that this student employed a legend as a metanarrative to contextualize his individual language learning journey as part of a broader linguistic and cultural revitalization movement. Structural elements of the narrative downplay the narrator’s individual role and agency in studying the language, showing ways that this learner negotiated his position and privilege in learning a language previously only spoken by members of the Lenape cultural community. The article considers the utility of narrative analysis and the constructs of investment and imagined communities in a language revitalization context.
The experiences of a community of people learning and teaching Lenape in Pennsylvania provide ins... more The experiences of a community of people learning and teaching Lenape in Pennsylvania provide insights into the complexities of current ways of talking and acting about language reclamation. We illustrate how Native and non-Native participants in a university-based Indigenous language class constructed language, identity and place in nuanced ways that, although influenced by essentializing discourses of language endangerment, are largely pluralist and reflexive. Rather than counting and conserving fixed languages, the actors in this study focus on locally appropriate language education, undertaken with participatory classroom discourses and practices. We argue that locally responsible, participatory educational responses to language endangerment such as this, although still rare in formal higher education, offer a promising direction in which to invest resources.
Center for Applied Linguistics Heritage Voices Series, Dec 2013
H e r it a ge Voice : Pr ogr a m Le n a pe Lan gu a ge Edu ca t ion Pr ogr a m of t h e Le n a pe... more H e r it a ge Voice : Pr ogr a m Le n a pe Lan gu a ge Edu ca t ion Pr ogr a m of t h e Le n a pe N a t ion of Pe n n sy lv a n ia a n d Sw a r t h m or e Colle ge PO Box 451 East on, PA 18044 www.lenapenat ion.or g/ lenapelanguage.ht m l www.swart hm ore.edu/ SocSci/ Linguist ics/ LenapeLanguageResources
Working Papers in Educational Linguistics 28(1), Feb 2013
This paper examines the history of language-in-education policy in Nepal. I begin with a brief ov... more This paper examines the history of language-in-education policy in Nepal. I begin with a brief overview of a standard history of Nepali language planning and policy. This version of history describes an early period with almost no schools, followed by the Nepali-only Panchayat period, and, after the 1990 restoration of democracy, an openness toward multilingual schooling in policy. I augment this history to point toward a view of history that is not split into static periods, does not impose current categories of ethnicity and language on a past when such categories functioned differently, and that recognizes the importance of influences from outside of Nepal’s national borders. Finally, I discuss the ways these differences inform an understanding of the past and opportunities for considering the future of language policy.
Book Reviews by Miranda Weinberg
Anthropology & Education Quarterly 43(2), 2012
Anthropology & Education Quarterly 44(1), 2013
racialized others. Ahmed dismisses the quest for a positive, antiracist mode of embodying our whi... more racialized others. Ahmed dismisses the quest for a positive, antiracist mode of embodying our whiteness as narcissistic without providing alternatives. Whiteness Studies should be subjected to critique from an array of scholars; however, criticisms submitted as part of a dialogue rather than condemnation would do more to move the field forward in a productive direction.
Talks by Miranda Weinberg
In June 2012, student activists in Nepal declared a campaign against private, for-profit colleges... more In June 2012, student activists in Nepal declared a campaign against private, for-profit collegeswith foreign names, simultaneously decrying the schools' names and their exorbitant tuition fees. During the campaign, members of multiple student unions vandalized signboards, buildings, computers, and buses belonging to various colleges and filed a court case demanding stricter management of private schools by “checking exorbitant fees and deterring naming of schools after English-origin places and clubs” (The Himalayan, 7/23/2012). These activists claimed control of the linguistic landscape of Kathmandu, objecting not to English in the classroom but to the material emblems of branded educational institutions.
This paper explores implications of this movement through discourse analysis of newspaper coverage of events surrounding the protest. I examine the discursive construction in newspaper reports of competing “cultural chronotopes” (Agha, 2007), semiotic representations of time and place peopled by certain social types. Activists called into question a chronotopic representation marketed through gaudy school signboards that linked English language, symbols of Euro-American prestige, and forms of capitalism that sell education to those who can pay, and placed all of these elements in the territory of Nepal. Their suggested replacements for such school names drew from a chronotopic representation of Nepal as unchanging and morally pure. These protests, short-lived though they were, demonstrate a concern for the future linguistic community of Nepal and the kinds of people who will inhabit it.
Counting speakers and fusing language with identity are central elements of talk about language e... more Counting speakers and fusing language with identity are central elements of talk about language endangerment. This paper draws from an ethnographic study of a Lenape language revitalization project in Pennsylvania to investigate how Lenape speakers were created and counted, and how participants discussed language and identity. In the context of a language revitalization project focused on teaching the language to people with Lenape tribal affiliation, this paper explores a university class taught by the head of those language efforts at an elite liberal arts college. Through interview and observation data, we investigate the ways university students and the language teacher co-constructed and negotiated roles in the class and the broader project. Although participants frequently talked about the links between language and identity, they ultimately created a separation between what we came to understand as an open speech community and a closed identity community. Student interviews in particular provided insights into new identities and subjectivities that were available to students through learning an endangered language. While a growth in the number of speakers is a core goal of language revitalization, this case illustrates that the conceptualization of "speakers" is subject to negotiation, and that the motivations and structures of projects grouped under the category of "language revitalization" may vary widely. In addition, understandings of these nebulous concepts may vary among members of an individual project. Through this discussion we aim to illustrate the complex interplay between language and identity in the creation of endangered language speakers.
In June 2012, student activists in Nepal declared a campaign against private, for-profit colleges... more In June 2012, student activists in Nepal declared a campaign against private, for-profit colleges with foreign names, simultaneously decrying the schools' names and their exorbitant tuition fees. During the campaign, student activists painted over signboards of the Pentagon, NASA, Himalayan WhiteHouse, Liverpool and Barcelona Colleges; vandalized buildings and computers belonging to Florida Everest and South Western State Colleges; burned a school bus belonging to Delhi Public School; and filed a court case demanding stricter management of private schools by “checking exorbitant fees and deterring naming of schools after English-origin places and clubs” (The Himalayan, 7/23/2012).
This paper explores the students' attempt to influence language policy in superdiverse Kathmandu through a discourse analysis of newspaper articles. Student unions affiliated with but not controlled by political parties anointed themselves the arbiters of legitimate and commodifiable language (Heller & Boutet, 2006) by attacking certain institutions. The students claimed control of the linguistic landscape of the city, objecting not to English in the classroom but to the material emblems of branded educational institutions. This analysis investigates the circulation of names from American institutions and European cities (already converted to brands as football clubs) to their recontextualization as educational brand names, tracing the global travels of the nebulous concept of brand (Manning, 2010; Moore, 2003).
This paper describes Lenape language revitalization efforts in Pennsylvania, which include a lang... more This paper describes Lenape language revitalization efforts in Pennsylvania, which include a language class at Swarthmore College. We present the history of revitalization efforts and benefits of the community-university collaboration for both community language efforts and university students, a new Lenape speech community.
The Unami dialect of the Lenape language, once spoken in present-day Pennsylvania, New Jersey and... more The Unami dialect of the Lenape language, once spoken in present-day Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York, may be called "an extinct language" in the Ethnologue database (Lewis, 2009), yet it is currently the subject of language classes, materials development, and research by the Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania and students at Swarthmore College. We share an overview of Lenape language education initiatives in Pennsylvania, including perspectives from a language teacher, a language learner who is also a teacher, and student-researchers who conducted an ethnographic study of a Lenape language class. This program demonstrates that locally-relevant language education and research can give voice to the history and continued presence of Indigenous people, which are all too often erased from mainstream education, and increase students’ awareness of the linguistic and cultural history of their region.
This paper presents two views of the history of medium-of-instruction policy in Nepal, one based ... more This paper presents two views of the history of medium-of-instruction policy in Nepal, one based on language policy studies and the other drawing from additional sources. The second history challenges the first history in several ways. I interrogate the influence of particular kinds of histories on understandings of language policy.
There are many agents who influence language education practices and policies, from governments a... more There are many agents who influence language education practices and policies, from governments and administrators, to teachers and students (Hornberger and Ricento, 1996). These agents shape the language ecology, or linguistic landscape, of societies and education systems. Humanitarian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are not often considered among the primary actors responsible for language education policy and practice. In multilingual societies in the developing world, however, NGO institutions are increasingly influential in numerous spheres including education (Fisher, 1997; Sutton and Arnove, 2004). With the agenda to support mother tongue education set by UNESCO (2003), both large and small humanitarian organizations are promoting the use of minority or non-dominant languages in education and other social sectors.
This study examines NGO intervention in local language practices—especially languages in education—and considers some of its implications and potential future effects. In-depth case studies of NGO language-in-education initiatives in Nepal and the Philippines, as well as examples of projects in other highly multilingual countries, are drawn upon to illustrate trends in NGO interventions. We use data from participant observation, NGO documents, and materials produced by the projects to describe language planning activities, and to analyze some of their outcomes.
Through lobbying, teacher training, materials development, and assessment, among other activities, NGOs may have significant impacts on language use and education practices. NGO intervention may affect language standardization, dialect hierarchies, linguistic endangerment and vitality, literacy practices, and power structures within and outside of educational systems. Whether or not the effects are desirable remains a contentious subject; possible benefits and drawbacks are discussed, as well as areas of future research into the relationship between NGOs and language practices.
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Papers by Miranda Weinberg
in Nepal shows that each school had a pair of language
policy arbiters, actors with disproportionate power over language
policy decisions. The permissive but passive stance of Nepal’s
government toward providing multilingual schooling including
minoritized languages created a situation where inaction
maintained the language policy status quo. This ethnography of
language policy builds on theorizing of the language policy
arbiter to show that agency may require coordination of two
people, rather than being a slot filled by individuals. In a highly
centralized education bureaucracy, there were no crucial arbiters
between central policymakers and the school level. Shifting from
viewing scales as fixed to being produced by scale-making
practices clarifies how scale is employed politically. I argue that
identifying language policy arbiters may be important not only for
analysis but also for advocates interested in opening ideological
and implementational spaces for multilingual education.
three-year ethnographic case study to explore the processes through which a group of
learners at a Pennsylvania college came to be identified as speakers of Lenape, a language indigenous to the eastern United States. Using a communities of practice framework, we analyze how language learning was facilitated and how the identities of community members were negotiated and contested through processes of authentication. A community of practice lens affords a useful framework for understanding how this successful learning community functioned, and for identifying factors that may benefit other language revitalization initiatives
Book Reviews by Miranda Weinberg
Talks by Miranda Weinberg
This paper explores implications of this movement through discourse analysis of newspaper coverage of events surrounding the protest. I examine the discursive construction in newspaper reports of competing “cultural chronotopes” (Agha, 2007), semiotic representations of time and place peopled by certain social types. Activists called into question a chronotopic representation marketed through gaudy school signboards that linked English language, symbols of Euro-American prestige, and forms of capitalism that sell education to those who can pay, and placed all of these elements in the territory of Nepal. Their suggested replacements for such school names drew from a chronotopic representation of Nepal as unchanging and morally pure. These protests, short-lived though they were, demonstrate a concern for the future linguistic community of Nepal and the kinds of people who will inhabit it.
This paper explores the students' attempt to influence language policy in superdiverse Kathmandu through a discourse analysis of newspaper articles. Student unions affiliated with but not controlled by political parties anointed themselves the arbiters of legitimate and commodifiable language (Heller & Boutet, 2006) by attacking certain institutions. The students claimed control of the linguistic landscape of the city, objecting not to English in the classroom but to the material emblems of branded educational institutions. This analysis investigates the circulation of names from American institutions and European cities (already converted to brands as football clubs) to their recontextualization as educational brand names, tracing the global travels of the nebulous concept of brand (Manning, 2010; Moore, 2003).
This study examines NGO intervention in local language practices—especially languages in education—and considers some of its implications and potential future effects. In-depth case studies of NGO language-in-education initiatives in Nepal and the Philippines, as well as examples of projects in other highly multilingual countries, are drawn upon to illustrate trends in NGO interventions. We use data from participant observation, NGO documents, and materials produced by the projects to describe language planning activities, and to analyze some of their outcomes.
Through lobbying, teacher training, materials development, and assessment, among other activities, NGOs may have significant impacts on language use and education practices. NGO intervention may affect language standardization, dialect hierarchies, linguistic endangerment and vitality, literacy practices, and power structures within and outside of educational systems. Whether or not the effects are desirable remains a contentious subject; possible benefits and drawbacks are discussed, as well as areas of future research into the relationship between NGOs and language practices.
in Nepal shows that each school had a pair of language
policy arbiters, actors with disproportionate power over language
policy decisions. The permissive but passive stance of Nepal’s
government toward providing multilingual schooling including
minoritized languages created a situation where inaction
maintained the language policy status quo. This ethnography of
language policy builds on theorizing of the language policy
arbiter to show that agency may require coordination of two
people, rather than being a slot filled by individuals. In a highly
centralized education bureaucracy, there were no crucial arbiters
between central policymakers and the school level. Shifting from
viewing scales as fixed to being produced by scale-making
practices clarifies how scale is employed politically. I argue that
identifying language policy arbiters may be important not only for
analysis but also for advocates interested in opening ideological
and implementational spaces for multilingual education.
three-year ethnographic case study to explore the processes through which a group of
learners at a Pennsylvania college came to be identified as speakers of Lenape, a language indigenous to the eastern United States. Using a communities of practice framework, we analyze how language learning was facilitated and how the identities of community members were negotiated and contested through processes of authentication. A community of practice lens affords a useful framework for understanding how this successful learning community functioned, and for identifying factors that may benefit other language revitalization initiatives
This paper explores implications of this movement through discourse analysis of newspaper coverage of events surrounding the protest. I examine the discursive construction in newspaper reports of competing “cultural chronotopes” (Agha, 2007), semiotic representations of time and place peopled by certain social types. Activists called into question a chronotopic representation marketed through gaudy school signboards that linked English language, symbols of Euro-American prestige, and forms of capitalism that sell education to those who can pay, and placed all of these elements in the territory of Nepal. Their suggested replacements for such school names drew from a chronotopic representation of Nepal as unchanging and morally pure. These protests, short-lived though they were, demonstrate a concern for the future linguistic community of Nepal and the kinds of people who will inhabit it.
This paper explores the students' attempt to influence language policy in superdiverse Kathmandu through a discourse analysis of newspaper articles. Student unions affiliated with but not controlled by political parties anointed themselves the arbiters of legitimate and commodifiable language (Heller & Boutet, 2006) by attacking certain institutions. The students claimed control of the linguistic landscape of the city, objecting not to English in the classroom but to the material emblems of branded educational institutions. This analysis investigates the circulation of names from American institutions and European cities (already converted to brands as football clubs) to their recontextualization as educational brand names, tracing the global travels of the nebulous concept of brand (Manning, 2010; Moore, 2003).
This study examines NGO intervention in local language practices—especially languages in education—and considers some of its implications and potential future effects. In-depth case studies of NGO language-in-education initiatives in Nepal and the Philippines, as well as examples of projects in other highly multilingual countries, are drawn upon to illustrate trends in NGO interventions. We use data from participant observation, NGO documents, and materials produced by the projects to describe language planning activities, and to analyze some of their outcomes.
Through lobbying, teacher training, materials development, and assessment, among other activities, NGOs may have significant impacts on language use and education practices. NGO intervention may affect language standardization, dialect hierarchies, linguistic endangerment and vitality, literacy practices, and power structures within and outside of educational systems. Whether or not the effects are desirable remains a contentious subject; possible benefits and drawbacks are discussed, as well as areas of future research into the relationship between NGOs and language practices.