MANCEPT

  • Song, S. (Organiser)
  • Andrew Shorten (Organiser)
  • Sergi Morales (Organiser)

Activity: Participating in or organising an event typesOrganising a conferenceScientific

Description

MANCEPT Panel: New Directions in Linguistic Justice

Convenors

• Seunghyun Song, Tilburg University, [email protected]
• Andrew Shorten, University of Limerick, [email protected]
• Sergi Morales-Gálvez, Universitat de València, [email protected]

Panel Description

With the rise of globalization and immigration, linguistic diversity has steadily increased and become an undeniable fact of many societies. Correspondingly, tensions among language groups have become more tangible, providing new challenges for states and organisations, as well as for political theorists. This panel invites new approaches that have the potential to advance the linguistic justice debate in political theory, with the aim of refreshing the field and identifying new avenues for inquiry.

In political theory, debates about language rights and linguistic justice first gained prominence as part of broader discussions surrounding multiculturalism and cultural recognition, in which language was typically identified as a crucial marker of cultural difference (Taylor 1994; Kymlicka 1995). However, linguistic justice rapidly developed into a fully-fledged field in its own right, thanks to political philosophers who tackled issues related to language head-on (Kymlicka & Patten 2003). Today, linguistic justice is a broad and maturing field of academic research, concerned with numerous theoretical and policy issues connected to how people, states and international organisations should respond to linguistic diversity.

Current work on the topic often arises out of a liberal egalitarian framework and foregrounds the normatively salient interests that people are supposed to have in languages. Simplifying somewhat, these theories divide into two strands: instrumentalist and identitarian. Instrumentalists argue that language serves important civic and political interests due to the way in which shared languages potentially support national unity (Robichaud and De Schutter 2012), equality of opportunity (Pogge 2003) and democracy (Barry 2001; Weinstock 2003). Meanwhile, identitarians argue that language is also important for anchoring individual or collective dignity and self-respect (Taylor 1994, Van Parijs 2011), providing a sense of belonging (Reaume 2000; May 2003, 2015), generating options necessary for autonomous choice (Kymlicka 1995; Patten 2014), or securing access to a life-world (De Schutter 2022). It is identitarians who more frequently recommended measures to promote minority language rights, appealing to principles already implicit in liberal egalitarian theories, such as parity of esteem (Van Parijs 2011) and proceduralism (Patten 2014).

The theoretical dividing lines amongst liberal egalitarian approaches are now well-established, but insights and contributions from other theoretical traditions and perspectives remain underdeveloped and marginal. To address this, we invite submissions on any issue related to linguistic justice, but especially welcome papers that either challenge dominant liberal egalitarian approaches or seek to develop new theoretical perspectives. Potential topics could include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Linguistic injustice as structural injustice
• Linguistic justice and the capabilities approach
• Republican and / or socialist perspectives on linguistic justice
• Postcolonialism and linguistic justice
• Historic injustice and the politics of language
• Linguistic justice and global justice
• Feminist, critical race and/or intersectional perspectives on linguistic justice
• Discrimination and linguistic justice
• Linguistic justice for sign languages
• The limits of liberalism for linguistic justice
• Multilingualism and democratic theory
Period3 Sept 20246 Sept 2024
Event typeConference
Degree of RecognitionInternational