The Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa

There is an urgency in theorising how diversity is negotiated, communicated, and disputed as a matter of everyday ordinariness that is compounded by the clear linkages between diversity, transformation, voice, agency, poverty and health. The way in which difference is categorised, semiotised and reconfigured in multiple languages across quotidian encounters and in public and media forums is a central dynamic in how poverty and disadvantage are distributed and reproduced across social and racial categorisations. In the South African context, finding ways of productively harnessing diversity in the building of a better society must be a priority

Ensemble Kalman methods for high-dimensional hierarchical dynamic space-time models

We propose a new class of filtering and smoothing methods for inference in high-dimensional, nonlinear, non-Gaussian, spatio-temporal state-space models. The main idea is to combine the ensemble Kalman filter and smoother, developed in the geophysics literature, with state-space algorithms from the statistics literature. Our algorithms address a variety of estimation scenarios, including on-line and off-line state and parameter estimation. We take a Bayesian perspective, for which the goal is to generate samples from the joint posterior distribution of states and parameters. The key benefit of our approach is the use of ensemble Kalman methods for dimension reduction, which allows inference for high-dimensional state vectors. We compare our methods to existing ones, including ensemble Kalman filters, particle filters, and particle MCMC. Using a real data example of cloud motion and data simulated under a number of nonlinear and non-Gaussian scenarios, we show that our approaches outperform these existing methods

Multilingualism remixed: Sampling, braggadocio and the stylisation of local voice

Among the many challenges posed by contexts of social transformation and extensive mobility is the question of how multilingual voice may carry across media, modalities and context. In this paper, we suggest that one approach to this complex problem may be to look at multilingual voice from a sociolinguistic perspective of performance. Our focus here is thus on how marginalised voices on the periphery of Cape Town become mainstreamed within the city’s hip-hop community. Specifically, we ask how emcees sample local varieties of language, texts and registers to stage their particular stylisation of voice. By way of conclusion, we make brief recommendations with respect to the study of multilingualism in South Africa and how the stylisation of local voices in Cape Town hip-hop could inform studies on multilingual policy and planning.Department of HE and Training approved lis

Linguistic citizenship as Utopia

A major challenge of our time is to build a life of equity in a fragmented world of globalized ethical, economic and ecological meltdown. In this context, language takes on singular importance as the foremost means whereby we may engage ethically with others across encounters of difference. Howevever, there is an important sense in which the crisis of humanity we are experiencing as a crisis of diversity and voice is deeply entwined with a subterranean crisis of language itself. As Giorgio Agamben has pointed out, although language is the foremost realization of our humanity, our current understanding of language distorts rather than elucidates this humanity

Shapeshifters and shamans: Topologies of multilingualism

This paper is a radical break with a view of multilingualism as an arrangement or hierarchy of different languages which produces more or less visibility for these named varieties. Rather, it takes as its starting point a view of multilingualism as situated within a matrix of social relations, constituted in different times and spaces, between people carrying different histories, attitudes, and feelings. In an attempt to find new ways of representing these social rationalities, we argue for a topological view of multilingualism. This perspective draws attention to the ways in which the diverse facets of multilingualism interconnect and relate in different time-spaces. Our data draw on four artistic visualisations of multilingualism produced by students on a course which sought to explore new ways of re-imagining multilingualism. The posters and artefacts produced on this course stimulated our view of multilingualism as a networked, fluid and mobile typology, or as an n-dimensional form which shifts and changes as it rotates through time and space. We then link this conception to our discussion of Linguistic Citizenship as an n-dimensional topological phenomenon

Project proposal for Mellon Supra-Institutional project on the decolonial turn (unsettling paradigms) – 2018.

This is a proposal text submitted to the Mellon Foundation entitled "Languages and Literacies in Higher Education: Reclaiming voices from the south", to secure funding for the module

Fanon in drag: Decoloniality in sociolinguistics?

In focus in this paper is the genre of drag, and the uses to which it is put by its proponents in subverting conventional and repressive (Western) models of gender, sexuality and race. We raise the question of to what extent performances of drag, while arguably disrupting gender stereotypes, nevertheless continue to reproduce colonialities of race and sexuality. Framing an analysis of a drag king performance in a sociolinguistics of subjectification inspired by the work of Frantz Fanon, we offer an account that recognizes how, rather than subverting or challenging conventional images of gender, the performance is one part of a complex circulation of textual and corporeal semiotics that enregisters racialized categories of male and female cut to the cloth of coloniality/modernity. On the other hand, the analysis also reveals that there are moments of interruption and slippage in the reproduction of colonial constructs of race, gender and sexuality that may offer more complex and multifarious understandings of what may comprise the exercises of decoloniality. We conclude with a discussion of what a decolonial Fanonian approach to subjectification might offer sociolinguistics