This book presents alternative voices in the contexts of present day and historical globalisation, the emergence of the knowledge society, increased global-local or glocal migration flows, the explosion of new information technologies and social media, and disparate regional growth that have both impacted and shaped the sociocultural fabric of geopolitical spaces across the world. The volume builds upon twenty seven studies from different corners of South Asia, the geopolitical spaces of the Middle East, Scandinavia and North America. These contributions focus upon issues related to Language, Culture and Identity from a multidisciplinary nexus of historical, philosophical and empirically-based traditions. The contributions constitute alternative voices to the overwhelming majority of work reported primarily in the anglosaxian traditions. In addition to being positioned in terms of post-colonial emic heritage, the research represented in this volume importantly challenges what is termed as the monolingual (including monocultural) bias and the linguacentric bias in the Language Sciences. The latter have been recognized as dominating the areas of language studies (particularly mainstream sociolinguistic and bilingual studies) and ethnic studies. Taking imagined monolingual, monocultural and linguacentric points of departure in the conceptualization of the normal human state, has had (and continues to have) problematic consequences that frame issues related to human development and institutional practices in the age of glocal sensibilities. This volume is an important contribution in terms of analyzing and demonstrating issues related to the complexity of culture and language, and their links with social, political, economic forces, particularly the tensions related to global-local or glocal identity that get evoked and played out in geopolitically heterogeneous settings of the South Asian subcontinent and other spaces. Given its multidisciplinary nature, the aim of this volume is to present individual comprehensive accounts of complexities that have been poorly understood and inadequately covered in the existing literature - both in Southern and the Northern contexts. This collection of research contributions accounts for and highlights issues, challenges, agendas as well as theoretical and methodological reflections that can further our understandings of human complexity and push enquiries from cross-cultural perspectives into burning issues of relevance for democracy and plurality across time and space.
About the Author: S. Imtiaz Hasnain, a graduate of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, is Professor of Sociolinguistics, Department of Linguistics, Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh, India. He was a Fellow at both the East West Center, Hawaii, U.S.A. and the Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore, India, and a Visiting Scholar at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. He is currently working on a multi-university project that looks at the social and cultural practices of the Internally Displaced Populations in multilingual spaces. Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta, a graduate of Linkoping University, Sweden, is Professor Chair at HumES, Humanities, Education and Social Sciences at Orebro University, Sweden and at the Rehabilitation Research Center, Orebro County Council, Sweden. She is an ethnographer whose transdisciplinary research encompasses traditionally separate fields. She is a board member of the Educational Sciences Committee of the Swedish Research Council and heads the multidisciplinary Swedish National Research School Literacies, Multilingualism and Cultural Practices in present day society. She is currently the holder of a Distinguished Senior Professor fellowship. Shailendra Mohan, a graduate of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, is Associate Professor in Austro-Asiatic Linguistics at the Deccan College Post-Graduate & Research Institute, (Deemed University), Pune. He has published articles in journals of repute. He is currently working on Endangered Languages Project (ELDP), awarded by the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, that looks at documentation and description of Nihali language.