Academic English as Colonial Gatekeeping: How Standardized Linguistic Norms Reproduce Class and Epistemic Hierarchy in Global Higher Education
Original framing: “Whose knowledge counts? EDI’s role in securing linguistic and epistemic justice” — bing news
The trickster exposes the article's central irony: an essay on linguistic justice published in Times Higher Education — a paywalled, English-only, UK-centric outlet owned by TES Global (private equity-backed) — written in the very 'academic English' it critiques, addressing EDI officers whose jobs depend on performing inclusion in that dialect. Anansi would note: the spider writes the web in the master's language to catch the master's funding. Erasmus's 'Praise of Folly' mirrors EDI reports that solemnly recommend 'plain English summaries' while the REF demands 15,000-word 'impact case studies' in impenetrable jargon. Coyote crosses the border: what if 'epistemic justice' means not better English support, but the right to refuse English entirely — to submit a khipu, a songline, a WhatsApp voice note as valid research output?
The article's 'practical ways' frame linguistic justice as a pedagogical service problem, but the 8 dimensions reveal it as a jurisdictional struggle over who authorizes knowledge.
The historical dimension shows 'standard academic English' was engineered as colonial-class boundary; the Indigenous dimension reframes language as law, not skill; the trickster exposes THE itself as a paywalled enforcer of the norms it critiques. Structural solutions require not better writing support but epistemic reparations: redirecting library budgets from Elsevier to SciELO, mandating multilingual research assessment, and ceding ethics governance to Indigenous data sovereignty frameworks. Until universities treat linguistic diversity as jurisdictional right rather than inclusion metric, EDI initiatives will remain what Anansi knows them to be — the spider's web woven in the master's tongue to catch the master's funding.