Invited Colloquium

Everyday-ism from below and the power of governmentality in the Global South

Chair: Shaila Sultana, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh

Co-Chair: Dariush Izadi, Western Sydney University, Australia

Practices are the essential constituents of social life - comprised of bundles of activities that we conduct in our everyday lives. These discursive and non-discursive practices are integral to our societal existence and they shape our social experiences. We position ourselves in society based on our engagement with these activities, aka, practices (Schatzki, 1996, 2007; 2009).

We intend to understand how everyday practices are intricately intertwined with everyday-ism. By everyday-ism, we refer to ideologies, attitudes, and beliefs in relation to language, nation, religion, gender, or ethnicity that influence our everyday practices. We aim to understand how different types of isms are reincarnated, nurtured and sustained through governmentalising apparatuses (Foucault, 2009; 2010), specifically with the help of activities and multilingual, multimodal and multi-semiotic resources. This exposes the ideologies fueling populism, nationalism, sexism, racism, genderism, and linguicism in formal and informal domains.  We employ qualitative research, using ethnographic and netnographic methods for in-depth observations of governmentality in social media, education, and workplaces in the Global South. Going beyond the geographical locatedness of the Global South, we try to understand the Global South with reference to marginalisation, disempowerment, silencing, inequalities, or disparities which may be reinforced by a long history of colonialism, neo-imperialism, and other forms of -ism.  

This colloquium is a vital platform for grasping the intricate dynamics of everyday-ism and governmentality, contributing to a broader understanding of societal structures and the role of languages in our daily lives. Most importantly, it refrains from romanticising resistance discourses, favouring empirical examination for new insights.

 References

Foucault, M. (2010 [1984]). The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978–1979 (G. Burchell, Trans.). Picador.

Foucault, M. (2009). Security, territory, population: Lectures at the Coll ge de France, 1977–78. Palgrave Macmillan.

Schatzki, T. R. (1996). Social practices: A Wittgensteinian approach to human activity and the social. Cambridge University Press.

Schatzki, T. (2009). Timespace and the organization of social life. Time, consumption and everyday life: Practice, materiality and culture, 35-48.

Schatzki, T. (2010). Materiality and social life. Nature and culture, 5(2), 123-149.

Schatzki, T. (2018). On practice theory, or what’s practices got to do (got to do) with it?. Education in an era of schooling: Critical perspectives of educational practice and action research. A Festschrift for Stephen Kemmis, 151-165.

Titles of the presentations and names of the contributing speakers

1. Troubling Populism Or Challenging Colonial-Capitalist Governmentality from the Ground-Up

Ana Deumert, University of Cape Town

Nkululeko Mabandla, University of Cape Town

2. “When you arrived, my saint was already there”: Racism and sexism as read through local knowledges and counter-conduct

Daniel N. Silva, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Brazil

3. Everyday-ism  in Action: Governmentality and Protest Movements

Dariush Izadi, Western Sydney University

Shaila Sultana, University of Dhaka

 4. "The subterranean stream": Class composition and everyday governmentality in the workplace

Alex Luke

 5. Afterthoughts: Everyday-ism from below and the power of governmentality

Stephen May, University of Auckland

Abstracts for the invited colloquium

Troubling Populism Or Challenging Colonial-Capitalist Governmentality from the Ground-Up

Ana Deumert, University of Cape Town

Nkululeko Mabandla, University of Cape Town

This presentation looks at one specific -ism: populism. There has been much recent work on populism which has associated populist politics with far-right politics and rising authoritarianism. This presentation builds on previous work by Mabandla and Deumert (2020), which has argued that this view is Euro-centric, and centralizes a particular understanding of populism, an understanding that is far removed from the complex politics of anti-colonial resistance; that is, a politics that could not have succeeded without ‘the people’.

In this presentation, we seek to further ‘trouble’ existing work on populism linking it to questions of modernist governmentality. In developing this argument, we draw on Mary Louise Pratt’s (2022) discussion of Euro-modernity as being grounded in ‘imposed receptivity’, and suggest that the liberatory populism associated with left-wing, anti-colonial politics challenges western governmentality by questioning – and fighting against – the very foundations of the colonial-capitalist order. In other words, this is a presentation not on how governmentality is discursively constructed and linked to securitization in authoritarian practices (for example, by conceptualizing ‘freedom fighters’ as ‘terrorists’), but how it is challenged through liberation discourses and creates ‘counter-governmentalities’.

We follow a discursive approach, drawing on the extensive archives of the South African liberation struggle. At the centre of this presentation will be the journal Sechaba, which was published by the African National Congress in exile. Sechaba is multilingual as well as multimodal, featuring extensive revolutionary artwork in each issue. The archive of Sechaba is extensive: it was published monthly between 1967 and 1990. The issues have been digitized and this extensive archive will form the basis of the analysis.

Bios

Ana Deumert is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Cape Town. Her research program is located within the broad field of sociolinguistics and has a strong transdisciplinary focus. Her most recent book is an edited collection, Colonial and Decolonial Linguistics, Knowledges and Epistemes (with Anne Storch and Nick Shepherd, 2020). She is a recipient of the Neville Alexander Award for the Promotion of Multilingualism (2014) and the Humboldt Research Award (2016). 

Nkululeko Mabandla is a lecturer in the Sociology Department at the University of Cape Town. He has worked on the history of the black middle class in South Africa (Lahla Ngubo: The Continuities and Discontinuities of a South African Black Middle Class, 2013). His current research looks at the historical and present socio-political formations in South Africa’s rural towns. This work links his interests in land and the political economy with work on settler colonialism and globalization studies.

“When you arrived, my saint was already there”: Counter-conduct against racism and sexism in Brazilian peripheries

Daniel N. Silva, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brazil

Abstract

This presentation discusses resistance to racism and sexism within Brazil’s governmentality of peripheries. Foucault’s governmentality has proven relevant for understanding the (self-)replication of language regimes. More than power stemming from a centralized agent, governmentality concerns the “more or less subtle mechanisms of self-management that are internalized by individuals and ultimately influence their actions without them being fully aware” (Milani et al, 2021:758).

Brazil is interesting to study governmentality because it received the most enslaved Africans during European colonialism. Following the end of slavery (1888), policies of whitening were implemented by facilitating migration from Europe. Unlike European migrants, Africans were not afforded housing and labour. Yet they developed creative economic and cultural forms. I discuss Faveladoc, a film workshop held in the favela in 2021. I draw on two classes by Renato Tutsi and Joice Lima, Black activists who engaged with "counter-conduct." For Foucault (2007), counter-conduct concerns resistance by the governed: "how not to be governed like that, by that, in the name of those principles…, not like that, not for that, not by them" (p. 44). I unpack the counter-conduct of race and gender in two case studies, where a collective construction of language, gender and sexuality emerges as a critique of colonialism.

References

Foucault, M. (2007). The Politics of Truth. Semiotext(e).

Milani, T. Bauer, S., Carlson, M., Spehar, A., & Brömssen, K. V. (2021) Citizenship as status, habitus and acts: Language requirements and civic orientation in Sweden. Citizenship Studies, 25(6), 756-772.

Bio

Daniel N. Silva teaches applied linguistics at Unicamp, Brazil. He researches language, violence, and hope in Rio de Janeiro favelas and other peripheries of Brazil. His work problematizes the mediatization of violence in Brazil by looking at alternative communicable models in empirical loci of resistance. In 2021, with Jacob Mey, he edited The Pragmatics of Adaptability (John Benjamins). With Jerry Lee, he coauthored Language as hope (Cambridge University Press, 2024). 

 Everyday-ism in Action: Governmentality and Protest Movements

Dariush Izadi, Western Sydney University

Shaila Sultana, Univeristy of Dhaka

In our presentation, we talk about a research study that examines protest movements as a manifestation of everyday-ism in action. These protests, held under the banners of “woman/life/freedom” and “we are Tonu” were instigated by the tragic passing of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman in Iran in 2022 and the rape and murder of Sohagi Jahan Tonu, a 19-year-old woman in Bangladesh in 2016 respectively. Mahsa Amini’s arrest, stemming from a perceived violation of Islamic dress norms, acted as a catalyst, sparking widespread societal discontent. The rape and murder of Sohagi Jahan Tonu sparked a grassroots movement in Bangladesh against government investigating authorities, which were accused of purposefully failing to make any progress in the murder inquiry. In digital spaces, protestors strategically employed linguistic and semiotic expressions through platforms like Twitter, Instagram, blog, and YouTube to amplify their message on a global scale, thus demonstrating the intersecting realms of everyday-ism and digital activism.

Through our netnography investigation, we ascertain a distinct interplay between governmentality and the 2022 Iranian protest movement and the 2016 “we are Tonu” movement. Specifically, we observe that governmentalising apparatuses can exert a discernible influence on the circulation and resonance of protest-related content within the digital sphere. By examining patterns of discourse, dissemination, and audience engagement, we identify how these apparatuses shape the trajectory and impact of protest movements. Our analysis illuminates how digital platforms become tools for both amplifying and suppressing protest narratives, involving techniques such as surveillance, discipline, and control. These operate from macro-state policies to everyday practices. Instances of strategic messaging reflect a complex interplay between state agendas and grassroots movements. Furthermore, the study reveals that prevailing societal norms, particularly those concerning gender and its intersections with ethnicity, religion, and class, are contested and renegotiated through these digital channels.

These findings underscore the central role of everyday practices and deeply ingrained ideologies in mobilising collective action. It becomes evident that governmentality, as a powerful force in shaping societal structures, plays a pivotal role in influencing the trajectory of the protest movement. This nuanced exploration reveals the complex mechanisms through which governmental apparatuses intersect with grassroots initiatives, ultimately shaping the evolution and impact of contemporary societal movements.

Bios

Dariush Izadi teaches at Western Sydney University, Australia. He has authored articles in the Journal of Multimodal Communication, Social Semiotics, Journal of Pragmatics, and Journal of Linguistic Landscapes. He has recently published a book entitled The Spatial and Temporal Dimensions of Interactions: A Case Study of an Ethnic Grocery Shop with Palgrave Macmillan (UK). He has also published chapters in Critical Inquiries in the Studies of Sociolinguistics of Globalization with Multilingual Matters (USA) and The Sociolinguistics of Iran’s Languages at Home and Abroad: The Case of Persian, Azerbaijani, and Kurdish with Palgrave Macmillan (UK).

Shaila Sultana is a Professor and the former Head of the Department of English Language, Institute of Modern Languages, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. Her recent publications include a co-authored book Popular Culture, Voice and Linguistic Diversity, a co-edited handbook titled Routledge Handbook of English Language Education in Bangladesh, Language in Society in Bangladesh and Beyond: Voices from the global south (forthcoming), and a Special Issue of Australian Review of Applied Linguistics titled ‘Translingual Practices Entangled with semiotised space and time’.

 "The subterranean stream": Class composition and everyday governmentality in the workplace

Alex Luke

Abstract

This paper explores not only how governmentality can inform linguistic ethnography, but also how linguistic ethnography can illuminate some less developed aspects of research on governmentality in the everyday life of the workplace. It will draw upon linguistic ethnographic research on a performance management system at an Australian university language centre. The performance management system analysed showed key signs of being a technology of government by producing a certain subjectivity, in this case that of a reflective practitioner. Performance management was inserted as a form of governmentality into the everyday practices at the centre, and diffused resistance by incorporating a discourse of reflection, which was already part of the professional habitus of teachers.

The paper also hopes to illuminate some elements of discourse and social life that can be understated at times in much work on governmentality due to its frequent reliance on archival work. Ethnographic work on governmentality, and linguistic ethnography in particular, can show how neoliberal technologies of government are not totalising, but rather contingent assemblages prone to failure. Moreover, linguistic ethnography can also better explain resistance or 'counter-conduct' not as an after effect of governmentality but as responsible for its ongoing failure in everyday practices, leading to ongoing problematisation and innovation by the managers and designers of such systems.

Bio

Alex Luke holds a PhD in sociolinguistics from Macquarie University, and is a teacher trainer at the University of Sydney. Their research interests centre on relations between discourse and class struggle in the workplace. In particular, their research focuses on reflexive language and metalanguage, the technologisation of discourse and literacy practices, chronotopes, and discourse and semiosis as material practices.

 Afterthoughts: Everyday-ism from below and the power of governmentality

Stephen May, University of Auckland

Bio

Stephen May is a Professor in Te Puna Wānanga (School of Māori and Indigenous Education) in the Faculty of Education and Social Work and the Director of the cross-faculty and interdisciplinary Master of Regional Development program. He is an international authority on language rights, language policy, language revitalisation, language education (especially, Indigenous, bilingual, and multilingual education), critical multiculturalism, and the "multilingual turn". To date, he has published 27 books and over 100 articles and chapters in these areas.