Abstract
Remote communities in Africa are variously positioned as without voice and in need of external aid from agents of the centre, or they are assumed to exhibit recalcitrant behaviour resistant to change and modernity (Carr-Hill and Peart, 2005). An alternative view of communities that exist on the peripheries in the global South is offered here through a discussion of ethnographic data collected during a countrywide study of language medium education from a range of stakeholders including: education officials, teachers, students and community representatives in Somali, Afar and eastern Oromiya Regions in Ethiopia. It will be argued that community participation in education is collaborative rather than recalcitrant. In addition, community views of language and identity indicate that such communities do not need to be spoken for, rather they are indicative of political agency, claims of citizenship knitted into ‘language ideologies’ (e.g. Jaffe, 1999), and rejection of ‘language regimes’ (Kroskrity, 2000, following Laitin, 1993) within the linguistic ecology of a difficult-to-reach part of Ethiopia.
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Heugh, K. (2014). Shades, Voice and Mobility: Remote Communities Resist and Reclaim Linguistic and Educational Practices in Ethiopia. In: Prinsloo, M., Stroud, C. (eds) Educating for Language and Literacy Diversity. Palgrave Advances in Language and Linguistics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137309860_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137309860_6
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