Language is an integral part of identity formation and educational institutions are crucial sites where this process unfolds. How are students socialised through language? What role does language play in creating hierarchies or challenging the status quo within educational institutions? How do nation-states navigate language politics within vastly multilingual landscapes and what impact do these have on their populations? These are some of the questions we hope to explore in the Language and Education Reading Group.
The Language and Education Reading Group (LERG) was launched at the University of Oxford in May 2023 under the Education South Asia initiative, with an aim to foster dialogue between the different ways in which language and education are studied and understood, with perspectives from sociology, anthropology, education research and policy, and linguistic and sociolinguistic studies, among others.
Over the last two years, this reading group has been producing three distinct outputs 1) an annotated and thematically organised Reading List, which serves as a research and teaching resource; 2) a network of scholars from different regions of the Global South working in the fields of language and education, and form a long-term and meaningful collaboration; and 3) academic and non-academic publications (e.g. ThinkPieces or collaborative edited volumes).
In the academic year 2025-2026, LERG 2.0 will be hosted in a hybrid format, under the Education Anthropology research unit at the Danish School of Education, Aarhus University, Copenhagen, with members from around the world. We plan to host three hybrid meetings per semester (Sept-Dec and Jan-April). Please do our join our mailing list below to stay updated on the details of our upcoming sessions!
Join the Mailing List here.
For queries, please contact the convenors:
Abhishek Ranjan Datta (abhishek.datta@lincoln.ox.ac.uk) and Mohini Gupta (mg28@edu.au.dk)