Legacies of the Next Generation Literacies Network

The Next Generation Literacies Network is hosting its network conference devoted to “Social Participation in Linguistically Diverse Societies” at Hamburg University this week. I take this opportunity to share my reflections on the legacies of the Next Generation Literacies Network as the 3-year funding period comes to an end.

Network of networks

Although the Next Generation Literacies network is only 3 years old, it is embedded in a series of much older and more long-standing collaborations.

As a network of networks, the Next Generation Literacies network has brought together not only individual researchers but three research teams, namely the Literacy in Diversity Settings Research Center based at Hamburg University, the Multilingual Innovation Research Team based at Fudan University and Language on the Move Research Group, based at Macquarie University.

The broad international character of the Next Generation Literacies Network with its bases in Australia, Germany, and China, and including individual members from every continent and from countries across the Global North and South is truly unique and an achievement we can be rightly proud of.

As such, I believe that the Next Generation Literacies Network will leave at least three legacies, related to the new knowledge we have created, to the research capacity we have built, and to the research community we have created.

Focusing linguistic diversity and social participation

The Next Generation Literacies Network is very much a child of the Covid-19 pandemic. Professors Ingrid Gogolin, Sílvia Melo-Pfeiffer, Yongyan Zheng, and I wrote the funding application in 2020 and the funding period was from 2021-2023.

The pandemic forced us to do things differently right from the start and affected all aspects of our work.

In terms of research content, for a research network devoted to linguistic diversity and social participation, it was only natural that many members would turn their attention to the exclusion of linguistic minorities from public service communication.

Some of the internationally leading research into the intersection of linguistic diversity and emergency communication took place within the auspices of the Next Generation Literacies Network, such as the Language on the Move Covid-19 Archives, where we started to explore the lived experience of migrants, indigenous people, and international students from February 2020 onwards or the special issue of Multilingua devoted to “Linguistic Diversity in a time of crisis” edited by network members professors Zhang Jie from Zhongnan University of Economics and Law in Wuhan, Li Jia from Yunnan University in Kunming, and myself.

We showed how the the Covid-19 pandemic had exposed language barriers in societies around the world. It became obvious that the fact of linguistic diversity had not been incorporated systematically into emergency preparation and crisis planning.

As a result, the effectiveness of the pandemic response suffered, and linguistic minorities everywhere struggled to access timely high-quality information. The consequences of widespread language and communication failures have been felt most heavily by the most marginalized groups, with the mortality rates of migrant and indigenous populations exceeding those of linguistically dominant populations in every context where such data were collected.

In short, the pandemic has demonstrated that the intersection between linguistic diversity and social participation is vital to ensuring social cohesion, fair and equitable enjoyment of human rights, and the well-being of all. As such, going forward, the research focus of our network will only gain in importance.

A strong legacy of capacity building

The Next Generation Literacies Network will also leave a strong legacy in terms of capacity building. Academia is a global enterprise but one where information flows are from the Anglophone world to the rest, and from the Global North to the Global South. Members of our network have played a key role in challenging those inequities and asymmetries in our field.

An example comes from the Next Generation Literacies virtual doctoral summer schools under the theme “Linguistic Diversity, Education, and Social Participation,” which we have run each year since 2021. These summer schools brought together students from across the world and from many countries, particularly in the Global South. We successfully piloted a multilingual and multimodal model of an international co-learning community facilitated by remote learning technologies.

I want to take this opportunity to thank all those network members who readily volunteered their time and expertise so that students could attend the event for free.

If we want to challenge the linguistic and epistemic exclusion of peripheral multilingual scholars from global knowledge production, we need events such as these and networks such as ours: networks that enable, provide linguistic and epistemic brokerage, and help scaffold participation in academia, as a community of practice, as Zhang Jie, Li Jia and myself showed in a positive case study.

“Ideas can only be useful if they come alive in many minds.”

Let me now move on to the third legacy I want to talk about, community building. I’m talking about a humanistic way of day doing research together, in interaction and communion.

When we did the research for “Peripheral multilingual scholars confronting epistemic exclusion in global academic knowledge production” we framed epistemic justice within the evidence of research metrics – essentially, we asked who gets published and who gets cited, and we showed how disproportionately both these metrics are skewed towards scholars based in the Anglophone world and in the Global North.

Yet, the last few years have shown that such metrics are quickly becoming completely meaningless as academics write more than they read – a strange inversion in literacy practices Deborah Brandt noticed already back in 2014. The release of ChatGPT in late 2022 and other automated writing technologies have further taken off the brakes. Texts – including academic texts – are now being produced on an industrial scale just for the sake of textual outputs, as opposed to sharing knowledge and ideas. A condition Matthew Kirschenbaumer has famously called the looming textocalypse.

Of course, knowledge and ideas that only exist digitally bypassing the human mind are completely useless. To be useful, research must go hand in hand with community building and here, too, the Next Generation Literacies Network leaves a strong legacy.

For me personally, a recent highlight project combining original research, capacity and community building has been Life in a new language. Life in a new language is a co-authored book project, which will come out from Oxford University Press this year.

Life in a new language asks what it is like to learn a new language as an adult in real life. The project builds on ethnographic research with 130 migrants to Australia from 34 different countries on all continents. The research spans a period of almost 20 years between 2000 and 2020.

By sharing and re-using data from 130 participants from across 6 separate ethnographic studies, we were able to cover a wide range of themes in a single analysis.

Our methodological approach germinated within the Language on the Move research team and has been inspired by open science principles, the desire to share our data, and pool our existing resources to paint a bigger picture of language and migration.

Life in a new language is both a research product and a research process. The process with its multilingual collaboration across different levels of academic experience and its focus on data sharing and reuse is what I want to highlight here. It is an example of the kind of research and publishing community of practice that has been fostered with the framework of the Next Generation Literacies network.

We’ve had a lot of fun in the past 3 years, as this photo from our first in-person network meeting at Macquarie University in June 2023 shows. And fun matters because it inspires us to do better research and be better researcher together.

As Alexander von Humboldt reminds us, “Ideas can only be useful if they come alive in many minds.” And that is what the Next Generation Literacies network has achieved and what our legacy will be as we head into the next phase of our network.