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Time zone: Europe/Brussels
Eiji Oguma is a historical sociologist at Keio University and an expert of the history of ideas in postwar Japan, as well as current transnational social movements and activism. He has written extensively on postwar social and political history and issues of Japanese nationalism. He has recently also turned to documentary filmmaking, directing a documentary on Japanese protests against nuclear power in the aftermath of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, entitled "Tell the Prime Minister" (2015).
Professor Eiji Oguma's keynote lecture is entitled A Reflection on the History of Racial and Ethnic Identities in Japan.
Abstract
The issue of racial and ethnic identities has become critical again in the world. However, we should examine specific historical context of each society before assuming concrete existence of race and ethnic group and imposing European/American categorization framework to every part in the world.
Race and ethnicity are frameworks constructed historically and politically. Racial or ethnic category can be constructed and imposed in the absence of differences in physical characteristics or language. On the other hand, sometimes even powerful groups might not be constructed as a separate category by terms of race or ethnicity. It depends on political/historical context whether these categories are constructed. Hence, each society has within its political/historical context invented and developed their own terms and framework to construct particular categories, such as for example German Volk, which, with all its connotations is hard to translate into English.
In this lecture, I would like to examine the development of the Japanese term Minzoku which was invented within the political context of a modernizing Japan, rather than as the translation of a European concept. Then I will describe how this framework, based on the notion of Minzoku shaped national identity of Japan, how the identity had changed along with the expansion and shrinkage of Japanese territory, how the term spread to China as Minzú and to Korea as Minjog based on the same combination of Chinese characters, and how it affected the nationalism and governmental policy of contemporary Japan.
The goal of this lecture is understanding concerning the function of social construction of ethnicity in a society in East Asia. The audience would be able to learn about East Asian history from the standpoint of sociological/comparative analysis.
Rethinking the ideology of language education from a metrolingual perspective: shifting the focus from individual competencies to the urban public sphere
… it is this ideological conception of ‘language’ that very often causes […] forms of social inequality (Blommaert 2019: 28)
This presentation mobilises metrolingualism to seek an alternative framework for understanding ‘Plurilingual and Pluricultural Competences’ and ‘Competences for Democratic Culture’ and associated understandings of ‘social integration’. It proposes a new language ideology by reconsidering language in terms of semiotic assemblages, thus seeing linguistic resources as part of a wider constellation of things, people, history and places. Adopting a language modifier which represents space (metro), metrolingualism avoids linguistic enumeration politics – language as a discrete, quantifiable and bounded property – as well as methodological individualism, whereby language, cognition, agency and identity are all seen as personal properties. Instead, it views language as an emergent property deriving as much from assemblages of multilingual, multimodal and multisensory semiotic resources (meaning potential resources) as from place, geopolitics, history and the culture of the city.
This presentation proposes that, due to its capacity to break down existing linguistic hierarchies and competency-based linguistic exclusionism, language education premised on the new metrolingual language ideology can assist in reducing social and linguistic inequality while promoting democratic citizenship and ‘civic-mindedness’. Four questions will be explored – What constitutes language? Where does language reside? What counts as competency? What is social integration? – to scrutinise the notions of ‘Plurilingual and Pluricultural Competences’ and ‘Competences for Democratic Culture’ which draw on methodological individualism.
This presentation contends that language education that deploys a metrolingual perspective with its spatial and semiotic orientation is the key to the production of a multiculturally and multilingually convivial society and to the promotion of social integration.
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Dr. Emi Otsuji is a Senior Lecturer in International Studies and Education at the University of Technology Sydney. Her research interests include language and globalisation (metrolingualism and multilingualism), language and identities, critical pedagogy, and language citizenship education. She writes both in English and Japanese and is a co-author (with Alastair Pennycook) of Metrolingualism: Language in the City (2015), Routledge; co-editor (with Ikuko Nakane and William Armour) of Languages and Identities in a Transitional Japan: From Internationalization to Globalization (2015), Routledge; and a co-editor (with Hideo Hosokawa and Marcella Mariotti) of Shiminsei Keisei to Kotoba no kyoiku, Kuroshio (2016). She is currently working on a book project with Dr. Shinji Sato and Dr. Yuri Kumagai on the Ecological approach to Welfare Linguistics and Language Education.
Convenor: Marcella M. Mariotti