Short Abstract

This panel examines translation and multilingualism as practices of knowledge- and world-making in African education, asking how classrooms mediate languages, epistemologies, policies and identities, and with what consequences for participation, authority and epistemic justice.

Long Abstract

Through the panel “Translating African Worlds: Multilingualism, Knowledge-Making and Epistemic Justice in Education” we invite empirical and theoretical papers examining how translation and multilingualism shape knowledge production, pedagogical practice, epistemic authority, participation and belonging across African educational contexts. Contributions may address classroom interaction, terminology and concept formation, language-in-education policy, teacher practice, curriculum and assessment, indigenous and local knowledge, colonial linguistic legacies, gender and intersectionality, or emerging multilingual pedagogies.

The panel particularly welcomes analyses that connect micro-level practices with wider questions of policy, power and epistemic justice. Bringing education into conversation with translation studies, sociolinguistics, anthropology, African Studies and decolonial scholarship, the panel seeks to theorise African classrooms not as sites where predetermined knowledge is merely transmitted, but as spaces where multiple educational and epistemic worlds are continually translated, negotiated and made.

This Panel has 1 pending paper proposal.
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