Sociologists have recently developed critical perspectives on the social aspects of sustainability and its ability to create inequalities (Neckel 2017). They suggest that sustainability is more a problem than a solution as it makes part of the modernisation of Capitalism while relying on a well-established paradigm of power and control (Holz 2018). At the same time, Capitalism, along with Colonisation and Modernity, have extensively contributed to the linguistic ideologies of homogenisation (Milroy 2001), conducting minority groups towards marginalisation (McCarty 2003). However, the study of Sustainability from the perspective of language as a social practice remains under-explored within the literature, especially in the domain of Education. The integration of multilingual practices in educational systems is a challenge for future research in the Global South, as educational systems are caught, inevitably, between Globalisation and Colonisation (Léglise 2017). This presentation illustrates a bottom-up initiative to construct sustainable societies through multilingual practices within the ecotourism-based curriculum of an indigenous school in the Amazonian trapezium. This initiative, framed within a broader project mobilising the language sciences and the sustainability sciences, intends, as a first step, to raise awareness of multilingualism through biographical language portraits (Busch 2018). We follow the paradigm of multilingual education for social justice (Mohanty et al. 2009), in which using several languages in educational processes can lead to social justice as all languages and varieties have a legitimate place. Previous work has shown that the local experience is crucial for the success of this kind of initiatives. For example, literacy work in the Global South has shown that students become able to criticise the hegemonic practices and ideologies (patriarchal, colonial, global) in which they are immersed, and that this positioning liberates them from the hegemonic ideologies, allowing them to claim for their own voice, history, and future (Morrell and Duncan-Andrade 2004).
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Léglise, Isabelle. 2017. “Multilinguisme et hétérogénéité des pratiques langagières. Nouveaux chantiers et enjeux du Global South.” Langage et société, no. 160–161 (May): 251–66.
McCarty, Teresa L. 2003. “Revitalising Indigenous Languages in Homogenising Times.” Comparative Education 39 (2): 147–63.
Milroy, James. 2001. “Language Ideologies and the Consequences of Standardization.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 5 (4): 530–55.
Mohanty, Ajit K., Minati Panda, Robert Phillipson, and Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, eds. 2009. Multilingual Education for Social Justice: Globalising the Local. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan.
Morrell, Ernest, and Jeff Duncan-Andrade. 2004. “What They Do Learn in School: Hip-Hop as a Bridge to Canonical Poetry.” In What They Don’t Learn in School: Literacy in the Lives of Urban Youth, edited by Jabari Mahiri, 247–68. New York: Peter Lang.
Neckel, Sighard. 2017. “The Sustainability Society: A Sociological Perspective.” Culture, Practice & Europeanization 2 (2): 46–52.
