LIFELANGS

On “Racism, Language and Educational Materials”
With Professor Bassey E. Antia.

The first LIFELANGS Annual Lecture will take place on Thursday 9 July 2026 at Queen’s University Belfast, on th e topic of Racism, Language and Educational Materials, delivered by Professor Bassey E. Antia from the University of the Western Cape, South Africa.

All guest are warmly welcome to join us! This lecture will be of particular interest to teachers, language educators, and other practitioners in the fields of language, linguistics, publishing, sociology, education and anthropology.

Overview

Racism continually evolves to redefine itself, morphing into less objectionable categories by swapping its biological premises for increasingly hidden, cultural ones. As an interlocking system of mutually reinforcing hierarchies motivated by constantly shifting rationales, racism has developed sophisticated mechanisms that conceal the very dynamics of its exercise. While researchers frequently draw attention to overt racialized verbal interactions inside and outside the classroom, the ‘non-standard’ forms of language racialized text personas are permitted to use in prescribed texts, and the exoticized descriptions and visual profiling of these personas, much less attention has been paid to the grammar that actively sustains an insidious politics of knowing within educational materials.

This public lecture addresses this gap by analyzing the hidden textual grammar of who knows, who is known, and how; whose knowledge is represented as certain or uncertain; and knowledge about whom is presented as independent versus dependent on others. Drawing on an ongoing project that theorizes a text-linguistic turn to decolonizing the curriculum, Professor Antia will shed light on the racialized politics of knowledge in apartheid-era school textbooks in South Africa., and outline a concrete pedagogy for making racial ideology in educational texts visible and for writing against the racialized grain.

About the Speaker

Bassey E. Antia is Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. An alumnus of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and a fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, he holds a PhD from the University of Bielefeld, Germany. His teaching, research, and publications span several areas, including language policy and multilingualism, the cultural politics of language and knowledge production in the Global South, and terminology theory and applications. He manages a government language policy implementation initiative across South African public universities. He holds visiting professorships at Trinity College Dublin and Rhodes University, and was previously a DAAD Visiting Professor at the University of Education Heidelberg. Recent co-edited publications include The Routledge Handbook of Language and Race (2026), Multilingual Assessment: Finding the Nexus (2024), and Southernizing Sociolinguistics: Colonialism, Racism and Patriarchy in the Global South (2023).