Building (and teaching) on shaky ground: precarity and minoritized language-in-education policy

Abstract

This article draws upon ethnographic data from the Aran Valley, Spain, a trilingual region with an official policy of Aranese language promotion, to interrogate the challenges and experiences of precariousness that emerge in a context of precarity. Though previous scholarship has discussed the intersection of neoliberalism and language revitalization projects, this article specifically examines language-in-education policy efforts in the framework of precariousness inhabited in late-capitalist, neoliberal contexts of the Global North. The paper employs Judith Butler’s theory of precarity to analyze Aranese teachers’ feelings of instability and precariousness in the context of their engagement with language-in-education policy. The results show, firstly, that teachers enact language policy labor as a response to precariousness and that secondly, their experiences of instability translate to an inability to maintain a future-oriented time perspective of their teaching role. The author posits studies of minoritized language policy as an opportunity to understand how political action and sociolinguistic transformation can come about in precarious times.