About

Sinfree Makoni is a Professor of African Studies and Applied Linguistics in the Department of Applied Linguistics at Pennsylvania State University, where he also serves as the Director of the African Studies Program. Born in Zimbabwe, he holds a BA in English with a specialty in Linguistics from the University of Ghana and a PhD in Applied Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh. His academic career includes teaching at several universities in southern Africa, notably the University of the Western Cape and the University of Cape Town, as well as a postdoctoral fellowship at the Centre for Afro-American Studies at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on discourses of terrorism outside the United States, language and health in Africa, language planning, language policy, and philosophies of language. Makoni has published extensively on topics such as language and aging, language and security, Southern epistemologies, and decoloniality. He is the architect of the African Studies Global Forum and co-editor of the Multilingual Matters book series Global Forum on Southern Epistemologies. Additionally, he serves as an associate editor of Applied Linguistics. His work emphasizes the importance of decolonizing language scholarship and engaging with Southern epistemologies, contributing significantly to the fields of applied linguistics and African studies.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Linguistics
• Social Science
• Economic geography
• Philosophy
• Geography
• History
• Gender studies
• Media studies
• Anthropology
• Pedagogy
• Law
• Economic growth
• Public relations
• Economics

Selected publications

• Planning Language, Planning (In)Security

  Multilingual Matters eBooks · 2026-01-09

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• Political and Linguistic Entanglements

  Channel View Publications eBooks · 2025-08-08

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• 3 In Conversation with Mamphela Ramphele

  Multilingual Matters eBooks · 2025-08-14

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• Towards a decolonial Bantu linguistics

  2025-08-19

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  Abstract Drawing on a decolonial perspective, the chapter investigates how a heteronormative ideology of language intertwined with race theory guided the Eurocentric construction of Bantu languages. It discusses the works of key figures in Bantu linguistics, including Wilhelm Bleek and Carl Meinhof, to reveal their racial and gendered underpinnings. We show that the western constitution of Bantu linguistics is the effect of an interdisciplinary coalition of theology, linguistics, and physiology, involving fantasy and fiction. This is a version of colonial interdisciplinarity which aimed at the hierarchical ordering in terms of race and gender of bodies, languages, spaces, and ways of knowing and being. The chapter advocates for a decolonial Bantu linguistics that eschews the search for abstract universals, and instead focuses on addressing how to do linguistics without perpetuating the colonial constructions of language and race.

  PublisherDOI

• Waterscape Epistemologies, Waves of Knowing and Translanguaging as Wet Ontology

  2025-11-20 · 1 citations

  other1st authorCorresponding

  Translanguaging has been framed from a variety of political, educational, and decolonial perspectives. Most of these approaches, however, are founded in various ways on metaphors and epistemologies grounded in land. In this chapter, we look at watery themes from several directions and their relationships to translanguaging. What has been called “modern water”—the contemporary hydrosocial meaning of water within the Global North—is understood, like language, as an invention, a way of thinking that has only emerged under particular cultural and political conditions. Hydrocolonial relations bring to the fore histories of oceans as sites of colonial control and extraction, the colonization of and through water. Thinking with water is a matter of waterscape epistemologies, or hydrologics, ways of thinking and being in water that question ideas of the individual and of the separability of humans and other creatures. Concerns about ownership of water (hydrocommons) can help us reconsider what it means to have ownership over linguistic resources. Considering the materiality of water (hydromateriality) urges us to reconsider common metaphors around flows and fluidity once we take water as our starting point. We conclude with some suggestions of ways forward for translingual studies from a hydropolitical standpoint. We are interested in examining translanguaging through watery lenses, of asking social, political and material questions through a focus on water, and asking how this can help us think through what is at stake in discussions of language.

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• Planning Language, Planning In(Security)

  Channel View Publications eBooks · 2025-12-16

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• Ethics in Qualitative Applied Linguistics Research: Toward Southern Perspectives and Critical Problematizations

  The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics · 2025-12-02

  other1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter problematizes the concept of ethics in qualitative applied linguistics research by considering Southern epistemologies. This means that we avoid a universal ethical approach applied to research by arguing in favor of a radical, situated approach of research. This concern also includes a shift in the extractivist nature of fieldwork toward a responsive and dialogical approach that includes other voices as authors in the process of knowledge production. We also include in this debate on ethics in applied linguistics research the role of positionality and the researcher's experience. By inscribing ethics and politics in the domain of knowledge production in applied linguistics, we avoid reaffirming neutral and objective top‐down ethical protocols that transfer the researcher's responsibility to an academic bureaucratic system. Instead of the reifying practice of “datafication,” the focus of the decolonial methodological practice needs to be radically restructured around the values of relationality, materialist entanglement, and social justice.

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• Critical Applied Linguistics

  The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics · 2025-12-02

  other1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Within a sea of dominant and counter voices, applied linguistics experienced a surge in publications that express unease with the exclusionary practices of the discipline and indicate that declared values of diversity and inclusion were nothing but strategic hyperbole. Applied linguistics has seen a significant increase in publications that call out practices that sustain inequality within applied linguistics. Research in CAL also has grappled with voices of dissent from Global South scholars, which raises the question of whether it is possible to strive for equity and bring about equality in a discipline deeply entrenched in the structures of capitalist higher education. Decolonial approaches to CAL focus on “un‐silencing” the silenced voices by centering the contributions of Global South scholars and acknowledging the input of their contexts to scholarly theorizing.

  PublisherDOI

• In Conversation with Mamphela Ramphele

  Channel View Publications eBooks · 2025-08-08

  book-chapterSenior author
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• Introduction:

  Channel View Publications eBooks · 2025-08-08

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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Frequent coauthors

• Bassey E. Antia

  Pennsylvania State University

  55 shared

• Magda Madany-Saá

  Nelson Mandela University

  50 shared

• Der Merwe

  University of Oslo

  48 shared

• Rafael Gomes

  University of Oslo

  48 shared

• C Van

  University of Oslo

  48 shared

• Cristine Görski Severo

  Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina

  46 shared

• Ashraf Abdelhay

  34 shared

• Ofelia Garcı́a

  32 shared