About

I am a multilingual Indigenous Yakthung/Limbu from Nepal. I have worked in Nepal (Tribhuvan University) and Hong Kong (The Chinese University of Hong Kong) before joining Columbia University. My research and teaching broadly cover the intersection of language, society, and education. I am interested in the processes, discourses, and effects of language and education policies on the personal, social, and political life of historically marginalized people. I investigate how language policy serves as a mechanism to hinder and/or facilitate cognitive engagement, epistemic reclamation, and multispecies relationality, and as a process to create a (un)safe and (un)just learning environment for multilingual, Indigenous, ethnic minority, refugee, and immigrant students. I take critical, decolonial, and engaged approaches in my research.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Social Science
• Sociology
• Gender studies
• Law
• Anthropology
• Media studies
• Pedagogy
• Linguistics
• Epistemology

Selected publications

• Epistemic injustice and neoliberal imaginations in English as a medium of instruction (EMI) policy

  Applied Linguistics Review · 2022 · 59 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Social Science
  • Sociology

  Abstract This article examines the construction of epistemic injustice in creating and implementing an EMI policy. Drawing on “epistemic injustice” (Fricker, Miranda. 2007. Epistemic injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing . Oxford: Oxford University Press) and “misframing” (Fraser, Nancy. 2009. Scales of justice: Reimagining political space in a globalizing world . New York: Columbia University Press), we discuss how the EMI policy in Nepal’s school education has reinforced the epistemic nature of social injustice. Taking an ethnographic approach, we have analyzed how EMI policies are created, interpreted, and implemented in two public schools located in historically marginalized ethnic minority/Indigenous communities. Our analyses show that the schools misframe and misrecognize Indigenous/ethnic minority parents’ and children’s linguistic knowledge and awareness of language education policy. While reproducing neoliberal values, EMI policies construct a deficit identity of Indigenous/ethnic minority communities by erasing and stigmatizing their knowledge of mother tongues in school. Such policies not only promote an English-only monolingual ideology but also pose multiple challenges for epistemic access of Indigenous/minority students and affect parents’ “party of participation” (Fraser, Nancy. 2009. Scales of justice: Reimagining political space in a globalizing world . New York: Columbia University Press) in policymaking process.

  DOI

• Epistemicide, deficit language ideology, and (de)coloniality in language education policy

  International Journal of the Sociology of Language · 2021 · 120 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Social Science
  • Sociology

  Abstract The purpose of this paper is to analyze how research approaches and methods in language education policy could serve to erase local multilingualism and its associated epistemologies while reproducing inequalities of languages. This paper builds on “epistemicide” (Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. 2014. Epistemologies of the South: Justice against epistemicide . New York: Routledge) to critique how the knowledge constructed on the basis of the evidence collected by using research questions in binary/conflictual terms misrepresents the real experiences and voices of multilingual participants, particularly those from language-minoritized communities. This paper argues that advancing research and building educational practices upon the lived experiences of the people, particularly Indigenous and ethnic minorities, could help us resist the destruction of languages, epistemologies, and linguistic/epistemic self-determination of communities. I use the case of Nepal not only because I am familiar with its historical, sociopolitical, and cultural contexts (so I can provide an insider’s reflective perspective), but also because Nepal’s case offers new insights into understanding language ideological issues in the discourses of language education policies from the vantage point of “peripheral multilingualism” (Pietikäinen, Sari & Helen Kelly-Holmes. 2013. Multilingualism and the periphery . Oxford: Oxford University Press).

  DOI

• Decolonial Struggles in Indigenous Language Education in Neoliberal Times: Identities, Ideologies, and Activism

  Journal of Language Identity & Education · 2021 · 48 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Gender studies

  (2021). Decolonial Struggles in Indigenous Language Education in Neoliberal Times: Identities, Ideologies, and Activism. Journal of Language, Identity & Education: Vol. 20, Decolonial Struggles in Indigenous Language Education in Neoliberal Times: Identities, Ideologies, and Activism, pp. 291-295.

  DOI

Frequent coauthors

• Bal Krishna Sharma

  8 shared

• Monica Johannesen

  3 shared

• Peshal Khanal

  3 shared

• Pramod K. Sah

  Education University of Hong Kong

  3 shared

• Ellen Carm

  3 shared

• Leikny Øgrim

  3 shared

• Bal Chandra Luitel

  Kathmandu University

  3 shared

• Peter I. De Costa

  Hologic (United States)

  2 shared

Education

• Ph.D.

  Columbia University

• M.A.

  The Chinese University of Hong Kong

• B.A.

  Tribhuvan University

Similar researchers at Columbia University

• Eric R. Kandelh-248
• René Henh-177
• Peter D Kwongh-176
• Lawrence Elliot Friedh-171
• Tom Maniatish-162