Suresh Canagarajah

About

Suresh Canagarajah is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor in Applied Linguistics, English, and Asian Studies, and serves as the Director of the Migration Studies Project at Pennsylvania State University. His educational background includes a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin, obtained in 1990. Having completed all his schooling and taught English in Sri Lanka, he has extensive experience with the promise and challenges of English in postcolonial communities. His research adopts a sociolinguistic orientation, drawing from cultural studies and postcolonial discourse to interpret the use and development of English across diverse contexts. Canagarajah's scholarship explores the social and educational prospects of English for periphery communities, emphasizing local strategies of language appropriation and resistance against linguistic imperialism. His notable works include 'Resisting Linguistic Imperialism in English Teaching,' which argues against deterministic views of language power, and 'A Geopolitics of Academic Writing,' which advocates for recognizing diverse rhetorical traditions in academic knowledge construction. His recent work focuses on globalization, hybrid identities, and codes in diaspora and transnational relations, with an emphasis on multilingual communities and the heterogeneity of English. He has edited volumes on language policies and practices, redefining concepts like identity and speech community to reflect multilingual…

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Social Science
• Pedagogy
• Linguistics
• Epistemology
• Anthropology
• Law
• Aesthetics

Selected publications

• Language diversity in academic writing: toward decolonizing scholarly publishing

  Journal of Multicultural Discourses · 2022 · 121 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  This article draws from scalar theory to examine how textual diversification can engage with linguistic and social structures to both pluralize academic writing and facilitate an alternate structuration of publishing policies and practices. It adopts indexical analysis to demonstrate how non-normative linguistic choices can gain uptake for meanings and status in academic communication, leading to the rescaling of vernacular resources in global publishing contexts. The author illustrates from his…

  DOI

• Decolonization as pedagogy: a praxis of ‘becoming’ in ELT

  ELT Journal · 2023-04-22 · 70 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This introduction to the special issue on ‘Decolonizing ELT’ defines pedagogy as expanding beyond the classroom and knowledge concerns to accommodate embodied affective, social, and cultural learning that draws from and transforms environmental and geopolitical spaces. It defines pedagogy as a ‘praxis’, involving the reflexivity of action, reflection, and relearning, thus challenging the condescending view of ‘practice’ as secondary to research, policy, and scholarship. This perspective…

  PublisherDOI

• Challenges in decolonizing linguistics: the politics of enregisterment and the divergent uptakes of translingualism

  Educational Linguistics · 2022 · 70 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This article traces the roots of translingualism in the Global South, with particular relevance to the author’s South Asian heritage. After narrating his attempts to practice this orientation in his research and scholarship, the author analyzes the problematic ways in which translingualism is appropriated in the academic, economic, and political contexts in Global North. Employing the conceptual orientation of enregisterment, the article theorizes the challenges for decolonizing discour…

  DOI

• Decolonizing Academic Writing Pedagogies for Multilingual Students

  TESOL Quarterly · 2023-05-21 · 60 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This article discusses how academic writing pedagogies for multilingual students can be transformed by the literacy traditions that these students bring to North American classrooms. This is an embodied and personal rendition, situated in the author's South Asian literacies as illustrative of Global South traditions, and draws from his own empirical research and teaching practices for writing instructors in TESOL. Informed by developments in decolonization, the article highlights the pr…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Transnational work, translingual practices, and interactional sociolinguistics

  Journal of Sociolinguistics · 2020 · 56 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This introductory article explains the need for interactional analyses of workplace communication, which is increasingly multilingual and multimodal in expansive spatiotemporal contexts and layered frames. It provides an overview of how neoliberal economic conditions have impacted workplace communication, generating new task structures and communicative practices. Arguing that there is a need to situate localized workplace interactions in changing frames and task structures, the article…

  DOI

Frequent coauthors

• Edwin Erle Sparks

  Pennsylvania State University

  85 shared

• Peter I. De Costa

  Hologic (United States)

  84 shared

• Emrah Cinkara

  Pennsylvania State University

  81 shared

• Tabitha Kidwell

  American University

  81 shared

• Choi Min-Seok

  Michigan State University

  81 shared

• Ufuk Keleş

  81 shared

• Kyung Kim

  81 shared

• Danning Liang

  Huazhong University of Science and Technology

  81 shared

Awards & honors

• MLA’s Mina Shaughnessy Award (2000)
• Gary Olson Award from the Association for the Teachers of Ad…

Similar researchers at Pennsylvania State University

• Aparna Parikhh-55
• Shuang Shenh-41
• Xinyi Luoh-39