Abstract
In contemporary post-migrant societies—i.e., societies characterized by increasingly interconnected migratory experiences and plural identities (Gaonkar et al. 2021)—educational systems remain slow to adapt. School curricula continue to privilege historically dominant languages and knowledges, while those associated with migranticized communities (Dahinden 2016) are commonly misrecognized (Fraser 2009), i.e., devalued and structurally marginalized. Drawing on sociolinguistics, migration studies and decolonial perspectives, this talk contends that such misrecognition constitutes a form of epistemic injustice (Fricker 2007) that exacerbates disparities in learning opportunities and reinforces asymmetric power relations across language communities.
The argument is grounded in research conducted in South Tyrol (Italy), an officially trilingual region characterized by complex historical and ongoing interaction processes between established language groups and more recently settled language communities, and where the role of language in the educational sphere is highly politicised and contested. After delineating epistemic imbalances in institutional discourses on language and education, the talk outlines pathways to rethinking legitimate knowledge production by drawing on data from a two-year, translanguaging-based participatory action research project. More specifically, the talk zooms in on the experiences of a team of primary school teachers in the validation of their plurilingual students’ epistemic capacity (Guarda 2026). Based on the qualitative analysis of data generated through individual semi-structured interviews, focus groups and visual documentation of classroom activities, the paper exemplifies how the teachers began to reconceptualise language education to support the learning of the languages of schooling while sustaining the epistemologies and competences of non-dominant language speakers. By framing language education as an epistemic issue (Menezes de Souza 2017), the talk aims to stimulate a debate on how schools—in Italy, Finland as well as in other post-migrant societies—can foster greater linguistic and epistemic justice.
References
Dahinden J. (2016) A plea for the ‘de-migranticization’ of research on migration and integration. Ethnic and Racial Studies 39(13): 2207–2225.
Fraser N. (2009) Scales of justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World. Columbia University Press.
Fricker, P. (2007). Epistemic injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford University Press.
Gaonkar, A.M., Ost Hansen, A.S., Post, H.C. & Schramm, M. (Eds.) (2021). Postmigration: Art, Culture, and Politics in Contemporary Europe. transcript Verlag.
Guarda, M. (2026). Shifting the paradigm: Inclusive plurilingual education as a (re)positioning journey. In: Guarda, M., Stopfner, M. & Meier, G. (Eds), Changing Perspectives Towards Linguistic Diversity in Education. Educational Linguistics, vol 71 (pp.153-178). Springer.
Menezes de Souza, L.M.T. (2017). Epistemic diversity, lazy reason and ethical translation in post-colonial contexts: The case of indigenous educational policy in Brazil. In C. Kerfoot, & K. Hyltenstam (Eds.), Entangled discourses: South-North Orders of Visibility (pp. 189–208). Routledge.