On Becoming a Middle Class (by Pramod Sah)

Our guest blogger this week, Pramod K. Sah, is a PhD candidate & Killam Scholar in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia. His research interests include language planning and policy, English medium instruction, language ideology, TESOL and social justice, politics of English, and critical literacies. His work is driven by the core values of social justice indexes, for example, class and ethnicity, in English language education policies and practices in low- and middle-income polities, often drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s critical social theories. Pramod’s research has appeared in the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, International Multilingual Research Journal, and Asia Pacific Journal of Education, among others, and in many edited volumes.

The privilege of being an ethnographer is to get continued reminders to check and re-check one’s perceptions toward what’s happening in society. In 2019 during my ethnographic fieldwork at a public school (government-funded) in an ethnic minority community in Nepal (called Madheshi), one question that a student interlocutor asked me challenged my perspectives toward the English language that I had firmly held.

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