Languaging : Playfulness and Precarity (Key Topics in Applied Linguistics)

Reconceptualising language as a dynamic, relational, and embodied practice, this book explores the concept of languaging. Moving beyond static, standardised, and purified understandings of languages, it traces how communication is lived, contested, and embodied across urban, rural, and remote mobility, everyday encounters, classroom pedagogies, and digital platforms. Through critical analyses of First Knowledging and First Languaging, nomadic languaging and knowledging, racialised and AI-mediated communication, it highlights how languaging is both playful and precarious. It entails creativity and resistance, while also exposing language users to inequality and surveillance, and is deeply entangled with histories of colonialism, racial hierarchies, and displacement. Concluding with the concept of pedagogical languaging, the book calls for a reimagining of education as interactional design, rather than the delivery of standardised curricula, with learning environments where diverse semiotic repertoires - linguistic, embodied, cultural, and digital - are recognised as epistemic resources rather than treated as deficits.