a. suresh canagarajah
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Research Interests: Applied Linguistics, Rhetoric and Composition, Multilingual Writing
Profile from A. Suresh Canagaraja's Website (footnotes not included)
Athelstan Suresh Canagarajah is a Sri Lankan Tamil scholar in the fields of sociolinguistics, literacy, and English language teaching. He is currently the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Applied Linguistics, English, and Asian Studies at Pennsylvania State University. He is best known for introducing orientations to language and education from traditions and practices in the Global South to diversify dominant norms and policies in higher education and academia. He has played a leading role in empirically studying, theorizing, and defining the notion of translingual practice,[i] which introduces a way of looking at communication as exceeding bounded languages and involving a negotiation of diverse semiotic repertoires, including words, multimodal resources, objects and artifacts, and material structures. He treats this ecological, ethical, and inclusive orientation to speaking and writing as part of his South Asian heritage and ancient practices in the Global South, which were later suppressed by European colonization.
Life
Canagarajah was born in the norther peninsula of Sri Lanka, Jaffna, which is the traditional capital of ancient Tamil kingdoms and the current center for struggles for political self-determination for the Tamil ethnic community in Sri Lanka.[iii] His parents were both secondary school teachers, and he is the eldest in a family of four siblings. His secondary school education was in the formerly missionary school, St. John’s College. Except for four years of university education in Colombo, the capital city, all his schooling and teaching career before he migrated to the USA were in Jaffna. After his BA (with an honors degree in English) at the University of Kelaniya in 1981, he returned to the University of Jaffna as an instructor of English.
Much of his life in Sri Lanka was in the middle of the political agitation, ethnic violence, and military campaigns relating to the self-determination of the Tamil community. After independence from Britain in 1948, the island was left with a nation-state constituting diverse ethnic and religious groups which had enjoyed regional autonomy before European colonization. After nationalistic politicians from the dominant Sinhala Buddhist community introduced policies that made Sinhala the official language and Buddhism the national religion in 1956, the newly established Sinhala-Only Act[iv] sparked the Gandhian-style non-violent demonstrations of the largely Hindu Tamil community for their rights. This was met with a backlash, involving periodic violence against Tamils living in Sinhala-dominant areas such as the capital city Colombo. The first ethnic riots of this nature occurred in 1958 May. Canagarajah and his parents who were visiting relatives in Colombo at that time are said to have taken one of the last remaining flights to Jaffna as the riots were breaking out when he was an infant.[v]
The mostly parliamentary and democratic negotiations between the diverse ethnic communities broke down after 1977 as there were claims that the Sinhala politicians themselves sponsored violence against Tamil civilians in Sinhala areas and shipped them to the northern peninsula. This was in response to the Tamil politicians who were putting forward a claim of regional autonomy for their homeland, which they called “Tamil Eelam.”[vi] The ethnic violence signaled to the Tamil youth that peaceful negotiations were ineffective. They launched a military campaign, characterized by urban guerrilla warfare, and characterized by a mixture of Marxist, nationalist, and nativist ideologies, for the separate state of Eelam. The ambush and killing of 13 soldiers in Jaffna in July 1983 sparked another major riot. This led to full blown military encounters between the Sri Lankan army (which is mostly Sinhala Buddhist) and Tamil youth militants, at points leading to a de facto separate state, where the Sri Lankan army and government institutions didn’t have access to vast Tamil-speaking regions.
Canagarajah’s early education and teaching occurred in this setting. As the Sri Lankan government had instituted a quota system to restrict the number of Tamil students who entered the limited places available in the local universities, he experienced a competitive education system and entry examinations to qualify for higher education. The quota system for higher education and the restrictions in government-employment which mandated a proficiency in Sinhala led to widespread disgruntlement among Tamil youth. Initially, many of them led campaigns for peaceful demonstrations. In the 1970’s, some of the Tamil students who failed to see educational and employment prospects in the country organized clandestine militant groups as they saw an armed struggle as the only way out for self-determination. There were many militant outfits, which were also getting secret military training and arms from the Indian government. South India has about 50 million Tamils who are sympathetic to the plight of the language group in Sri Lanka. University of Jaffna was the center of this youth resistance, with militant groups recruiting fighters, conducting publicity events, and obtaining help for their activities from students and faculty.
Canagarajah’s schooling was in the Tamil medium, as schools had turned to the vernacular after independence from Britain. He chose English language and literature as electives, and also had the possibility of participating in the creative arts (choir, drama, creative writing, and elocution) in English. However, the emerging nationalism in the region led to his politicization. He gained admission to University of Kelaniya (on the outskirts of the capital city, Colombo) to do a degree in English literature in 1977. His admission to the university was delayed by the riots of 1977 which brought the country to a standstill. After he attended classes, he lived in the midst of many other shorter ethnic disturbances, including the 1981 riots.[vii]
After he finished his bachelor’s degree, he returned to Jaffna. He worked in many part-time positions teaching English language and literature in the Open University of Sri Lanka, University of Jaffna, and Chundikuli Girls’ College. He also worked as an Assistant Editor in the newly established weekly Saturday Review.[viii] This weekly was published in English from Jaffna to communicate news about political developments in the Tamil region to Colombo and the rest of the world. The newspaper was censored by the Sri Lankan government often, and then banned in July 1983, with the editor having to flee the country when he was sought for questioning in September 1983. After this, Canagarajah took up full-time employment as Assistant Lecturer (entry level position in Sri Lankan universities) and head of the newly established English Language Teaching Unit at the University of Jaffna in January 1984.
Canagarajah then traveled to United States to follow graduate studies in July 1985, as required by his appointment. The lecturers are tenured after they obtain graduate degrees, presumably outside the island, as there were few universities which provided post-graduate training in the country. Canagarajah first went to Bowling Green State University (BGSU), Ohio, for a Master’s degree in English in July 1985. As he couldn’t complete his GRE and TOEFL examinations in Sri Lanka because of cancellations resulting from curfews and travel disruptions from the civil war, he was given “Probationary Admission” by BGSU. He did his teaching assistantship in the Department of Ethnic Studies. He gained admission in the University of Texas at Austin for his Ph.D with a specialization in Applied Linguistics in the Department of Foreign Language Education in August 1987. At the completion of his doctoral defense, he returned to the University of Jaffna on June 1st 1990, as stipulated by the furlough granted by the university. However, on the 11th of June 1990 a major fighting erupted between the Sri Lankan army and Tamil militants, resulting in a military blockade of the Jaffna peninsula. After this, Canagarajah’s teaching, research, and family life was conducted in this context of war. He has written about his life at this time in personal essays.[ix] The way war and limited resources shaped his teaching[x] and how they influenced local scholarly life[xi] inform some of his early publications. His early journal articles in TESOL Quarterly, Multilingua, World Englishes, and Language in Society[xii] were written by hand in recycled paper under lamp light, as there was a power cut and other shortages resulting from the military blockade of the region.
As the military campaign prolonged, life became difficult in the Jaffna peninsula, and people started fleeing as refugees. After some time, the Sri Lankan military moved out of their barracks, intending to capture the peninsula from rebel control on October 30th 1995. This led to the mass displacement of the residents of the Jaffna peninsula. As Canagarajah had two infant daughters, he received an offer from the International Committee of Red Cross (ICRC) for his family to be taken out in a boat to the capital city by sea some time before the mass displacement of Jaffna residents. Travel by land was treacherous as land mines were placed along the boundaries between the territories held by Tamil militants and the Sri Lankan army. ICRC policy was to permit a single traveling bag per person. The family was first taken on a small barge to the middle of the Indian Ocean; there they were shifted to a larger cargo ship belonging to the Sri Lankan navy; this took them to the Eastern port of Trincomalee; from there they took trains and buses to the capital city.[xiii]
Canagarajah received an appointment as a Tenure Track Assistant Professor in English at the Baruch College of the City University of New York in August 1994. This position enabled him to migrate with his family to the United States. In July 2007, he received an offer as the William and Catherine Craig Kirby Professor in Applied Linguistics and English at the Pennsylvania State University[xiv]. He now lives in State College, Pennsylvania.
Scholarship and Teaching
Canagarajah’s lifelong interest in multilingualism began with his schooling and teaching career in Sri Lanka. Though English was a coveted medium of education during the British administration, all instruction transitioned to the vernacular Tamil after independence in 1948. English language and literature was offered as a subject in some urban schools for the middle class, and most people spoke the localized variety of Sri Lankan English. Canagarajah began to recognize that textbooks and standardized examinations treated Sri Lankan English as nonstandard and the Tamil vernacular writing styles as inappropriate for academic purposes. The pressure to resolve the conflict between the divergent grammatical and rhetorical norms became urgent when Canagarajah started teaching English in the regional University of Jaffna in 1984. The English textbooks published in UK or USA, and donated by the British Council or Asia Foundation (a wing of the US Information Agency) adopted norms drawn from the UK or USA, while the instructors and students adopted local language practices and norms. Canagarajah was motivated to investigate ways of resolving the norm differences he encountered.
Though he initially went to BGSU for a Master’s in English Literature in July 1985, he transitioned to linguistics and literacy for his Ph.D. He elected the doctoral program in Applied Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin from 1987 to 1990 because its interdisciplinary approach would train him in a sociolinguistic orientation to study communicative practices in education. Armed with suitable research tools, he planned on returning to Sri Lanka to gather data on the language conflicts that teachers and students experience there. However, the worsening civil war in the island prevented him from pursuing that interest. As he had been volunteering on his summer breaks to work in inner-city youth programs in South Bronx, Los Angeles, and Washington DC, he had become interested in the communicative practices of the predominantly African American community he was serving. He was intrigued to explore how children resolved the conflict between Black English at home and mainstream varieties in school. When he got the opportunity to teach a special First Year Composition course intended for minority students to enhance retention at Austin, he designed a classroom ethnography to study the attitudes and practices of the majority African American students in his class as they sought to resolve this conflict in their academic writing. His study showed that the students were adopting hybrid writing strategies to mesh their vernacular in a qualified manner within the academic register. His dissertation eventually led to a 1997 publication in the flagship research journal of the professional association, College Composition and Communication,[xv] on how this hybrid writing practice might alleviate the inequalities implicit in the then-recommended educational policy of using Black English for home and switching to the “educated” register for school. It then became imperative to study how expert writers such as African American scholars resolved the language conflicts in their own academic writing. His close analysis of the writing strategies of sociolinguist Geneva Smitherman led him to theorize her hybrid practice as “code meshing” in a College Composition and Communication article in 2006, which won the association’s Braddock Award for the best article for that year.[xvi]
Upon earning his doctorate in June 1990, he returned to Sri Lanka to resume his teaching at the University of Jaffna. Drawing from the hybrid communicative practices of African American students and scholars and adopting sociolinguistic tools, he now endeavored to study how Tamil students might pluralize academic English with their vernacular resources. His findings on students’ strategies of appropriating English for their purposes led to a book-length manuscript, Resisting Linguistic Imperialism in English Teaching, published in 1999 by the Oxford University Press.[xvii] He argued in this book that “resistance” is a constructive term and not one that is synonymous with “rejection.” While rejection adopts non-engagement, resistance transforms English from within, infusing it with the voices and values of its users. The book won the 2000 Mina Shaughnessy Award[xviii] from the Modern Language Association of America, and was shortlisted for the 2000 best book award by the British Association of Applied Linguistics.
Though the research informing these publications occurred between 1990 and 1994, Canagarajah couldn’t publish the book-length works in Jaffna. They had to await his evacuation from the civil war in 1994. His new faculty position in New York City gave him the resources for such writing projects. Teaching in City University of New York also gave him the opportunity to expand his pedagogical and research interests beyond particular ethnic groups. Now he was drawn to investigate the relations between diverse language groups. Treating the classroom as a “contact zone,” he endeavored to study how the languages students were bringing to learning created new synergies for their literacy development. His classroom ethnographies demonstrated that rather than being a liability, their multilingualism endowed these students with dispositions and practices that helped them negotiate diversity constructively. The many research articles that report the findings culminated with the publication in the Journal of Second Language Writing (2015), which won the award for the best article in that journal.[xx] The article demonstrated how multilingual students strategically represent their voices in academic writing. His data gathering was helped by a National Endowment of Humanities Summer Stipend Award, which he won as the Junior Faculty nominee of my institution in 1998. His publications also earned him the 1999 CUNY-wide Feliks Gross Endowment Award for an outstanding junior faculty member in the university, and the 2004 Presidential Excellence Award for Distinguished Scholarship and Research at Baruch College. He earned his tenure in 2000 and became a full professor in 2005.
When he accepted an appointment as William and Catherine Kirby Professor of Applied Linguistics and English at Pennsylvania State University in July 2007, the dual affiliation in the departments of English and Applied Linguistics enabled him to continue his interdisciplinary interests in sociolinguistics, literacy, rhetoric, and education. The move to a research university also gave him more time and resources for empirical research. Having earlier conducted mostly classroom ethnographies, he now had the resources to study migrants in the professions and transnational communities. Furthermore, having adopted broad-based ethnographic approaches to study literacy practices earlier, he now had the resources to film interactions, collect electronic copies of drafts, and record interviews for close sociolinguistic analyses. His scholarship began to coalesce around the paradigm of mobility, along two general lines.
One strand focused on moving beyond situated perspectives on learning to consider how migration endows multilingual students and professionals with dispositions that enable them to successfully negotiate diversity. His findings have shown that communicative practices in these contexts of mobility always exceed the boundaries of named languages (such as English, Tamil, or Spanish), as speakers shuttle between languages for identities and community. He adopted the term “translingual” to capture this notion of practices and meanings that go beyond separately structured and labeled languages. His book Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations (2013)[xxi] articulates how this translingual disposition enables multilingual students and professionals to engage in critical and creative communication in supportive social spaces. The publication won the best book award from the American Association of Applied Linguistics (2016)[xxii], the British Association of Applied Linguistics (2014)[xxiii], and the Modern Language Association of America (2015; as the Mina Shaughnessy Prize for a second time)[xxiv]. Because the mobility paradigm was generating interest in language studies, with scholars in different countries attending to diverse implications, he brought them together in the Routledge Handbook on Migration and Language (2017).[xxv] This 590-page edited book, which featured 50 authors and 32 chapters, won the best book award from the American Association of Applied Linguistics in 2020[xxvi] and was shortlisted by the British Association of Applied Linguistics in 2018[xxvii]. The handbook provides valuable theoretical and methodological tools for studying communication and education as characterized by flows rather than fixed structures.
His second strand of mobility scholarship relates to the communication of multinational STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) professionals, and strategically brings together his research, policy, advocacy, and pedagogical interests. While economically advanced nations in the Global North benefit from the knowledge and skills of scientists from the South, host nations assume that their own languages and intellectual traditions are best suited for success. In the US, international STEM scholars are assessed for their English proficiency in tests such as TOEFL and are provided with remedial instruction on American pedagogical and professional discourse conventions. His latest ethnographic research focuses on going beyond policy and pedagogical assumptions to inquire into how scientific communities work in practice. His findings demonstrate that scientific communication is in fact multilingual, multimodal, and collaborative. Both host and migrant professionals negotiate the diversity they bring to the workplace in the interests of succeeding in their mutual scholarly pursuits. Their linguistic and cultural differences enrich the scientific outcomes by marshaling a broader range of resources. He has published the findings emerging from a smaller data set in leading journals such Applied Linguistics (2018), Modern Language Journal (2018), and the International Journal of Multilingualism (2021). This research has tremendous implications for the development of fairer policies on assessing multinational STEM scholars for education and work, and training both host and migrant scholars for more reciprocal communication, fulfilling his lifelong interest in diversifying academic communication and scholarly exchanges to enhance education.
The ongoing research on mobility and multilingualism has also expanded his theoretical orientations. While he adopted postcolonial orientations and Marxist-influenced World Systems Theory to articulate the hegemony of English language and developed communities of the Global North in his early work in Sri Lanka, the recent work has taken an edgier decolonial orientation that reframes the critique by drawing from the linguistic and epistemological traditions of his heritage South Asian community. This orientation also leads to an appreciation of non-dualistic approaches to Euro-centric dichotomies such as human/nonhuman, cognitive/material, and mind/body. Decoloniality also influences his appreciation of more rhizomatic orientations to social structuration and change. These developments have led to an expansion of the notion of translingual practice. Canagarajah now treats the “trans” in translingualism as not pertaining only to practices that exceed monolithic labeled languages, but extending to practices that integrate both verbal and non-verbal resources. The “trans” also strives to look at communication as going beyond traditional separations such as text/context, and leans towards transforming unequal structures that define communicative norms and social groups. Canagarajah’s leadership in translingual orientations is attested to by a bibliometric analysis published in System (September, 2021) recently. The researchers conclude that their analysis reveals “the most highly cited author (Suresh Canagarajah) and the most frequently referenced publication (Canagarajah, A. S. (2013a). Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations). Our quantitative results and qualitative check reveal that the conceptualization of translingual practice is mainly initiated and developed by Suresh Canagarajah, a scholar whose work crosses different research areas such as applied linguistics, composition studies, and literacy studies” (p.7).[xxviii] Canagarajah’s work has thus been foundational for this line of scholarship.
Community Service
Canagarajah has been involved in community work and political activism since his youth. He started as a Staff Worker for the Sri Lankan organization Fellowship of Christian University Students[xxix] as soon as he completed his bachelor’s degree in 1981. In this capacity, he developed Christian student leaders and facilitated retreats and discussions for social and spiritual awareness among students. After this, he served as an Assistant Editor for the weekly political newspaper Saturday Review[xxx] for about two years. Both positions were voluntary and provided a small honorarium. He has continued working with Christian student organizations as a volunteer unpaid staff worker after he started teaching full time in the University of Jaffna and later in the City University of New York.
His activism also involved going beyond the teaching and research in his institutions to promoting justice for minoritized students, scholars, and communities worldwide. One strand of his advocacy work focuses on changing academic policies to favor multilingual scholars and students. To address the inequalities in academic publishing and in the interest of fairer exchanges of knowledge between scholars from different communities, he applied for the editor’s position of TESOL Quarterly[xxxi]. From 2005 to 2010, he edited this flagship journal of the international association of TESOL (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages), a double-blind-reviewed research journal with an acceptance rate of 8%, 8000 individual subscribers, and 1700 institutional subscribers. Among other changes, he made the editorial board more inclusive by inviting more scholars from the Global South, and nudged the journal towards publishing articles featuring more diverse research methods and article genres. He has also intentionally disseminated his knowledge in international scholarly circles both to learn from other communities and to influence the reform of their monolingual policies in education. He was chosen as a resident fellow in the Institutes of Advanced Study in Bristol University (2008), Stellenbosch University (2011), and University of London (2016), and has been invited to teach or speak in more than 30 countries. His contributions to democratizing academic communication and diversifying education have been recognized by his profession: He was elected President of the American Association of Applied Linguistics in 2011,[xxxii] named as one of the top 50 scholars who have shaped the field of TESOL in its 50th anniversary celebrations in 2016,[xxxiii] and received the 2018 Distinguished Scholarship and Service Award by the American Association of Applied Linguistics (AAAL)[xxxiv], which honors a single scholar each year for lifetime achievement. As AAAL’s President, member of the Executive Committee, and Trustee of the Fund for the Future of Applied Linguistics (FFAL)[xxxv] he led efforts to diversify the profession. As the chair of the Trustees for FFAL in 2020, he led a fund raising campaigns to enhance the endowment dedicated to improving the participation of graduate students in the conference and association, and initiated the new “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Access (DEIA) Graduate Student Award (GSA)” to be given to graduate students from minoritized backgrounds to support their attendance at the AAAL annual conference.
Outside academia, he was appointed by the Governor of Pennsylvania, Tom Wolf, as a member of the Governor’s Advisory Commission on Asian Pacific American Affairs (GACAPAA) from 2015 to 2019.[xxxvi] In that capacity, he established a pro-bono service for professionalizing immigrant community members who were teaching heritage languages on a voluntary basis, as they lacked support for such instruction from their school districts. To network community teachers in the State, he established AAPLES (Asian and Asian Pacific Language Education Schools).[xxxvii] This outreach work was done under the auspices of the Migration Studies Project,[xxxviii] an institute of the Pennsylvania State University which he was asked to establish as the founding director in 2008. At the end of his term with GACAPAA, he was appointed to the newly instituted statutory body, the Pennsylvania State Law Enforcement Citizen Advisory Commission,[xxxix] by Governor Tom Wolf in 2020. In this capacity, he advised the state police on areas of possible miscommunication with minority communities, and recommend areas for its professional development on diversity concerns.
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