Abstract:

The post-conflict foreign language classroom is a precarious space. It constitutes a forum in which local, national and international interests stake claims and where multiple divergent subjectivities collide and intermingle – and all in a language that is not the mother tongue of the local students who populate the educational space. In regions where ethnic conflicts and political instability predominate, how important is the affective bond to the mother tongue and how traumatic might the encounter with others and the self in a foreign language be? Taking the form of autoethnography, my research project features three vignettes reconstructed from remembered incidents from my teaching experiences in an English-medium university in Iraqi Kurdistan. Informed by over two decades of international language education, this research, which applies three theoretical frameworks from outside that of Language Teaching and/or Applied Linguistics – deconstruction, psychoanalytic theory and Levinasian ethics, seeks to address and reconceptualize the impact of the foreign language as the medium of academic communication; the potential trauma as well as the possible creation of opportunities for agency, freedom and creativity that accompany the reconsideration of the familiar that the recreation of self in a foreign language entails. This paper aims to expand the body of work on education in an under-examined context, contribute new applications of theoretical frameworks to the field of language education as well as trauma and memory studies, and generate new modes of examining practice and providing support for language teachers working abroad in post-conflict settings.

Keywords:

Ethics, deconstruction, psychoanalytic theory, applied linguistics, international education, English-medium universities, post-conflict contexts, trauma, memory.