International Journal of Multilingualism

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Nodal frontlines and multisidedness.

Contemporary multilingualism scholarship and
beyond

Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta & Alan Silvio Ribeiro Carneiro

To cite this article: Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta & Alan Silvio Ribeiro Carneiro (2021) Nodal frontlines
and multisidedness. Contemporary multilingualism scholarship and beyond, International Journal of
Multilingualism, 18:2, 320-335, DOI: 10.1080/14790718.2021.1876700

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14790718.2021.1876700

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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MULTILINGUALISM
2021, VOL. 18, NO. 2, 320–335
https://doi.org/10.1080/14790718.2021.1876700

ARTICLE COMMENTARY

Nodal frontlines and multisidedness. Contemporary

multilingualism scholarship and beyond
a b
Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta and Alan Silvio Ribeiro Carneiro
a
School of Education and Communication, Jönköping University, Jönköping, Sweden; bDepartamento de
Letras, Escola de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (EFLCH), Federal University of São Paulo, Unifesp,
Brazil

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

At an overarching level this paper attempts to draw attention to Received 23 December 2020
emerging trends in the humanities where alternative ways of doing Accepted 11 January 2021
science reconfigure epistemological traditions and research
KEYWORDS
methodologies, the role of intellectuals and their engagement with Second Wave of Southern
current conditions of the world, including ways in which scholars Perspectives; multisidedness;
gazes are constituted. Drawing on what we call a Second Wave of multilingualism; semiotic
Southern Perspectives (SWaSP), that sees the entanglements of two repertoires; enregisterment;
clusters – the first of which comprises contemporary ways of chaining
reading anticolonial, postcolonial and decolonial thinkers with
offerings of Southern perspectives, and a second where
contemporary theories about language and communication that
considers their cultural and social dimensions, this paper calls for a
mobile global-centric gazing. More specifically this paper actualises
ontoepistemological trajectories that feed into the scholarship about
multilingualism, looking at its different possible beings and
becomings that enable a variety of ways of conceptualising
multilingual practices. We do this by first presenting a brief review
about recent discussions related to the concept of repertoires in the
field of multilingualism and pathways that can move these debates
in different directions. After this, we present possible ways to go
beyond the sociolinguistics of multilingualism, by considering
contemporary challenges in the knowledge production enterprise.

The idea that European whites could colonise the rest of the world was based on the premise that
there was an enlightened humanity that had to meet the obscured humanity, bringing it into this
incredible light. This call to the bosom of civilisation has always been justified by the notion that
there is a way of being here on Earth, a certain truth, or a conception of truth, that guided many
of the choices made at different periods in history.
Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, some collaborations between thinkers with
different views originating in different cultures allow a critique of this idea. Are we really only one
humanity? (Krenak, 2019, p. 8, our translation)

CONTACT Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta sangeeta.bagga-gupta@ju.se School of Education and Communication, Jön-

köping University, Jönköping, Sweden; Alan Silvio Ribeiro Carneiro alan.carneiro@unifesp.br Departamento de
Letras, Escola de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (EFLCH), Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp), São Paulo, Brazil.
© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any
medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MULTILINGUALISM 321

Introducing a multisided mobile gaze

Frontline scholarship draws attention to the cumulative nature of the epistemological
enterprise and builds upon the taken-for-granted nature of both (i) an accumulation of
knowledge, often in terms of a linear progression or Kuhn’s paradigmatic moves, and
(ii) a universalistic stance wherein knowing and knowledge are assumed or understood
as being monolithic. These assumptions emerge from knowledge regimes that spur
developments in the so-called ‘natural sciences’ as they developed since the eighteenth
century in the European context. Despite such a dominant linear idea of progression and
knowing, diverse views of knowledge production – like ones based in Indian schools of
philosophy or South American indigenous ways of conceptualising knowledge – have
existed in parallel. These types of Southern philosophies disturb such linearity and mono-
lithic universal ideas, which is why we – in line with the opening quote1 – argue for a mul-
tisided mobile gazing in the knowledge production enterprise.
For instance, Gandhi’s focus on the non-uni-sidedness of things derived through the
notion of anekantavada is relevant for our purposes here (Peetush, 2016). From such a
gaze, we can ask, what the meaning of conducting frontline scholarship is in the
human/social/educational sciences (henceforth human sciences) today. What claims to
creating knowledge in general and to universal knowledge production more specifically
exist and are embedded in and are (re)produced in the epistemological enterprise rep-
resented by special issues like the present one in the human sciences? Whose gaze or
gazes are taken as the natural order of things – i.e. as one or more hegemonic order of
things – in such frontline knowledge production? What epistemological stances and/or
advancements are being silenced or amplified and by whom in such knowledge creation?
What is the role of different (physical and symbolic) loci of enunciation in contemporary
knowledge creation processes?
These types of questions have been emerging from implicit or explicit ideas within
anticolonial, post-colonial, decolonial, southern and related framings in relation to knowl-
edge production as a critique of the modern science Western/Northern paradigm.2 We
highlight the significance of this theoretical cluster in terms of how these different fram-
ings open up possibilities for calling attention to specific new modes of knowledge pro-
duction. The entanglements of these in contemporary human science reflections are
brought together with a second theoretical cluster made up of contemporary readings
of dialogical and sociocultural framings on issues of language and communication, that
we refer to as a Second Wave of Southern Perspectives (henceforth SWaSP).3 Thus,
instead of dealing with theories in either of the clusters individually, we draw upon the
entanglements of the two clusters in our thinking. The ontoepistemological framings
that can be seen as emerging from SWaSP calls for the need for a mobile global-centric
gazing (see particularly Bagga-Gupta, 2017a, in press a) wherein reflexivity constitutes
both the source and the outcome of pluriversal, multisided understandings. Despite
the different orientations, propositions and histories of anticolonial, postcolonial, decolo-
nial and southern theories, and those related to language and communication broadly,
the entanglements of these two clusters that contribute to SWaSP framings open up to
diverse new approaches in the human sciences.
A central dimension of a SWaSP framing includes a non-universal and non-linear
knowledge-creation stance and wherein identified northern hegemonies are not seen
322 S. BAGGA-GUPTA ET AL.

as place-bound framings that need dislodging by a marginalised southern truth. This

means (among other things) that scholars’ positionalities, including zir4 mobile gaze
(Bagga-Gupta, 2017a, in press a, b, c) need reflexive framings such that they are ratified
through their experiences and engagement with knowledge and knowing. We actualise
these issues through a SWaSP framing by dwelling upon ontoepistemological trajectories
that feed into the scholarship about multilingualism. This means for instance that dialo-
guing with the scholarship about multilingualism from a global-centric, rather than a
place-based northern- or southern-centric gaze constitutes a multisided mobile gaze,
i.e. a way to look at multiple possible becomings through which social practices
glossed as multilingualism can be conceptualised. These, we argue, constitute nodal fron-
tlines rather than a, or the frontline. Nodal frontlines and multisidedness draw attention to
emerging trends in the humanities where alternative ways of doing science reconfigure
epistemological traditions and research methodologies, the role of intellectuals and
their engagement with the current conditions of the world, including ways in which scho-
lars’ gazes are constituted.
A SWaSP framing thus draws attention to the socialisation patterns within the research
trajectories in which scholars aligned to a given theoretical cluster related to the domains
of language and identity find themselves situated in or make a claim to belong to. This
means, amongst other things, that the circulation of key texts and key scholars across
what is framed as the south/east/rest and north/west demands a careful scrutiny at
how gazes are enabled/disrupted/aligned and how researchers position themselves in
the complex dynamics of centre and margins. As Rodríguez (2018) and other black fem-
inists highlight, scholars of colour, and in particular women of colour have met with epis-
temic violence wherein their academic contributions to science are ignored and not
nurtured due to the politics of censorship and silence that sustains the Ivory Tower.
This is why, both research and scholars’ positionalities need illumination in terms of a mul-
tisided mobile gaze that acknowledges a multiplicity of points view in the production of
knowledge. This is aligned with Santos discussions regarding what southern epistem-
ologies consists of: ‘evaluating the relative reasonableness and adequateness of the
different kinds of knowledge in light of the social struggles in which the relevant episte-
mic community is involved’ (2018, p. 39).
SWaSP framings furthermore imply that knowledge production needs to be seen as a
situated enterprise mediated by the constraints of the times that scholars live in, but also
by their more specific contexts, purposes, interests and unidimensional or multidisciplin-
ary alignments, including the singular/multiple academic environments that zir has been
socialised into. This points to the epistemic multisidedness that exists in any academic
domain across times and spaces. These processes of knowledge production have
existed, continue to exist and will – most likely – remain the same in the future.
However, there is – as we have already highlighted – an implicit and explicit erasure of
the multisidedness of things whereby knowledge production becomes reduced to a
unitary imagined epistemological frontline – a ‘single academic story’ (see Bagga-
Gupta, 2018; see also Rodríguez, 2018). A SWaSP stance draws attention to the impor-
tance of making visible and questioning why knowledge – in particular that related to
language and communication – is produced in a specific way at a specific time and in
specific settings, bringing to the forefront questions about who is producing what
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MULTILINGUALISM 323

types of knowledge when, where, why and for/with whom (see Bagga-Gupta, in press a, b,
2017b, 2017c, see also, Carneiro & Silva, 2020).
Despite its key relevance across time-spaces and the growing awareness about these
issues among scholars situated in multiple academic domains, engaging in this enterprise
is far from simple. There exists, for instance as Blommaert (2020) and others point out, a
growing awareness today about an international academic industrial culture, in which a
managerial perspective is seen as becoming the main normative orientation, instead of
an academic collegiate culture that is understood as having flourished in the past.
However, it is, in our view, simplistic to see the new millennium as the main or the
most important vantage point for understanding epistemic practice. While the present
is the most connected with our lived experiences, diversities of academic cultures were
very different in the past and will continue to be very distinct in the future. This means
that the dynamics of knowledge production can be a blind spot for scholars, not just
because it constitutes a marginal topic of research, but also because it gets filtered
through a gaze where some scholars experiences are naturalised and privileged. This
once again points to the importance of highlighting scholarly positionalities in the epis-
temological enterprise. Furthermore, local and situated gazes and views can indeed
provide interesting windows to understand changes being articulated by scholars with
different experiences. This means, for instance, that our gaze with regards to the more
recent shifts vis-à-vis an international academic industrial culture pointed to above
differ, not only because our positionalities differ from that of others who may have
been accorded more mainstream positions in comparison to others and us, but also in
terms of our own participation that enables looking at how the broad field of the
language sciences (henceforth LS) has changed globally in the new millennium.
With the above as a point of departure, reflexivity, an important tenet of SWaSP fram-
ings and as the source and as the reason for specific ontoepistemological understandings,
colours all the sections of this paper. In the rest of this paper, we dialogue with the scho-
larship about multilingualism from a gaze where we look at different possible becomings
that enable a variety of ways of conceptualising multilingual practices. Section 2 presents
a snapshot on the concept of repertoires in sociolinguistic thinking and Section 3
attempts to reframe the present special issue beyond a universal gaze in the sociolinguis-
tics of multilingualism. In the final section (4) we attempt to reconnect this scholarship
with a broader understanding about what it means to be human.

Notes on repertoires in sociolinguistic thinking across time

Taking a multisided mobile gaze as a point of departure, we situate the concept of reper-
toire in its emergence in the ‘ethnography of speaking’ (Bauman & Sherzer, 1975), a field
that emerged in the 1960s. At that point in time, this field attempted to bridge the gap
between the more traditional area of linguistic anthropology (whose primary concern
at that time was descriptions of indigenous language grammars) and interests in
different forms of social life in the area of ethnography. Lodged between them was
‘speaking’, that Hymes used as a short-form to explicate the ways in which language is
used in social contexts, the meanings attached to them, as well as the regulations of
their usage.5 It is in this broader context that the concept of repertoire emerged in
terms of a question related to situations where multiple ‘codes’ were being deployed.
324 S. BAGGA-GUPTA ET AL.

Recognised for the most as classical, studies by Gumperz and Wilson (1971) and Blom and
Gumperz (1972), for instance, focused on not just relationships between different
resources used by interlocutors or languagers, but primarily how the means of specific
contextualisation cues in the use of these resources indicated changes in the communi-
cative situation itself. Heller and McElhinny (2017) importantly indicate the hegemonic
epistemological work that Gumperz and his contemporaries carried out in India. In
addition to the erasure of local expertise that Heller and McElhinny point towards, the
paucity of local knowledges, including that of named-languages of India,
draw attention to problematic hegemonic stances in this scholarship. Heller and McEl-
hinny also draw attention to the issue of sexual harrasment raised by Hymes female col-
leagues and students during his tenure as dean at the University of Pennsylvania. In light
of our discussion here, such issues are salient given their contributions to the silencing of
voices and stances that otherwise could have flourished in the field of sociolinguistics.
Having said this, despite the fact that the concept repertoire at that time was primarily
connected with linguistic resources, it was also concerned with the broader idea of means
of speaking (Hymes, 1974); the latter was understood as including the acts, genres and
frames that are part of how language is used in social interaction. From an analytical
point of view what these resources had in common is their encoded use for specific situ-
ations and their role in people’s social lives. Despite the limited focus on the cultural uses
and non-uses of verbal/oral/spoken language, the central dimension of the ethnography
of speaking was understanding communicative practices, i.e. illuminating how meaning-
making is organised in everyday life. So, its epistemological project primarily looked at
what resources were being used, when, why, in what form, by whom, considering that
the specificities of communicative situations are unique, unpredictable and unfolding.
This tradition of looking at language-use also contributed to a concern regarding
framing in the field of linguistic anthropology. Related to the implicit devices that regulate
language-use, framing was concerned with metacommunication i.e. an explicit marking
of why language is used in a specific manner in a specific situation. From these develop-
ments emerged studies concerned with ‘language ideologies’ (Woolard & Schieffelin,
1994) that focused on the role of language in regimentation purposes, as well as concerns
regarding metapragmatics that points to the multiple layers in which the pragmatics of
language-use is regulated by different normativities or orders of indexicality (Silverstein,
1993, 2003). The field of linguistic anthropology moved on to other concerns where
the central focus became understanding how signs indexicalize meaning, i.e. how signs
point to specific meanings, and how this can be understood from different theoretical
points of view (see for instance, Duranti, 1997, 2004).
While some have argued that the term repertoire, despite its centrality in sociolinguis-
tic thinking has not been a focus of attention in itself since its inception in the ethnogra-
phy of communication (see Blommaert & Backus, 2013), others have pointed to specific
ways of approaching it recently based upon different research interests (see Busch,
2012). An example of the latter can be found in Carneiro (2014) who focuses on the socio-
linguistic dynamics of Timor-Leste and reports on how different registers constitute reper-
toires in multilingual settings, including their role in the constitution of its political
economy. Rymes (2010, 2014) expanded the concept to communicative repertoire, refo-
cusing its centrality from societal to individual dimensions, suggesting that it is something
that an individual acquires along zir socialisation trajectory, and that it includes gestures,
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MULTILINGUALISM 325

dress, posture, mass media elements, etc. that may or may not be enregistered. Penny-
cook and Otsuji (2015) and Canagarajah (2018) further expanded it to spatial repertoires
by drawing attention to the multiple (semiotic) resources that are part of communication
in specific settings and that are constitutive of communicative routines.
A similar expansive direction of this trajectory can be noted in a special issue of this
journal (IJM) in 2017. Here Kusters, Spotti, Swanwick and Tapio (2017) propose semiotic
repertoires as a way to bridge studies of multilingualism and multimodality; while atten-
tion is drawn towards the use of signed and verbal/spoken/oral languages, spatial
environments and resources are also considered important in peoples meaning-making
processes. These rest on important debates about gesture and space in communication.
Kusters et al. (2017) also highlight a concern with the hierarchising of communicative
resources and the result of people’s lack of accessibility to different types of resources.
Following Busch (2012), they discuss how the presence or absence of desired communi-
cative resources can play a role in processes of subjectivation and identity construction,
including how this relates to understanding emotional and embodied dimensions of
repertoires. We argue that while these offerings are in line with perspectives of linguistic
anthropology in the important role of context in the meaning-making of language-in-
action, this recent expansion to semiotic repertoires needs to be understood as a political
gesture that has sought to bring to the forefront traditions in sociolinguistics that can be
augmented by studies concerned with and boxed around signed languages.
The developments outlined in this brief expose build upon and intersect with the par-
allel growing concerns regarding critiques towards the taken-for-grantedness of the
boundary-marked nature of named-languages and the lack of consideration regarding
semiotic resources that are always at play in the situated spaces of communicative prac-
tices (see for instance, Bagga-Gupta, 2018, 2017b; Bagga-Gupta & Messina Dahl-
berg, 2019, 2018). In parallel to these developments, digitalisation processes have led
to an increasing interest wherein the entanglements of the digital-analogue have been
upfronted, for instance, digital-analogue communicative repertories across timespaces
(Messina Dahlberg & Bagga-Gupta, 2013, 2015, 2016). Of relevance here is that Bagga-
Gupta and her colleagues expand the critiques of the boundary-marked nature of
named-languages also to named-modalities – oral/verbal/spoken, written and signed –
since the turn of the century. The significance of this discussion can be augmented
through some SWaSP tenets. First, it points towards independent lines of thinking –
some of which interest and others that don’t. This highlights instances of approaching
nodal frontlines and multisidedness of knowledge and knowing. Second, these parallel
streams of thinking, including the mainstream scholarship in sociolinguistics, goes
beyond disciplinary areas of expertise given that these are always temporary in the scien-
tific enterprise. Third, this brief overview approaches the centrality of human meaning-
making or communication, rather than different named-languages or modalities (like
oral, written or signed communication) per se, etc. Thus, it becomes relevant to highlight
that the need for bridging the demarcated knowledge areas of multilingualism and multi-
modality, particularly in relation to spoken/oral and signed communication, but also
written communication developed and lived a different parallel trajectory in other non-
mainstreamed areas within LS, for instance, in the field of deaf studies and deaf education,
on the one hand, and literacy studies, including new literacy studies on the other hand. In
326 S. BAGGA-GUPTA ET AL.

this regards, a focus on the digital constitutes yet another demarcated scholarly domain
of relevance to multilingual and multimodal scholarship.
This leads to a reflection about a few challenges in relation to the trajectory of the
concept repertoire that should be tackled in how it is appropriated in mainstream epis-
temologies, despite its original sense as the central ‘bridging’ dimension in the ethnogra-
phy of speaking and its more encompassing gaze of going beyond ‘oral speaking’ (see
above): first, it mistakenly continues to be haunted (in some scholarship) by a problematic
stance that inadvertently separates individual repertoires from community repertoires
(see for instance, Pennycook, 2018), and second, some of these circulations unfortunately
relegates written and signed communication on the one hand, and digital and analogue
communication on the other hand to different areas of expertise (see for instance, Bagga-
Gupta, 2017b, 2019a, 2019b, 2019c; Bagga-Gupta et al., 2019). We consider such divisions
problematic since languaging and semioticizing are intrinsic dimensions of social life that
get relegated to the background, and the spaces where they play out (for instance, ana-
logue and digital) are not hermetically sealed. Another issue that haunts the concept is
the idea of repertoire as an inventory of forms and countable things. This issue does
not seriously take into account the ways through which the terms historical trajectory
and its relationship to the role of language broadly (i.e. communication in constructing
social relations) has been theorised in the fields of interactional sociolinguistics and lin-
guistic anthropology.
Another stance of the mainstream character of these discussions lies in the vocabul-
aries that are being offered in attempts to go beyond understandings of language.
However, while terms like multimodality, translanguaging, metrolingualism, polylingual
languaging and others purport to question the bounded nature of language, these con-
cepts become positioned (ironically) in relation to modern hegemonic mainstream
language ideologies that themselves objectify and count languages. While these vocabul-
aries and ideologies are widely spread in the broad field of LS, efforts for deconstructing
the bounded nature of named-languages call attention to both a serious study of histori-
cal framings and specific languaging contexts across global spaces.
Concepts concerned with language and the construction of named-languages and
named-modalities or the bounding of specific resources with names are ideologically
framed. They are rebuilt based on the social realities of historically shaped contexts,
even when we consider the major power of colonial linguistics in shaping what we under-
stand as language and named-languages. The point that is relevant here is that the ways
in which the term repertoire is approached currently needs to avoid both repeating the
history of expanding countable fixed resources, and of maintaining an objectified view
of communicative resources in the background. Such naturalised biases can be
misleading in relation to analytical tasks that a semiotic and sensory turn (Chumley,
2017; Howes, 2019) embedded in exploring semiotic repertoires should entail. Herein
dimensions of qualia – the ways in which sensorial experiences are experienced, evalu-
ated and become conventionalised – transpire and become part of communicative
repertoires.
Thus, when repertoires are at stake, two ongoing processes need attention: one related
to the use of multiple multimodal and multissemiotic resources in a very broad sense in
communicative practices, including the complex sensorial and emotional dimensions
connected with them, and the other related to the regimentation of the uses of these
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MULTILINGUALISM 327

resources that guides how they are going to be interpreted. This means that when the
focus is on the ‘how’ of the organisation of a repertoire as a set of forms or things, the
specific pragmatic values associated with them and the social domains in which they
take place need explicit consideration (Agha, 2004). Furthermore, metapragmatic
models, which typify and value these forms and things, including the ways in which
these models are disseminated across populations and across time need attention. This
takes us to the issue of enregisterment processes i.e. ‘processes and practices whereby
performable signs become recognized (and regrouped) as belonging to distinct, differen-
tially valorized semiotic registers by a population’ (Agha, 2007, p. 81).

Framing this special issue beyond multilingualism scholarship

Is it possible to say that languaging (including, semioticizing) clothed in Agha’s (2004)
framing is organised as an infinite bundle of different registers that can be frozen and
described in stable forms only at any given moment? The individual papers in this
special issue can contribute to a reflection about this question and point to the need
for a more nuanced gaze that goes beyond a focus on repertoires, looking at the indexi-
cality of entangled resources and how these are part of enregisterment processes. The
data the individual studies engage with enable a connection with such dynamic semioti-
cal work that transpires in different settings at any specific moment.
Different communicative processes are displayed by the authors of the individual
studies. For instance, in the construction of the register of deaf cosmopolitanism
(Kuster and Moriarty), communicative resources like International Sign Language, Amer-
ican Sign Language and local/national languages and signs are illustrated as assembled
(or not assembled) with distinct indexicalities in specific settings. The family interactions
across borders of deaf/hearing worlds, in Iquitos, in Goico’s study, also points to the ways
specific resources get enregistered in specific family settings, including the use of unre-
gistered signs that become semiotically meaningful in the communicatively shaped his-
torical trajectories of families. Tagg and Moriarty’s study of digital-analogue
communication presents signs that most probably won’t become enregistered in univocal
ways, given that they are organised according to highly situated metapragmatics and
orders of indexicality, which are also mediated by specific relationships of kinship and
proximity. The ways in which signs of affection and emotions, entangled with specific set-
tings can mediate communication, constitutes dimensions also in two studies: Boldt and
Valente, and Canagarajah. Both display – in different ways – how enregistered resources
become and don’t become meaningful in interaction and how specific genres related to
academic meetings, get configured and which emotional, sensorial and social features
constitute them. The importance of the analysis of genre configurations (Hanks, 1996)
is most evident in Stone and Koehring’s study that presents television weather forecast-
ing, a highly codified form of communication. The significance of genres that arise in the
use of the language portraits methodology wherein diverse communicative resources are
drawn upon, including an important concern with emotional dimensions that shape
attachment or rejection of the use of specific repertoires is presented in Busch’s study.
A salient dimension in all these studies is the effect of a general feature of communi-
cation and what Tapio (2019, p. 134) refers to as the juggling between modes and affor-
dances in communication used by deaf and hearing ‘visually oriented’ people (Bagga-
328 S. BAGGA-GUPTA ET AL.

Gupta, 2004). The metaphor that Tapio engages with – and which some of the individual
studies in this special issue engage with – derives from the scholarship tradition that dis-
cusses the concept ‘chaining’.6 Chaining (that has also been described as linking, bridging,
sandwitching) consists of the patterned ways in which potential communicative resources
across named-modalities and named-languages are interlinked in mundane meaning-
making processes of communication in and across analogue and analogue-digital situ-
ated-distributed settings. This scholarly tradition that emerges in the 1990s in at least
two different scholarly clusters – in the USA and Scandinavia – highlights an important
interactional resource engaged in communicative spaces marked by visual orientation,
i.e. where the visuality of signed, written communication is primary.7 This research
emerges in teams where deaf and hearing scholars are members and users of different
named-languages (signed, written, spoken) across geopolitical spaces. The meaning-
making potential of languaging where more than one named-language (signed,
written, spoken), modalities (oral, written, signed), tool-usage, among other resources
across analogue-digital spaces have also been explored and discussed in the mainstream
LS scholarship (see for instance, Bagga-Gupta, 2018; Bagga-Gupta & Rao, 2018; Bagga-
Gupta & Messina Dahlberg, 2018; Gynne, 2016; Messina Dahlberg, 2015).
Chaining processes indicate ‘how’ remodalizations and resemiotizations play out, i.e.
their entanglements in communication (Scollon, 2008) and point to their relevance in
building meaning-making routines, which are connected to enregisterment processes.
These processes, wherein different resources (multilinguistic, multimodal and multisse-
miotic, including those available in specific settings i.e. tools, objects and other spatial
resources) are engaged with based on their affordances at specific moments. Such
chained entanglements become even more evident in contemporary communication
across analogue-digital settings. Going beyond sectorism in the LS scholarship, such
non-mainstream frontlines, in particular in the area of multilingual scholarship, attest to
the need for recognising the multisidedness of the epistemological enterprise wherein
the significance of nodal frontlines, rather than a or the frontline, needs to be recognised.
Considering the political advancement vis-à-vis the discussion proposed in the special
issue of IJM in 2017, and with the above as background, we pose the following queries to
this 2021 special issue:

. How does this special issue move the debates regarding repertoire forward? and more
pertinently,
. What do enregisterment processes, including the meaning-making potentials mapped
in the chaining scholarship, contribute towards discussions about semiotic repertoires?
. How can the concept be refined as an important tool that can potentially move the
field of the sociolinguistics of multilingualism forward – and beyond a universal multi-
lingual gaze?

We envisage two potential pathways. If semiotic repertoires are merely a set of

resources that describe contingent interactions, it is a useful concept, akin to the
common-sense meaning of the word repertoire as an inventory, even if this does not con-
tribute to advancing the field forward. However, embedded in the concept exists a more
long-term potential if it is seriously understood in terms of unstable assemblages of
human and non-human signs, tools, objects and spatial resources in different
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MULTILINGUALISM 329

enregisterment processes that are situated in specific moments within specific commu-
nities of practices and practioners/languagers. In the latter, these could – taking inspi-
ration from Busch’s study – be seen as portraits of communication practices, in situated
settings with specific embedded metapragmatics and language ideologies, which indi-
cate how a range of resources can become potentially enregistered and part of
meaning-making processes for different contingent subjects that assume distinct identi-
ties in different communities of practices and practioners/languagers.
From such a stance (and without seeing science as a monologising enterprise), it
becomes important to consider how communicative practices play out – i.e. their tempor-
ary chained nature – and peoples’ understandings of what is salient in these. The relation-
ship between indexes and meaning is key in such a stance (Urban, 2006), given that all
resources that potentially contribute to meaning-making are not enregistered (Rymes,
2014), and all enregisterment processes don’t lead to specific forms of temporary stable
registers. In such a reading, this 2021 special issue makes an attempt that is interesting:
it offers a hint of the directionality that the concept can move in, i.e. looking at enregister-
ment processes, where chaining dimensions are considered, in the configuration of com-
municative practices.
To summarise, taking onboard conceptualizations offered by Agha (2007) and the
chaining scholarship (see Tapio, 2019 for a recent study; Bagga-Gupta 1999, 2002, 2004
for earlier studies) that bridges the meaning-making potentials of communication
across multiple communicative resources (including named-languages, named-modal-
ities, specific tools, objects, spatial resources, etc.) has the advantage of framing social
practices through perspectives that attempt to illuminate languaging (including dimen-
sions of semioticizing) as situated-distributed meaning-making practices. However, the
issue here is not to substitute one framework by another, but acknowledge the limits
of concepts and their usage, and consider the concept of repertoire to pinpoint its
place in sociolinguistic thought. From such a stance, semiotic repertoires can be seen
(among other ways of conceptualising human communication and meaning-making) as
a set of different types of resources, with specific ranges, that are chained and drawn
together temporarily as a part of enregisterment processes. It is possible to make sense
of them only as far as what they indexicalize, i.e. their metapragmatics and metasemiosis,
which are framed by broader language ideologies, and are part of broader political econ-
omies (for an illustration, see Carneiro, 2014).
Having said this, it is important also to consider that the organisation of the field of
scholarship in linguistic anthropology enables the existence of multiple concurrent theor-
etical models depending on different ontological worlds that are focused upon. This
means that multiple epistemological ways of understanding languaging exist and need
visibility if different saliences in communicative practices are to be acknowledged. We fur-
thermore suggest that other ways of enriching a multisided stance, include working with
concepts like genres (Hanks, 1996) and participation frameworks (Goodwin, 2007). Gazing
broadly, would also enable recognising different developments in the intersections
between language, culture and society in other epistemological traditions that emerge
from the east/south/rest. Thus, questions that can be reiterated include: What constitutes
an advancement in the human sciences in specific areas? How do we understand
advances in scientific knowledge production from a non-universal gaze?
330 S. BAGGA-GUPTA ET AL.

While theories can be general and can contribute to illuminating dimensions of the
human condition, a problem emerges when such general, all-encompassing theorizations
take on a universalisation hue and are seen as the best way or from the only gaze possible
for understanding potentialities of being and becoming in different realities (see Bagga-
Gupta & Messina Dahlberg, in press). Following from our opening quote, the colonial
European model had at its core one way to be human and this is constitutive of the ideol-
ogies that lie at the crux of the modern epistemological enterprise (Bauman & Briggs,
2003). Such problematic and instrumental universal gazing allows progress to be natur-
alised in terms of unidirectionality and linearity where processes of overcoming shortcom-
ings or making science better constitute the agenda.

Reconceptualizing ways to understand humaning

The multiple complex ways of the scientific enterprise go beyond unitary lines of devel-
opment. In other words, there have always existed different ways of knowing and knowl-
edge production and advancements. Recent discussions regarding the very doing of
being human i.e. human as a verb (Ingold, 2015), and the multiple ways of humaning
further heightens this issue. Such reflections produced in the complex racialized
context of South Africa can illustrate our point here:
Humaning is a different activity from humanising. To human is a lifelong process of life-in-the-
making with others. To humanise is to impose to the world a pre-conceived meaning of the
human (Ingold, 2015, pp. 115–120) There is no way of humaning. There is no perfect way to
go about it. Humaning is a social and cultural practice which we constantly hone. Humaning
as praxis is historically and contextually specific (Erasmus, 2018, p. XXII).

Given the multiple ways of humaning, reinforces the idea of diverse ways of under-
standing how social practices play out, are routinised and their multiple directions
depending on a scholar’s social trajectory. Perhaps limitations in the LS scholarship
relates to precluding a more comprehensive and global approach (that goes beyond
tokenism) to illuminating the many legitimate ways of humaning. Returning to our
opening quote, Krenak’s query about many humanities is here read as highlighting the
different ways of humaning that have been eclipsed in the knowledge production and
their circulations. While it is important to broaden epistemological horizons by scrutinis-
ing which directions of knowledge production are relevant as an advancement, it is per-
tinent to pay close attention to the different ways of doing this, the different pathways
that make (in)visible different epistemic issues, including being sensitive to hegemonies
of knowledge circulations themselves.
Despite the diverse histories of the traditions of semiotic and linguistic analysis since
the twentieth century, a main concern of the sociolinguistics of multilingualism –
which gains projection with studies in the ethnography of communication – was, as we
have pointed out, oral/verbal/spoken language, and to some extent written language.
This has inadvertently restrained epistemological horizons in LS in relation to more holis-
tic understandings of human communication and has given rise to sub-areas that have
existed – and exist – as silos with specific alignments/biases in their respective
approaches, even if they attempt to consider language-use-in-context. Thus, for instance,
LS scholarship continues to thrive in areas that are demarcated in terms of multiple
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MULTILINGUALISM 331

named-languages (bilingualism, SLA, TESOL, foreign language studies, home language

studies, etc.), written language (literacy and new literacy studies, multilingual literacies),
signed language (deaf studies, signed language studies, deaf education, etc.), digital com-
munication (multimodality, CALL, etc.) etc.
This highlights that the recent semiotic turn in LS and anthropological studies
(Chumley, 2017), which includes by extension a multisensorial turn (Howes, 2019) needs
to be considered carefully by the sociolinguistics of multilingualism. Where do such
‘advancements’ take the field in its thinking about language and what contributions
can they make to thinking about how scientific thought can be organised, differently?
Reflexively this leads to considering how these meaning-making processes are part of
the construction of specific ontological worlds (Kohn, 2015) that call for the building of
new epistemological tools that can have different extensions, but that can also be
diverse and unique to specific contexts. Framed differently, humaning is always situated
and distributed.
Contributions towards a decolonised knowing and knowledge – from a SWaSP framing
– would in this way mean that the sociolinguistics of multilingualism, instead of being
dominated by centripetal forces, from the – until now – main centres of knowledge pro-
duction, needs to acknowledge its hegemonic historically shaped contours and contrib-
ute to the promotion of different approaches, with different gazes i.e. of different nodal
frontlines and multisidedness. It is in this manner that Ingold (2015) and Erasmus (2018)
enable understandings of how ‘to human’ can be done in multiple ways, not just in
languaging, in semioticizing, in communicating, but in thinking and producing
knowledge as well. This includes also the hegemonies of the languaging of knowledge
production and circulations.
As Mol suggests, ‘if reality is done, if it is historically, culturally and materially located,
then it is also multiple’ (2002, p. 75). This means that looking at reality in its situatedness,
distributedness and circulations allows not just understanding its characteristics and
possible ways of becoming, but also the different ways in which it is specifically regimen-
ted and made in the way it is made in scholarship. If life and the times we are living in are
uncertain then the task of science and knowledge creation is better served in understand-
ing and producing knowledge that, modestly teaches us how to deal with uncertainties. If
we cannot predict the future, the enterprise of science can be helpful in the understand-
ing of its different becomings.

Notes
1. Here it can be noted that a number of scholars highlight the economic dimensions that
naturalise the hegemonies of European pushed colonialism and racism as the naturalised
order of things (see for instance, Heller & McElhinny, 2017; Tsing, 2015). Krenak’s point of
different humanities needs to be read in terms of pointing to hegemonies of such naturaliz-
ations – this is developed in our paper, in particular in terms of ‘humaning’ (see the final
section).
2. The following can be named to highlight the epistemological heritage of this critique:
Bhabha, Comaroff and Comaroff, Fanon, Grosfoguel, Kilomba, Mignolo, Santos, Spivak.
3. For more on SWaSP, see Bagga-Gupta (2017a, in press a, b, c).
4. Instead of her/his/their/they, we use the gender-neutral term zir unless the context calls for
otherwise.
332 S. BAGGA-GUPTA ET AL.

5. Linell (2009) and others have been critical to discussing these issues in terms of language-use,
since that implies that language is outside of its users. The terms languaging and languagers
attempt to go beyond this type of dichotomy.
6. See for instance, Bagga-Gupta (1999, 2002, 2012), Erting et al. (2002), Hansen (2005), Humph-
ries and MacDougall (1999), Padden (1996).
7. Mouthings i.e. visually available articulations on the mouth of oral/spoken/verbal language-
use is also described as a resource in visually oriented communication.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

ORCID
Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1846-858X
Alan Silvio Ribeiro Carneiro http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6315-6676

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