Critique Without Landing: The Emancipatory Gap in Critical ELT

There is a productive discomfort that runs through critical language education scholarship — a recognition that English language teaching is never politically neutral, that classrooms are sites of power, and that the identities of learners are not raw material to be shaped by institutional agendas. This discomfort has been named, theorized, and circulated with increasing sophistication. And yet something keeps NOT happening.

The critique lands. The emancipatory practice does not.

This is the tension that surfaces when reading deeply in the critical ELT tradition, particularly work that draws on post-structural and transdisciplinary frameworks to interrogate being, becoming, and belonging in language education. The questions being asked are the right ones. But there is a recurring failure to move from critical diagnosis toward what Kurasawa (2011) calls a "grounded project of universal emancipation for situated agents" — that is, toward frameworks that actually hand agency back to communities rather than continuing to theorize them from above.

Cosmopolitanism From Above, Again

Critical cosmopolitanism offers a useful lens here. Delanty (2006) drew an important distinction between cosmopolitanism as an elite universalism — what Kurasawa terms "cosmopolitanism from above" — and the emergent, situated, community-generated expressions of global-local negotiation happening on the ground. The scholarly turn toward critical cosmopolitanism was supposed to close this gap. It was supposed to reorient attention toward what Hawkins (2014) calls "ontologies of place": the messy, located, agentive meaning-making of people who are living cosmopolitanism rather than theorizing it.

But critique, it turns out, can reproduce the very structures it interrogates. When critical frameworks remain primarily diagnostic — identifying what is wrong with dominant paradigms without modeling participatory alternatives — they risk becoming their own version of cosmopolitanism from above. The scholar retains the interpretive authority. The community remains the object of analysis.

The Participatory Turn That Hasn't Fully Arrived

This is not a problem unique to any single scholar. It is a structural tendency within academic knowledge production. The conditions that reward theoretical sophistication — journals, conferences, citation networks — do not always reward the slower, messier, less legible work of genuinely participatory and emancipatory practice.

Yet that work exists and is being done. Canagarajah (2012) theorized translingual practice as a co-constructed, community-generated process rooted in what multilingual communities have always done. Campano, Ghiso, and Welch (2016) modeled what radical hospitality looks like as a literacy practice embedded in community partnership. Hull and Stornaiuolo (2014) moved cosmopolitan literacies into empirical, grounded studies of how actual learners negotiate meaning across difference.

The distinction is not between theorists and practitioners. It is between scholarship that positions communities as agents of their own meaning-making and scholarship that positions them as evidence for theoretical claims — however critical those claims may be.

What the Field Needs Now

The critical ELT tradition has done its diagnostic work well. The power asymmetries of English language education have been named. The colonial legacies embedded in pedagogical practice have been traced. The instability of identity, the politics of voice, the reproduction of inequality through institutional structures — these are no longer invisible.

What remains underdeveloped is the constructive side of the critical project: frameworks that are participatory in design, emancipatory in intent, and grounded enough to be accountable to the communities they claim to serve. This means scholarship that doesn't just critique the system from a critical distance but enters into genuine reciprocal relationship with the people navigating that system daily.

Hansen (2010) reminded us that cosmopolitanism foregrounds interaction — not as method, but as the very condition of meaning-making. Belonging and trust, he argued, emerge from interaction, not from its theorization. If critical ELT is to fulfill its emancipatory promise, the field needs more scholarship that is itself an act of interaction: co-constructed, situated, and answerable to voices beyond the academy.

The critique has been heard. The question now is who gets to do the constructing.

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References

Campano, G., Ghiso, M. P., & Welch, B. J. (2016). Partnering with immigrant communities: Action through literacy. Teachers College Press.

Canagarajah, S. (2012). Translingual practice: Global Englishes and cosmopolitan relations. Routledge.

Delanty, G. (2006). The cosmopolitan imagination: Critical cosmopolitanism and social theory. The British Journal of Sociology, 57(1), 25–47.

Hansen, D. T. (2010). Chasing butterflies without a net: Interpreting cosmopolitanism. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 29(2), 151–166.

Hawkins, M. R. (2014). Ontologies of place, creative meaning making and critical cosmopolitan education. Curriculum Inquiry, 44(1), 90–112.

Hull, G. A., & Stornaiuolo, A. (2014). Cosmopolitan literacies, social networks, and "proper distance": Striving to understand in a global world. Curriculum Inquiry, 44(1), 15–44.

Kurasawa, F. (2011). Critical cosmopolitanism. In M. Rovisco & M. Nowicka (Eds.), The Ashgate research companion to cosmopolitanism (pp. 279–294). Ashgate.