Professor Hannah Gibson and co-authors Jacqueline Lück, Kristina Riedel, and Savithry Namboodiripad have published a new Open Access monograph, African linguistics after #RhodesMustFall: Contextualising the Role of African Languages in Higher Education in Times of Global Change (Palgrave 2025).
In addition to its timely content, this was an especially exciting project for the Open Access team because it is the first volume that we have co-funded with the University of Michigan, with thanks Savithry Namboodiripad and her institution for their contribution and support.
We spoke to Professor Gibson from the Department of Language and Linguistics about this new volume and why the authors chose to publish Open Access. The book is freely available to download now.
How does it feel to have it published and freely available?
We are very happy to see this book published. It’s always nice to see the outcome of what is often several years of work come to fruition. But in this instance, it is great to be able to freely share the final version of the whole book with people who contributed to the study and with the wider research community.
Why is Open Access important to you and your co-authors?
Open Access was important for us from the outset of this project. The book explores the link between African languages, and decolonisation and transformation. As such, it directly engages with issues related to inequitable access to information, global power structures, funding flows and ongoing inequalities in higher education.
It was crucial to us that this book, on this topic, was made freely available to anyone who would like to access it, and not only those who are able to afford to pay for it or whose institutions can purchase the book.
In earlier work, we have written about the importance of open access and open science, and the potential for these to contribute to supportive decolonial communities of practice. It was great to be able to not only discuss this in our work, but to be able to put this into action via publishing this book Open Access!
How did you find the Open Access process?
For us, the Open Access process was very straightforward! We were very well supported by the Open Access Fund team at Essex and the University of Michigan, and it was just a matter of making the necessary arrangements for the Open Access support and agreement be-tween the two institutions. The whole process went very smoothly. And it certainly took less time than it took us to finish the book!
How do you plan to take full advantage of African linguistics after #RhodesMustFall being Open Access?
We have already started to share the book with individuals who helped us with the study and provided input on earlier stages of the work. All four of us are also sharing it around our own academic networks, with our colleagues, students and friends, and with a range of mailing lists which include people who are interested in or working on topics covered by the study. Beyond that, we are sharing the book online and using social media. We are encouraging people to download individual chapters that might be of interest, or the whole book!
Now, please, tell us about it: when did it first take shape and how did you all come together to work on it?
The book has its origins in an online survey we conducted in 2021. We received responses from 268 people who answered questions related to their experiences of African languages in higher education, including those based in Africa and those outside the continent.
After we completed the survey, we presented the findings at a number of conferences and then thought about the best way to write up the results. We discussed the possibility of writing a number of journal articles focusing on the key findings. But ultimately, we decided that a short monograph would be the best format since this would allow us to present all of the findings in one place and develop a sustained narrative across the work.
We had previously been contacted by Palgrave about the possibility of publishing some of our work with them. So we went back to them as we thought that the Palgrave Pivot series was a natural fit for the study and a piece of work of this length.
Given that we can now read the book itself for the full details, what would you say are its core themes?
The book explores the link between African language and linguistics, and notions of decolonisation and transformation. The four of us authors are all involved in teaching in language and linguistics courses, this includes me based at Essex, and co-authors Savithry Namboodiripad who is based in the US, and Jacqueline Lück and Kristina Riedel in South Africa.
Despite the three different contexts in which we are based, we saw common themes in terms of marginalisation and erasure of African languages, as well as broader attitudes towards African languages. This includes both in education and in more informal spaces. We chose to focus our study specifically on the role of African languages in higher education.
One of the key findings of the survey was that studying an African language had often fundamentally changed the worldview and career trajectory of many of our participants. Others commented that the teaching of African languages had – or could – improve cultural under-standing and facilitate exchange between groups and individuals. There were also more cautious responses where people were concerned about how the teaching of African languages might be under-resourced, and as a result risk doing “more harm than good”.
Overall, in the book we do not make generalised claims such as “learning about African languages is a central part of decolonisation efforts”. However, African languages operate from a position of historical and continued marginalisation. This means that the potential for African languages and linguistics to be involved in overturning and addressing the colonial legacies present in linguistics and higher education remains under explored.
We show that in many instances racist assumptions continue to underlie the study of African languages, including their absence from higher education. We argue that these need to be rooted out and addressed. The approach and impact of such actions in the classroom will naturally vary according to context. And while tokenistic inclusion may be harmful, instructors should not let their critical impulses obscure the potential value for students and for education more broadly.
What’s next for you? Do you have any new projects lined up?
Of course! I’m already working with colleagues on another book looking at research methods in linguistics, which again we will be publishing Open Access.
African linguistics after #RhodesMustFall: Contextualising the Role of African Languages in Higher Education in Times of Global Change is freely available to download now.
The Open Access Fund
The University of Essex's institutional Open Access Fund enables Essex authors to publish their research open access and to share their findings without barriers. You can explore your Open Access options with our dedicated forms: for longform works such as books and chapters, and for articles.
