Writing in English, writing and English: Diaethnographic scenes of identity, craft, mentorship, and advocacy

This chapter, written as a diaethnographic narrative with commentaries bookending each “scene,” features conversations
between the two authors as they reflect upon their shared journeys as scholars and writers over a decade. The conversations discuss a series of issues related to language ownership, including what it means to claim our local varieties of English as part of a more significant movement to decolonize our views of English and reclaim multilingualism as part of scholarship. This chapter shares the authors’ challenges and the ongoing advocacy efforts to have an actual “polyphony of the periphery” that enriches academic discourses worldwide. In that sense, this chapter challenges both authors and readers to move English (and other European lan guages, for that matter) away from colonial mindsets, to rethink our academic relationship with these languages, to consider the discourses we are inviting (and dismissing) via our language practices, and, finally, to (re)consider the pedagogical and scholarly implications of these contested relationships with English.