This chapter responds to an often-overlooked issue in Australian public schooling’s commitment to equity, that is, ‘religion’, or more precisely, educator’s ‘responsivity’ to the religious identities and knowledges of learners. The shared focus of this book is commitment to equity and pedagogies that transform learning and muster approaches to a more inclusive, responsive and socially just education. We argue for a widening of educational pedagogy. In this chapter, we center Muslim learners as a case study for enabling pedagogies for superdiverse Australian classrooms. We argue for culturally and ‘religiously’ responsive pedagogy (CRRP) as a powerful means of shifting away from established pedagogies that often erase religion from classrooms. This chapter considers the role of enabling pedagogical approaches that are responsive to the lifeworlds of Muslim learners and their religious backgrounds; that view religion as a form of learner diversity and thus assets for learning; that provide equitable opportunities and high expectations for all learners; and that prepare respectful spaces that allow for ‘sensitive’ and controversial dialogue, mediation of difference and criticality so all learners may engage with societal change.

In one way or another, each of these teachers in the quotes above is grappling with the role of theory and how best to employ it in their teaching to assist their students to better understand the cultural complexity of the world in which they live. By ‘cultural complexity’, I am primarily referring to that derived from the ethnic diversity now characteristic of school communities in migrant-based nations, such as Australia. This, of course, is evident on a global scale with increasing migration, both voluntary and forced leading to the rapid transformation of national populations. Diversification through migration is more prevalent in some countries than others. But, with global flows of people occurring alongside that of information, goods, services and capital, aided by digital technologies and the speed of, and easier access to, travel, nowhere remains impervious to the forces of globalisation and the cultural complexity that results. Such rapid and complex change is difficult to comprehend, but its effects are so far-reaching that now, more than ever, there is a need for the appropriate conceptual resources to better navigate its impact.

This introduction has three aims: (a) to discuss the causes of historic amnesia in the field of multilingualism; (b) to offer a brief survey of historic language management, defined here as explicit efforts to regulate the choice of languages and scripts and to facilitate communication in the public domain; and (c) to reconsider the relationship between past and present multilingualism and identify productive directions for future inquiry. I begin by listing the misconceptions that raised my interest in the history of multilingual societies. Then, I will discuss the paradoxes and contradictions of historic language management in six institutional domains: administration, courts of law, religion, army, education, and public signage. In the last section, I consider the big picture emerging from recent historic work. The opposite of what we have come to believe, this picture undermines the sense of contemporary exceptionalism and opens up space for new narratives and exciting avenues of pursuit.

Chapter 6 addresses the complex, multifaceted relationship between translation and society in general, before discussing translation in the context of multilingual societies. It examines translation in connection with translanguaging in the contexts of superdiversity and metrolingualism, drawing on findings of the AHRC-funded project ‘Translation and Translanguaging: Investigating Linguistic and Cultural Transformations in Superdiverse Wards in Four UK Cities’, arguing that translation should be seen as part of assemblages that constitute the discursive and semiotic character of multilingual societies.

In the context of English and Spanish in contact, issues of identity arise at various levels, including: how people’s national and ethnic identities are bound up with their language choices; how the national and ethnic identities were formed historically, and are continually re-formed, in conjunction with languages; how languages themselves are defined – how the English and Spanish (or Castilian) languages came to be recognised as such, and likewise for Scots or Galician or Catalan as languages apart, where many other varieties are regarded as dialects; how contact between English and Spanish, which principally means their knowledge and use by bilinguals, affects these conceptions of languages and national and ethnic identities. This chapter examines these issues in terms not just of Spanish and English, but of Spanishes and Englishes in their global diversity, together with the other languages with which they share multilingual spaces. A wide range of recent studies on bilingual identities are taken into consideration, as is current work on the effects of globalisation, superdiversity and translanguaging.

Linguistics as a modern science has invested its attention in describing structural rules and “trustworthy” parameters, which involve ideologies of objectivity, stability and invariance. These references conceived of language as an autonomous structured entity that created a kind of fixed ontology, relegating historical phenomena to a subaltern position. One can thus say that linguistics and history have been traditionally kept apart in the field of mainstream language studies. Considering the self-enclosure of linguistics, in this chapter, we begin by discussing how historicity and language are associated by different twentieth-century philosophers whose insights into historicity speak well to contemporary views of language as discourse. We then move into exploring how history is brought into textuality in present-day discourse studies by focusing on the macro–micro theoretical constructs of interdiscursivity and intertextuality. We conclude by drawing upon the relevance of such a theoretical apparatus to account for discourse circulation in fluid and superdiverse contexts. A specific question orients our line of reasoning and the pathway we construct: How can we, as discourse analysts, deal with the temporal–spatial horizon of history in view of the accelerated and ephemeral time-space references we experience nowadays? This question reflects our concern with the challenges that contemporary chronotopes pose to discourse analysis.

Transnationalism, globalization and superdiversity are constructs used for thinking about flows of people, information, capital, texts and ideas, how they are connected and the effects of these flows on social relations. While there are many differences in these constructs, this entry highlights commonalities of focus, intellectual roots and methods used to analyze flows and connectivity. I start by noting that much of the work carried out in this area was done by sociologists, anthropologists and those working in cultural studies, most of whom had little interest in how communicative activity figured in generating and sustaining flows, what such communicative activity looked like or how the communicative repertoires of mobile people opened or closed future life world potentials. I then go on to point out that, within sociolinguistics, the use of these concepts and the study of the phenomena they refer to have been characterized by a constant drive to understand connections between communicative events that are part of these flows, how and why different communicative events are valued, and how and why such differences can create inequality. In doing so, I point out that much of this scholarship has led to the creation of new concepts and invitations to reconceptualize how we think about language in social life.

The notion of language rights has proven to be highly controversial. It has typically been invoked in calls for the state to protect and recognize the heritage languages of minority communities. Implicit in such calls is a reliance on traditional understandings of what it means to be a member of a language community, to be a speaker of that community’s affiliated language, and to be a citizen of the state within which the community is embedded. But the conceptions of citizenship as well as those of community and language are changing – often in response to global shifts in mobility and migration. And these changes exacerbate rather than mitigate the problematic nature of language rights. In this chapter, I review various studies of citizenship, mobility, migration and language rights. Among the points that I make are the following: A fuller appreciation of implications of these changes needs to take into account the impact of neoliberalist ideologies. Recent developments such as the gig economy and virtual migration also need to be factored in. Underlying all these is the idea of personhood and how it variously informs the understanding of what it means to be a migrant, a citizen and a speaker of a language. I then flesh out the theoretical and policy implications of these studies, arguing that there is need to move beyond language rights if the migrant-citizen-language nexus is to be properly understood and fruitfully addressed.