Heritage languages and education in the post-migrant and post-multilingual society: Reflections from the lens of epistemic justice

In European post-migrant and post-multilingual societies, educational institutions are generally less responsive to the transformations brought about by migration experiences and increasingly complex language interweavings. Consequently, school curricula still prioritize the languages of autochthonous communities and expect students to acquire those skills and knowledge that are legitimized. Languages associated with migranticized communities, instead, are commonly misrecognized and structurally marginalized. Within this scenario, the teaching, learning and use of non-dominant heritage languages (HLs)—languages of transnational first-, second- and third-generation speakers—offer a context for considering the role of education in perpetuating or resisting imbalances of status and power. Building on scholarship from sociolinguistics, migration studies and decolonial theories, this paper contends that educational policies and practices rooted in the misrecognition of HLs constitute forms of epistemic injustice whereby knowledges associated with dominant languages are positioned as superior, while the contributions of non-dominant communities are delegitimized. This paper first explores how epistemic injustice is interwoven into societal and institutional structures in ways that reinforce epistemic hierarchies. It does so by delineating the tensions in South Tyrol, Italy, where the three official languages—German, Italian and Ladin—coexist with a growing number of migranticized HLs. Drawing on translanguaging and transknowledging, the paper then outlines pathways to rethinking legitimate knowledge production: to do so, it draws both on selected findings from a two-year participatory action research project with primary schoolteachers, and on knowledge co-constructed with one teacher of Albanian, the most widespread HL in the territory. By examining HLs through the lens of epistemic (in)justice, the paper frames the place of language in education as an epistemic issue and suggests ways to (re)center marginalized knowledges for increased justice.