Othman Z. Barnawi – författare

This book examines how a colonial matrix of power is established through temporality in English writing education. It offers discourse analyses of higher educational policies that operate in China and Saudi Arabia and then triangulates this data with conversations with writing teachers from representative Chinese and Saudi universities. Drawing on all this data to understand both the structured power relations shaping educational policies and the attendant effects on the writing teachers that inhabit these spaces, the book develops a decolonial comparative method and adopts the concept of “temporal regime” as an analytic lens. It not only attends to the complex and multilayered ways that this regime controls, disciplines and shapes the social wellbeing and professional practices of individual writing teachers, but it also details the various ways that teachers understand, experience, resist, negotiate and appropriate the temporal orders.

This book examines how a colonial matrix of power is established through temporality in English writing education. It offers discourse analyses of higher educational policies that operate in China and Saudi Arabia and then triangulates this data with conversations with writing teachers from representative Chinese and Saudi universities. Drawing on all this data to understand both the structured power relations shaping educational policies and the attendant effects on the writing teachers that inhabit these spaces, the book develops a decolonial comparative method and adopts the concept of “temporal regime” as an analytic lens. It not only attends to the complex and multilayered ways that this regime controls, disciplines and shapes the social wellbeing and professional practices of individual writing teachers, but it also details the various ways that teachers understand, experience, resist, negotiate and appropriate the temporal orders.

This book embarks on an ever-expanding array of language, academic mobility, neoliberalism, and accompanying rich scholarly debates. It examines the ways in which international English language teachers in Saudi Arabia’s higher education system position themselves, negotiate, interact, adjust, make sense of their classroom dynamics, and validate their senses of selves and pedagogies in their day-to-day (dis)engagement with their institutions and encounters at work. Informed by rich empirical data from a multi-year, multi-site project in addition to other qualitative studies, the book reveals on-the-ground complexities involving speaker status, language, ethnicity, nationality, race, religion, sociocultural factors, emotion labour, work dynamic and professionalism. It promotes thinking beyond normative ideologies on marginalisation, the native and non-native speaker dichotomy, linguistic, racial, religious and ethnic (inter)relations, and translanguaging pedagogies, while also offering new material for original theorisation in multi-Englishes multilingualism, local-trusting-local and the limits of negotiability.