Toward a transepistemic academe

Pakistan is a multilingual and multiethnic country with a rich cultural heritage and intellectual tradition. The inherited colonial legacy has nevertheless shaped the country’s academic, sociopolitical, and economic structures, influenced by colonial and neoliberal regimes. Consequently, educational policies and discourses are framed dominantly within the nation-state sensibilities, privileging English and Urdu languages and a state-centric, paradoxical view of episteme in academia. This results in colonialingual epistemic hierarchies in which local knowledge, diverse linguistic/semiotic repertoires, and folk experiences remain excluded in ELT and (applied) linguistics due to an overemphasis on nation-state representations, Anglo-Western/Eurocentric knowledge, and linguistic theorizations. Against this backdrop, the present autoethnographic narrative unravels my personal journey as an English language learner and teacher in Pakistan, showing how my personal “self” has undergone various identity shifts—from a multilingual “self” to a colonial-modern subject influenced by neoliberalism, experiencing anxieties and existential crises due to the hegemony of Eurocentricity and restrictive criticality in Pakistani university, and also the way university life enabled me to engage with the deracialization process. Lastly, I reflect on the research and teaching of applied linguistics in Pakistan as an Anglo-Western/Eurocentric epistemic project. I close my chapter by suggesting how transepistemic academia can subvert linguistic and epistemic hegemonies in Southern contexts like Pakistan.