Facilitated by: Dr Dylan Williams who is one of the co-convenors of the Multilingual University Network, alongside Dr Ibrar Bhatt, Dr Zhen Li and Dr Sal Consoli. For more details about the network and its activities, please click here. 

Overview

Linguistic-epistemic challenges faced by non-Anglophone students are a significant concern for all higher education researchers. This issue lies at the intersection of linguistics, higher education, and intercultural communication. Therefore, this event aims to bring together researchers, educators, and practitioners to focus on understanding, addressing, and ultimately bridging the language - and epistemology - related obstacles that hinder effective research, learning and communication within higher education settings.

The event opens with Jane Andrews and Richard Fay, experts in multilingualism and intercultural education. They will explore the need for a translingual and trans-epistemic mindset in decolonising higher education. Their talk connects translanguaging, transknowledging, and linguistic citizenship, highlighting the links between diverse languages, worldviews, and epistemic (in)justice.

This will be followed by Wisam Kh. Abdul-Jabbar, a leading scholar in intercultural education and curriculum development. His talk, focusing on epistemic challenges in international education, examines cultural and epistemic tensions Arab Gulf students face in Western education. He proposes rearticulating liberal arts education through Arab-Islamic traditions to bridge the epistemological divide.

The event aims to contribute to the development of a more inclusive and linguistically aware higher education epistemic landscape, fostering environments where all students and colleagues can thrive academically, regardless of their linguistic background, helping to enhance the inclusivity and effectiveness of academic communication across linguistic and cultural boundaries.

Schedule

Speaker bios

Jane Andrews: Professor of Education at the University of the West of England (UK), received her PhD in Education (2005) from The University of Manchester (UK). She jointly leads UWE’s EdD programme. She specialises in: multilingualism and learning including children’s experiences of being multilingual, and the languaging of research. 

Richard Fay:  Reader in Education (TESOL and intercultural communication) at The University of Manchester (UK), where he received his PhD in Education (2004). He specialises in: language teacher education, intercultural communication/education, researcher education, and ethnomusicology.

Jane and Richard have been collaborating for many years on topics related to researching multilingually, the languaging of research, researcher and supervisor development of a translingual mindset, translanguaging as linked to tranknowledging, and linguistic aspects of epistemic (in)justice.

Wisam Kh. Abdul-Jabbar holds a Ph.D. (funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) from the University of Alberta, where he was awarded the President’s Doctoral Prize of Distinction. Dr Abdul-Jabbar held a postdoctoral fellowship (also funded by SSHRC) at the University of Calgary. His research considers how intercultural communication resonates with educational practices. It explores the integration of intercultural competencies into curriculum and educational theory. Prior to joining Hamad Bin Khalifa University, he was an associate lecturer at the University of Alberta, Canada. He is the author of Negotiating Diasporic Identity in Arab-Canadian Students - Double Consciousness, Belonging, and Radicalization (Palgrave, 2019) and Medieval Muslim Philosophers and Intercultural Communication: Towards a Dialogical Paradigm in Education (Routledge, 2023). He is the editor of Teaching Interculturally in Qatar: Local Epistemologies, Communication and Pedagogy (Routledge, 2025). Currently authoring a manuscript titled Contextualizing Teacher Education Curricula in the Arab Gulf, to be published by Cambridge University Press.