Intersectional pedagogies for critical language awareness in multilingual India: a phenomenological inquiry

Abstract

This study provides an account of a pedagogical intervention designed to promote Critical Language Awareness among tertiary learners in an English Language Education (ELE) course at an Indian university in a hybrid mode. Rooted at the intersections of Critical Language Pedagogy, postmemory, and digital pedagogies, the pedagogical intervention enables learners to understand the complex interconnections between their language usage, linguistic identities, historical events, and digital medium in a multilingual context. It utilises an interpretative phenomenological approach to document and interpret multilingual participants’ perceptions of their language learning experiences. Eight sub-themes that emerged from the phenomenological inquiry are (1) everyday lives as sites of language politics, (2) inquisitiveness about native language and linguistic identities, (3) navigating digitality and hybrid learning experiences, (4) classroom as a multilingual space, (5) awareness of the complexities of multilingual context, (6) dominant narratives and representational politics, (7) co-curation of knowledge and dismantling academic hegemony and (8) negotiating multiplicity of linguistic identities. The study highlights both the effectiveness of such an intersectional pedagogical intervention and, in the process, argues for the necessity to integrate context-specific complexities of multilingual experiences into ELE courses that are traditionally shaped by distant native-speaker norms. © 2026 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.