De-centering the anthropocentric worldview in language textbooks: A posthumanist call for discursive reparations for sustainable ELT

Abstract

Our ecosystem has suffered severe material and epistemic damages as a consequence of contemporary neoliberal forces and Eurocentric onto-epistemologies in the Anthropocene era. These epistemic damages are also visible in how ELT textbooks are designed in local contexts. Informed by posthumanism and Southern epistemology, the present study analyzes the discursive/semiotic representation of nature, environment and human-nature relations in English language textbooks in Sindh province of Pakistan – highly affected climate region in South Asia. The study used Eco-CLA and multimodality as theoretical frameworks. The findings suggest that the English textbooks fail to incorporate localized sustainable thinking as well as lack references to marginalized communities affected by deteriorating ecological conditions in Pakistan. Instead, the textbooks tend to normalize the unsustainable stories connecting learning to the physical world in an anthropocentric, aestheticized, and neoliberal consumerist manner, while disregarding nonhuman entities as sentient entities. In light of our findings, we call for posthumanist discursive reparations informed by Southern epistemologies in order to rethink the writing of textbooks in ecologically affected global regions, including Sindh – the authors’ geo-epistemic context. This requires shifting away from anthropocentric disembodied conception of world to an embodied world characterized by nonduality, co-existence, entanglement and harmony.