Through the Little Cracks in the Educational System: Spaces for Translanguaging, Hamdeli, and an Epistemology of Love

Dr. Amir Kalan, Assistant Professor, McGill University, Canada

Mobina: Thank you so much again for joining me today for the Leveraging Languages for Learning interview series. In your research, you argue that current discussions of multilingualism and translanguaging are often framed through Western academic theories. What first led you to think about language and knowledge beyond these traditions? And what might we learn by placing these ideas in conversation with other intellectual traditions, such as from the Global South?

Amir: I would like to start by saying that it may seem rare to encounter articles that discuss language through other epistemological or academic lenses. But this is not because these ways of thinking do not exist. In reality, every community, every society develops its own ways of understanding and discussing language education and communication. In many non-Western communities, people have often had more welcoming and favourable understandings of multilingualism and translanguaging. But many of these ideas have been written in languages other than English, and unfortunately English academia is not very much interested in accessing those ideas. 

What motivated me to do this was, in fact, the interdisciplinary nature of my research, drawing on fields such as history, sociology, and philosophy. Applied linguistics, as you know, is insular and often stays within its own house. It does not always engage deeply with historical or sociological analysis. I began with simple questions: What perceptions of language existed before the colonial period and before the rise of European nation-states? Did different communities have their own forms of multilingualism? And did they study language in its diverse manifestations, including multilingual and multimodal communication? The answer is clearly yes! Civilisations such as India, many African societies, Persia, and Asian societies have long histories of multilingual and multimodal engagement with intellectual thought and philosophy. These communities were aware of multilingualism, plurilingualism, and what we might now call translanguaging, although they used different theoretical lenses and terminologies to discuss them.

What is interesting is that, from around the seventeenth century and especially during the height of European colonialism and nation-state building in the nineteenth century, Western intellectual traditions mobilised the humanities for two major projects. The first was colonial: disciplines such as philosophy, history, theology, literature, anthropology, and later sociology were used to justify hierarchies of languages and peoples. Some languages were presented as superior, because the people who spoke them were considered superior. The second project was nation-building. Humanities, literature, and even science were used to construct the idea of a nation based on one dominant culture and one dominant language. So, for centuries, one major activity of Western humanities was to support monolingual systems and language hierarchies. After the Second World War, there was a shift. With decolonisation processes in places such as Africa and India, and with the failure of European territorial expansion, there was growing recognition that these linguistic hierarchies were not based on reality. Multilingualism slowly began to be welcomed in schools and educational systems. The irony is that multilingualism is now often presented in the West as a new and progressive idea, and then sold back to societies that have already been multilingual for centuries and have long respected multilingualism, plurilingualism, and translanguaging. That has really been the main idea behind this project.

Mobina: So why does this view continue, even though societies increasingly recognise multiliteracies and multilingualism as natural phenomena? What are the implications of this, especially for multilingual learners, teachers, and researchers in the field?

Amir: I think we need to draw on history again. The reality is that we have inherited an educational system that comes from the colonial period. The schools we have today are deeply rooted in the idea of the European nation-state model. In their very design, state-run schools were not created to welcome diverse populations. In fact, their inbuilt design is almost the opposite. Educational structures were designed for homogenisation. They were created to bring diverse communities into the system, eradicate differences, and turn them into uniform citizens who speak the language of the nation. Most educational systems around the world still function through official languages and print-based literacies. This has been part of the design of the system. So, what we often see as a limitation is not necessarily a malfunction of the system. It may actually be the true function of the system.

Of course, there have been many positive changes recently. There have been major shifts in how we understand languages, cultures, and how they function, and important initiatives have been taken to reform educational systems. But educational systems are slow to change. Sometimes economic systems do not support these reforms either, especially when schools and teachers are constantly underfunded. Political fragility also matters. When political systems experience backlash against conversations about equity, transformation becomes even more difficult and very slow.  In terms of consequences, when we have monocultural and monolingual schools, what we lose first are the languages themselves. But, as we know, languages are connected to identities, cultures, and epistemologies. So when we sustain monolingual regimes of education, we weaken our collective understanding of the world. In practice, we risk destroying different ways of knowing and understanding reality.

What is often attracting my attention these days is that monolingual systems do not only erode concepts such as identity or culture, but they also destroy the infrastructures of cultural production. In the long term, monolingual education can weaken or eliminate publishing systems, book production, websites, media, TV programmes, and other cultural spaces connected to minoritised languages. Schools have not only been created for education. They have also functioned as key institutions of nation-states, controlling culture and regulating cultural interactions. So, if a community speaks a minoritised language but that language is not used in schools, there is a strong chance that the language will gradually disappear. This is because we have connected the infrastructures of cultural production to nation-states’ institutions, especially schools. So, these are the things we lose: language, identity, culture, epistemology, and the material infrastructures that allow cultural production to continue.

Mobina: Thanks for giving us a much clearer sense of what these limitations are. Still, as educators and teachers, we want to know: what small but meaningful things can we do to create a better experience for students in our classrooms? This brings us to one of the key concepts in our interview today: the Persian concept of the hermeneutics of mutual empathy, which in Farsi is translated as hamdeli. Could you explain what hamdeli means, why you chose this concept, and why you think it matters for how we understand language and communication in multilingual contexts today?

Amir: I have contributed to conversations about translanguaging and plurilingualism, and I am particularly interested in multilingual textual production and multilingual writing. However, I have sometimes felt that there is too much emphasis on alphabetic translanguaging; that is, on how multiple languages physically appear together in a text. Of course, there are very critical and sophisticated conversations in translanguaging studies, but I’m talking about the dominant discourse in the field.So I began to explore deeper layers of translanguaging. I wanted to offer teachers ways to continue working within monolingual systems while still accommodating students’ own rhetorics, discourses, and philosophies within the adopted language. For instance, I’ve introduced concepts such as rhetorical translanguaging, conceptual translanguaging, and presentational translanguaging. Extending this line of research, I focused on hamdeli as a hermeneutics of mutual empathy. Hamdeli, which can literally be translated as “co-heartedness” or “being of the same heart,” is a Persian concept that offers a translingual hermeneutics of mutual empathy. It shifts the focus of communication from surface-level linguistic mechanics to a shared emotional, ethical, and even spiritual foundation.

The hermeneutics of hamdeli suggests that meaning is generated and received through the heart, which is home to a universal love shared by human beings. In this sense, hamdeli expands translanguaging from a purely sociolinguistic phenomenon to an affective, meta-semiotic, ethical, and philosophical framework. It shows that translanguaging can succeed only when the listener practises mutual empathy, grounded in a radical love for the other. This is not only about understanding the language of the other. Interestingly, without empathy, you cannot even understand messages in your own language.

Mutual empathy is therefore the very foundation of communication, and it should be centred in language studies. Hamdeli puts forward a very ambitious argument: if you cannot understand someone because of their accent, code-switching, or other language practices, it may be because you have not activated the universal love within you; the will to communicate and the will to understand the other. In this sense, translanguaging does not happen only as a linguistic product, such as placing multiple languages side by side. It also happens at an ethical and philosophical level within the listener. So hamdeli shifts the focus from the language of the speaker or writer to what happens not only in the mind of the listener or reader, but also in their heart.

Mobina: Considering the little cracks in education, and the meaningful initiatives you proposed, what do you hope that we, as readers, teachers, students, researchers, and academics, can take away from your work on the hermeneutics of mutual empathy, translanguaging, and the other ideas you have discussed today? 

Amir: I hope that teachers, educators, and readers of this interview can join me in thinking about the possibilities we have discussed: how we might decolonise translanguaging as a field, find different ways of implementing plurilingual pedagogies, and engage in research projects that challenge current structures. Action research projects, for instance, can help us show and test alternative possibilities in real educational contexts. At a broader level, I would like people to think about the creation of an epistemology of love. This is also my future project. I am currently working on a book entitled Epistemology of Love. One concern I have, especially in the current political climate, is how claims to truth can become harmful, and how they can even kill human beings.

Going back to the beginning of our interview, epistemology was a major tool in the colonial project. It was the idea that some people knew the truth and others did not. Those who claimed to know the truth then felt entitled to harm, enslave, or kill those who were seen as not knowing it. I believe that the everyday pedagogies of translanguaging and plurilingualism can contribute to an epistemology of love. Previous epistemologies have often been epistemologies of violence, where truth became an excuse for imposing violence on others. What I hope to imagine is an epistemology that begins with love. Whatever conclusions such an epistemology reaches, I hope it will not promote violence in any form. That is my larger agenda and my bigger objective.

Mobina: I love how you have brought our interview to a close. We began with epistemology and with the challenges that emerge when particular epistemologies dominate educational contexts, once again we returned to epistemology, but through the hermeneutics of mutual empathy, as both a response and an ideal that we can move towards. Thank you very much.

Biography

Dr Amir Kalan is an Assistant Professor at McGill University. His interdisciplinary scholarship brings together philosophy, sociology, history, literary theory, and creative academic genres such as poetic scholarship. Drawing on discourse analysis, ethnography, practitioner research, narrative inquiry, and arts-based methods, his work focuses on minoritised and racialised students in multilingual and multicultural contexts. He is especially interested in unofficial, community-based, plurilingual, multi-semiotic, and non-Western literacy practices.

References

Kalan, A., & Davy, R. (2024). Identifying socio-textual nodes in the academic knowledge industry: “Multiliteracies” research and discursive appropriation. Journal of Language and Literacy Education, 20(1), 1-26.

Kalan, A., & Wang, S. (2026). Reconstructive discourse analysis as a method for reclaiming non-western epistemologies in language studies: The case of translanguaging. American Journal of Qualitative Research, 10(2), 70–94.

Kalan, A. (2022). Negotiating writing identities across languages: Translanguaging as enrichment of semiotic trajectories. TESL Canada Journal, 38(2), 63–87.

Kalan, A. (2025). Translanguaging as a hermeneutics of mutual empathy: همدلی. In M. S. Christiansen, Z. Tian, & S. Canagarajah (Eds.), Decolonizing academic writing through translingualism: Walking the talk. Routledge.