Language Incompetence

This book is framed as a memoir of the author's journey through a cancer diagnosis and resulting impairments, as he continued his teaching and research activities during and after medical procedures. The narrative weaves together theoretical debates, textual analyses, and ethnographic data from communicative practices to redefine language competence.
The book demonstrates:
the generative and resistant value of human vulnerability
the importance of vulnerability in motivating engagement with social networks and material ecologies for productive thinking, communication, and community
the role of relational ethics in social and communicative life
a decolonizing orientation to disability studies and language competence.
While language competence was traditionally defined as mentally internalized grammatical knowledge for individual mastery of communication, this book demonstrates the need for distributed, ethical, and embodied practice.
The book is intended for graduate students and researchers in language and literacy studies. It would interest scholars outside these disciplines to understand what language studies can offer to address the role of disabilities, impairments, and debilities in embodied communication and thinking. In the context of the global pandemic, compounded by environmental catastrophes and structural injustices which disproportionately affect marginalized communities, the book helps readers treat human vulnerability as the starting point for ethical social relations, strategic communication, and transformative education.

Suresh Canagarajah is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Applied Linguistics, English, and Asian Studies at Pennsylvania State University, USA. He was the former editor of TESOL Quarterly and President of the American Association of Applied Linguistics.

Preface 1. Am I Disabled? 2. Learning to be Able 3. BC/AC: Changing Identities and Communities 4. Designer Babies and Chosen Tribes: Toward a Relational Politics 5. From War Zones to Cancer Wards: A Community of Dependent Frail Bodies 6. Composing at Chemo Time: Cancer Journals as Performative Writing 7. John's Final Blogs: Anomalous Embodiment and Religious Disability Rhetoric 8. The Arbor and the Rhizome: Rethinking Language Competence 9. Weaving Texts: Scientific Communication as Anomalous Embodiment 10. "Supplement or Compensate our Weak Points": Relational Ethics in Academic Interactions 11. Café Conversations: Embracing Vulnerability in Society and Education Index