“To cook, I watch a Tik Tok video.”: Academic Literacies and the decolonisation of language and university

Citation

da Costa Cabral I (2025) “To cook, I watch a Tik Tok video.”: Academic Literacies and the decolonisation of language and university. Annual General Meeting of the British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL), University of Glasgow, 04.09.2025-06.09.2026.

Abstract
Our aim is to reflect on academic literacy practices as a third space (Anzaldúa, 1999), where the coloniality of language (Garcés, 2007; Veronelli, 2015, Torquato, 2020; 2021) and the colonisation of university can be challenged and dismantled. We analysed video-recordings of online classes run by the first author of this paper, along with literacy journals created by her undergraduate students as part of their assessment for the Literacy Studies course at a university in Southern Brazil. Their production aimed to help students become aware of the literacy practices they engage in throughout their everyday life, building knowledge about literacies, identity and power. The data analysed were ethnographically generated by the two authors engaged in collaborative reflexivity (Dietz and Cortés, 2022). Understanding Academic Literacies as related to identities, and epistemologies, and constituted by power relations (Zavala, 2009; 2011), we analysed these utterances (Bakhtin, 1998) in dialogue with the counter-hegemonic voices of Anzaldua (1999), hooks (2013), Smith (2012), Walsh (2018), Grosfoguel (2016), and Lander (2000). We will focus specifically on one student’s journal to show how these literacy journals can be understood as spaces where the social spheres/practices (Bakhtin, 1998) of academia, social media, affective relationships, entertainment are intertwined. The student-author drew on different heterodiscoursive (Bakhtin, 2015)/communicative and knowledge resources (Rymes, 2014), producing a multimodal digital journal. By producing her video-journal, the student decentralised writing in the knowledge construction and, consequently, decentralised legitimised language (Bakhtin, 2015) associated with academic writing (Smith, 2012; Anzaldúa, 1999; hooks, 2013). Simultaneously, the student integrated her personal lived experiences into academic text, embodying and giving life to knowledge . We conclude our analysis by pointing out that this other genre (literacy journal) in “other” pedagogic practice (Walsh, 2018) enables the creation of “other” knowledges in academic context and the decolonisation of language and university.