Ever Expanding Interdisciplinary Horizons: The Interlacing Domains of Critical Applied Linguistics

Notions of power, inequality, visibility/invisibility, disenfranchisement, and perplexing ‘’ideological lunacy’’ can be elucidated through critical applied linguistics as a robust emancipatory tool. Critical approaches like post-colonialism, feminism, and liberalism dispute discursive mapping of dominant ideologies and assertions. Moreover, the overlocalized undertheorized notion of the contextualized applied linguistic studies can be illuminated through a genuine critical globalized lens. Issues of racism, xenophobia, misogyny, Islamophobia, and anti-immigration policies are now more perniciously accentuated. Hence, being a critical linguist is tantamount to a critique on individuals’ pent-up emotions, disparity, exclusion, consciousness and resistance. All elements of ELT education like culture, identity, pragmatics, literature, assessment and literacy as sine qua non of this discipline may need to be reformulated and reconceptualized. This is indubitably an unorthodox approach to education warding off all conventionality and hackneyed ideological orthodoxies. It equips us against unethical pedagogical, not ‘’piratogical’’, hypocritical practices. Critical studies must address these corrosive malaises and must be responsive to repressive psychopathic practices camouflaged as critical studies. De-mysfication of aberrations and discursive disorders exercised by apparently democratic ‘’ scholars’’ is a vital critical sociolinguistic mission. It provides alternatives like Postmodernism, Post-Occidentalism, Anarcho-Particularism, Anti-essentialism, Liberal-Pluralism, and Multiculturalism, etc. Into the bargain, the nebulous confounding concept of “critical’’, removal of taken-for-granted assumptions and grand theories, critical thinking, higher order cognitive competencies, identity and ethnographic considerations are issues of controversy. This in-depth analysis is a significant step towards removal of myopic educational attitudes of trivialization of critical interdisciplinary practices and unfairly considering them as square pegs in round holes, outsiders, academic pariahs or pedagogical outcasts.