Colonial Temporality and Writing Education

First book-length study to examine colonial temporalities within the fields of applied linguistics, TESOL and writing studies

This book examines colonial temporality and English writing education by analysing higher educational policies operating in China and Saudi Arabia. It explores the ways temporality shapes the wellbeing and practices of individual writing teachers and the ways they understand, resist and appropriate the temporal orders.

This book examines how a colonial matrix of power is established through temporality in English writing education. It offers discourse analyses of higher educational policies that operate in China and Saudi Arabia and then triangulates this data with conversations with writing teachers from representative Chinese and Saudi universities. Drawing on all this data to understand both the structured power relations shaping educational policies and the attendant effects on the writing teachers that inhabit these spaces, the book develops a decolonial comparative method and adopts the concept of “temporal regime” as an analytic lens. It not only attends to the complex and multilayered ways that this regime controls, disciplines and shapes the social wellbeing and professional practices of individual writing teachers, but it also details the various ways that teachers understand, experience, resist, negotiate and appropriate the temporal orders.