In this unique exploration of the interplay of knowledge, memory, language, loss, and the layered unspeakability surrounding Palestine, Khawla Badwan develops an applied linguistics that sits with Gaza and the international failure to prevent the world's first livestreamed genocide. Still Gaza offers a deep understanding of how language operates in relation to human experience and how it can be stretched and shattered with pain and trauma. It presents a kind of applied linguistics and intercultural education scholarship that is critical, timely, disobedient, anticolonial and truly rooted in the lived experiences of genocide, erasure and struggle. The knowledge it produces is not only contemporary and current but also lived, felt, breathed, embodied and experienced. Genre-defying, Still Gaza refigures language as ethical action. It enables readers to understand the power of language as a witnessing project and as a tool for collective remembering and social healing.
Khawla Badwan is a Palestinian scholar of language, culture, education and social justice. She is Reader in Applied Linguistics at Manchester Metropolitan University, where she co-leads the Manchester Centre for Research in Linguistics. Her publications include Language in a Globalised World: Social Justice Perspectives on Mobility and Contact (2021).
Foreword; Prologue; 1. Applied linguistics with Gaza; 2. Still Gaza; 3. Aphasic being with Gaza; 4. The shattering of language with Gaza; 5. Linguistic rebellion for Gaza; 6. Poetic praxis for Gaza: methodology of witnessing; 7. Moving forward with Gaza.