Browning, Peter; (2024) Language Policy and Social Transformation in Colombia: A critical sociolinguistic ethnography of Rionegro Bilingüe. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

Against the backdrop of the country’s peace process and since signing up to the Interamerican Development Bank’s programme for Emerging and Sustainable Cities in 2016, the municipality of Rionegro (Colombia) has been the focus of substantial material and social intervention. This has manifested itself in a proliferation of urban projects, for example: the repaving of roads; the renovation of the main square; and the building of cycle paths, as well as the burgeoning of new social programmes including: free school meals; geriatric care; and a municipal-wide English language policy, Rionegro Bilingüe. All of these changes have been justified within the governing Centro Democrático party’s programme of ‘transformation’. My focus in this thesis is the role played by Rionegro Bilingüe in the ‘transformation’ of the municipality. Adopting a metasemiotic approach to language policy, which I operationalise through a conceptualisation of language policy as infrastructure, the thesis sets out to account for the work of Rionegro Bilingüe in (re)creating, mobilising and policing the frameworks through which the ‘transformation’ of Rionegro is made sense of. Based on 11 months of ethnographic fieldwork and over a decade of lived-experience, I craft my analysis around the existential axes of: time; space and personhood. The thesis reveals Rionegro Bilingüe as a political mechanism whereby the ‘transformation’ of the municipality is achieved. My analysis shows that through Rionegro Bilingüe ‘transformation’ is both performed and, moreover, is inscribed with specific understandings that are aligned with a Uribist, neoliberal politics and are rooted in a local struggle to establish Rionegro as the capital of a new Metropolitan Area. These findings demonstrate the critical potentiality of conceptualising language policy as infrastructure for sociolinguistic scholarship engaged in the politics of meaning making and provide an insight into the day-to-day workings of Uribism, an important political force in Colombia’s postconflict landscape.

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