Lara-Stephanie Krause-Alzaidi

Lara-Stephanie Krause-Alzaidi completed her Ph.D. in African Languages at the University of Cape Town in 2020, and, shortly after, published the resulting monograph Relanguaging Language from a South African Township School with Multilingual Matters. Based on a long-term ethnographic study of English language classrooms in a South African township, this project centers South African township teachers and students as skilled (re)languagers central to the workings of South African education, and to our scholarly understanding of how language classrooms work.

Since 2021, Krause-Alzaidi has been taking her skepticism of Western notions of language(s) further, questioning the concept of language itself by investigating, from a new materialist perspective, relationships between differently racialised bodies and protest placards in Ger­many – specifically in the context of Black Lives Matter. She is interested in the materiality of words in relation to different bodies, and in how understanding this relationship can help in encounter­ing the other ethically. Her focus lies, specifically, on the responsibility of white bodies to learn to sense their whiteness to ethically encounter differently racialised bodies in Germany.

For her postdoc fellowship at the Africana Research Center, she plans to work on publishing journal articles on the Black Lives Matter research project. Also, she wants to concentrate her research focus at the intersection of African Studies and Applied linguistics, centered on the potential of African languages for decolonising classrooms and scholarship.