Hannah Arendt Visiting Senior Fellow
David Gramling, Professor at the University of British Columbia, will join the Department for intercultural German Studies at the University of Göttingen for Summer 2026 to pursue an engagement project on “Envisioning Language(s) – Linguistic Disobedience in the Democracies of the Future” in tandem with Dr. Jacqueline Gutjahr. Drawing on David’s book Linguistic Disobedience: Restoring Power to Civic Language, co-authored with Michelle Moyd and Yuliya Komska, the team and members of the Youth Parliament Göttingen will update the book for 2026 based on practical examples from culture, politics, education, activism, and community engagement to refine the concept of linguistic disobedience.
David (they+) is Professor at the University of British Columbia (Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies) and author, editor, or translator of eight books in print: Literature in Late Monolingualism (Bloomsbury 2024); The Invention of Multilingualism (Cambridge University Press, 2021); The Invention of Monolingualism (Bloomsbury 2016, American Association for Applied Linguistics Book Award, 2018); co-author of Palliative Care Conversations: Clinical and Applied Linguistic Perspectives (De Gruyter 2019, with David’s big brother Robert Gramling); Linguistic Disobedience: Restoring Power to Civic Language (Palgrave 2019, with Yuliya Komska and Michelle Moyd); Germany in Transit: Nation and Migration 1955–2005 (University of California Press 2007 with Deniz Göktürk and Anton Kaes); and Transit Deutschland: Debatten zu Nation und Migration (Konstanz University Press / Wallstein Verlag, with Deniz Göktüurk, Anton Kaes, and Andreas Langenohl). David’s book-length co-translation (with Aron Aji) of Murathan Mungan’s Turkish-language Shahmeran story cycle Valor: Stories (Cenk Hikâyeleri) was published in Fall 2023 with Northwestern University Press, and made possible by a 2021 Global Humanities Translation Prize from Northwestern University.
Future books include Translating Transgender (with Aniruddha Dutta, Routledge 2026), and Aloof: On Seeing Less than you Should, which details David’s lifelong social and logistical adventure with their okulären Albinismus, a rare congenital visual Disability. David is an editorial board member of Transgender Studies Quarterly (Duke University Press) and German Quarterly, and was founding editor with Chantelle Warner of Critical Multilingualism Studies, now under the editorship of Janice McGregor and Emma Trentman.
Linguae futurae democratiae: Restoring Power to Civic Language in 2026
Held May 26, 2025
Much of the strain on truth, justice, hope, and solidarity in our cultural moment is a strain on language and languages—that is, our belief in the inherent capacity of languages to offer access to reality, fact, and effective social practice for the future. More often than not, in 2026, language and languages are seen warily as tools for manipulation, misdirection, strong-arming, elite narcissism, and grandstanding. So, if this is the case, why would anyone want to learn languages at all? Why not pivot into learning data, coding, and algorithms instead—“silence-maxxing” one’s way through everyday life otherwise? Such are the choices that young people and others face, who are learning and being in our shared institutions, communities, industries, and societies today. Drawing on insights from Hannah Arendt, Viktor Klemperer, and our own book from 2019 Linguistic Disobedience (co-written with Michelle Moyd and Yuliya Komska), this presentation opens a passionate and unapologetic call for a new public idea about language in 2026.
Seminar-related project: Linguistic Disobedience
What language(s) does democracy speak? The rise of authoritarian tendencies in 21st-century democratic societies necessitates a critical reassessment of the function and impact of power through language. In their book Linguistic Disobedience: Restoring Power to Civic Language (2019), Komska, Moyd, and Gramling demonstrate how linguistic disobedience—once a critical antidote to questioning power—is now being instrumentalized by certain heads of state, digital troll armies, and other actors to achieve interactional hegemony. Traditional dichotomies of “linguistic obedience” and “linguistic disobedience” appear to be blurring or even inverted.
This reversal raises the question of what options remain for addressing linguistic abuse and instrumentalization by authorities. How can linguistic disobedience be rethought in terms of social and linguistic justice and participation? The focus shifts to significant practices of linguistic disobedience that make otherness and other voices, ways of speaking, and language styles visible, audible, and understandable—for example, by challenging dominant notions of monolingualism, linguistic standards and normativity, and of ‘correct’ and ‘legitimate’ language use.
Based on a theoretical exploration of the relations between language(s), power, and democracy, in the second part of the seminar, we will discuss a range of examples with David Gramling (Hannah Arendt Fellow in the Department of Intercultural German Studies in summer 2026) to refine the concept of linguistic disobedience. To this end, we will examine the potential of language critique, correction, and care—defined as key forms of linguistic disobedience (see Komska, Moyd & Gramling 2019)—to counteract linguistic abuse and linguistic indifference. As part of their seminar-related project, participants independently develop case studies in the fields of education, art, politics, activism and civic engagement and are given the opportunity to contribute these as contributors or co-authors to a workbook on linguistic disobedience.