Chapter 9: Language, Globalization, and Education in Central Asia

Recent approaches to contemporary processes of worldwide change understood as globalization have been categorized into three main perspectives, hyperglobalism, transformationalism, and skepticism, according to attitudes towards the reality of globalization as a phenomenon and its effects (Held, McGrew, Goldblatt, & Perraton 1999). Following Bourdieu’s “hyperbolic doubt” (1998, p. 36),¹ this chapter provisionally treats the reality of globalization skeptically (Steiner-Khamsi, 2004). Processes of global interchange are carried out by concrete individuals in shared language(s), yet the role of language is little mentioned within globalization research, left as unimagined or unimaginable, with the presuppositions responsible for this unproblematized (Taylor, 1995, pp. 113–119), perhaps a sign of “language blindness” within globalization research (Bahry, 2016c).