Routledge Handbook of Race and Equity in Applied Linguistics

The Routledge Handbook of Race and Equity in Applied Linguistics provides an authoritative overview of research on racial and epistemic inequities in TESOL and applied linguistics. It focuses on intersecting systems of oppression in institutional, pedagogical, curricular, and policy spaces.

Across 27 chapters, contributors critically examine everyday policies and practices, such as hiring bias and discriminatory job ads, which disadvantage multilingual learners and teachers, while amplifying agentive voices seeking change. Organized into four parts and spanning the geographic and epistemic Global South and North, the handbook is both critique and praxis: it offers practical tools for valuing students’ full repertoires, challenging native-speaker norms, redesigning curricula and assessment, and linking classroom decisions to program and policy reform. It adopts diverse and groundbreaking lenses—linguistic racism, native-speakerism, commodified hiring, translanguaging, phenomenology, pedagogy of love, Ebùnlingualism, decolonial hermeneutics, intersectionality, and critical ethnographies—that counter linguistic, epistemic, racial, and institutional hegemonies.

This timely handbook charts a clear decolonial path for students and scholars in TESOL, Applied Linguistics, and Education, while equipping educators and policymakers with the tools to build more just and inclusive environments.

Leonardo Veliz is an Associate Professor in Language and Literacy in the School of Education at the University of New England, Australia. He is also an adjunct professor in the MTESOL program at Facultad de Educación, Universidad San Sebastián, Concepción, Chile. His research critically explores multilingualism, multiculturalism, and broader sociopolitical dimensions of language education, with a particular interest in equity, linguistic justice, and decolonial perspectives in diverse educational contexts, including Australia, Latin America, and the Global South.

Paul Meighan is a Gael sociolinguist, Indigenous to the Scottish Highlands and Islands. He is Research Project Manager for Learning from the Lands at the University of Guelph and an ESL Professor at Sheridan College, Canada. His research explores the intersections of language, land, identity, and power through Indigenous language revitalization, multilingual pedagogies, and Indigenous knowledge systems..

Waqar Ali Shah is an Assistant Professor at Mehran University of Engineering and Technology, Pakistan. He has obtained his PhD in Applied Linguistics from University of Jyväskylä, Finland. His research interests include critical applied linguistics, critical (multimodal) discourse studies, critical multilingualism, and decoloniality in TESOL. Waqar has published extensively in international peer-reviewed journals.

Xuesong Gao is a language teacher educator and leading scholar at the School of Education, Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture, University of New South Wales, Australia. His research interests include international students’ educational experiences, language learner agency, language and literacy education, language education policy and language teacher education, particularly applications of sociocultural/ecological perspectives on education.