Epistemic Disobedience and Swardspeak in Philippine Higher Education: A Critical Autoethnography of Decolonial Translanguaging
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.67903/ijroms0619Keywords:
Critical Autoethnography, Epistemic Disobedience, Philippine Higher Education, Swardspeak, TranslanguagingAbstract
Philippine universities operate within multilingual classrooms, yet institutionally privileged academic registers can obscure how queer-coded linguistic resources contribute to teaching. Research on Swardspeak—a creative, socially situated Philippine queer linguistic repertoire—has largely emphasized identity and language form rather than instructors’ reflexive pedagogical practice. This critical autoethnography examines how one queer educator interprets Swardspeak as translanguaging, or the strategic use of multiple linguistic resources for meaning-making, and as a possible instance of epistemic disobedience: questioning whose language is authorized to carry knowledge. The objectives are to interpret the educator’s documented classroom language decisions, identify attributed pedagogical functions, and examine tensions and ethical limits. The author analyzed 60 reflexive teaching logs, 35 curriculum and syllabus annotations, and 20 retrospective memory essays assembled during August 2024–June 2026 through reflexive thematic analysis; memory essays also recall earlier professional experiences. Three themes emerged. Affective-relational recalibration describes perceived shifts in interpersonal distance without proving reduced anxiety. Conceptual scaffolding describes informal metaphors as provisional routes into disciplinary explanation, while also revealing risks of conceptual imprecision. Constructive feedback and metalinguistic movement describes humor-inflected critique followed by explicit movement toward academic registers. Counterexamples indicate uneven repertoire familiarity and concern about academic standards. The Double-Entry Translation Journal is offered as an illustrative pedagogical design, not a tested intervention. Findings concern the educator’s situated interpretations, not independent student outcomes. The study contributes a bounded account of queer-coded translanguaging and proposes ethical, inclusive register-comparison practices for further investigation.
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