Dr Khawla Badwan

Back to the Human: Education in Times of Machines and Failures

What might innovative, inclusive, sustainable and responsible education look like in an era of algorithmic bias and assaults on the language of rights, truth-telling and humanity? This keynote discusses the manufacturing of epistemic and ethical aphasias in education through technological amnesia and the collective forgetting of human suffering. It argues for the moral imperative to go back to the human to challenge silences and erasures and to engender the conditions of care, connection and collective wisdom through worlding education for reparative presents and futures.

Dr Khawla Badwan is Reader in Applied Linguistics and Co-Lead for the Manchester Centre for Research in Linguistics at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. Khawla’s research expertise includes language education for social justice, language and intercultural communication, language and sustainability, language and sociolinguistics of globalisation, and children’s sociolinguistics. She chaired the expert advisory board for reviewing the Linguistics Subject Benchmark Statement for the Quality Assurance Agency, UK and she is an active member of the English Language Advisory Group for the British Council. Some of her publications include Language in a Globalised World: Social Justice Perspectives on Mobility and Contact (Palgrave, 2021). She is co-editor of Global Migration and Diversity of Educational Experiences in the Global South and North (Routledge, 2023) and Critical Perspectives on Teaching in the Multilingual University (Routledge, 2024). She is currently writing Still Gaza: Language in Times of Unspeakability (under contract- Cambridge University Press).