Power and the role of language

Luisa Martín Rojo
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
Table of contents

Two research questions are addressed in this chapter. Firstly, what role do knowledge and discourses we have accumulated about languages and their speakers play in the production and justification of the political rationalities with which the population is governed, individuals domesticated and societies securitised. Secondly, the extent to which this knowledge has led to the enactment of specific techniques of power, integrated within the same political rationalities – techniques often aimed at controlling and guiding the population and at obtaining consent (and suppressing resistance) to power relations that, among other consequences, limit people’s capacity for action or subject them to conditions of domination or exclusion.

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