Canagarajah, A. Suresh

Abstract Athelstan Suresh Canagarajah is a Sri Lankan Tamil scholar specializing in sociolinguistics, literacy, and English language instruction. He is known for incorporating language and educational practices from the Global South to diversify academic norms. His doctoral research focused on the communicative practices of African American students and the strategies they used to balance Black English and mainstream dialects in academic writing. Canagarajah coined the term code meshing to challenge monolingualist assumptions in multilingual writing. He characterizes multilingual writers as creatively meshing diverse codes into their texts, allowing for the possibility that text differences may be strategic choices. He conceives of multilingual writers as agentive, creatively shuttling between discourses to achieve communication objectives. Canagarajah is an advocate for global justice and has worked to modify academic regulations to support multilingual researchers and students. He encouraged the participation of academics from the Global South in TESOL Quarterly and spearheaded initiatives to diversify the profession. His work challenges the native‐speaker orientation of second language acquisition theory and develops constructs that can do justice to the strategies that multilinguals adopt. Canagarajah's recent work has a decolonial orientation that draws on the linguistic and epistemological traditions of his South Asian heritage community, challenging Eurocentric dichotomies. He is influenced by more rhizomatic orientations to social structuration and transformation, informed by ongoing studies on mobility and multilingualism.