UNESCO Chair on Refugee Integration through Education, Language and Arts

This episode is a recording of the opening keynote address Prof David Gramling delivered at the UNESCO RIELA Spring School: The Arts of Integrating 2025, in Glasgow, Scotland. Here is the abstract:

Good News

Bernice Johnson Reagon once sang for us a corrective teaching, along the lines that: “It’s ‘good news’ when you reject things as they are. […] And they don’t say ‘it’s good times’, they say ‘it’s good news’.” Fifty years later, these are definitely not good times. And, in this powerfully strange moment, even looking around for ‘good news’ often feels inappropriately consolational, often at fatal odds with the dreads and taunts of today’s geopolitical realism. This opening talk for our Spring School welcomes in the resources of “untimely optimism” (Feldman 2023), “out-of-phasedness” (Doumani 2007), “gramáticas de lo inaudito” (Acosta López 2023) and “anticipatory illuminations” (Bloch in Zipes 2019), in hopes of making room for a peace-in-this-time whose living vitality is the opposite of resigned quietism. To that end, we will meet head-on a few of the nightmares-of-the-self that may well haunt a peace-lover in Spring of 2025, seeking to expel that haunt and conjure in its place some unprecedented good news.

David Gramling (they+) is author, editor, or translator of eight books in print: Literature in Late Monolingualism (Bloomsbury 2024); The Invention of Multilingualism (Cambridge University Press, 2021); The Invention of Monolingualism (Bloomsbury 2016, American Association for Applied Linguistics Book Award, 2018); co-author of Palliative Care Conversations: Clinical and Applied Linguistic Perspectives (De Gruyter 2019, with David’s big brother Robert Gramling); Linguistic Disobedience: Restoring Power to Civic Language (Palgrave 2019, with Yuliya Komska and Michelle Moyd); Germany in Transit: Nation and Migration 1955–2005 (University of California Press 2007 with Deniz Göktürk and Anton Kaes); and Transit Deutschland: Debatten zu Nation und Migration (Konstanz University Press / Wallstein Verlag, with Deniz Göktüurk, Anton Kaes, and Andreas Langenohl). David’s book-length co-translation (with Aron Aji) of Murathan Mungan’s Turkish-language Shahmeran story cycle Valor: Stories (Cenk Hikâyeleri) was published in Fall 2023 with Northwestern University Press, and made possible by a 2021 Global Humanities Translation Prize from Northwestern University. Future books include Translating Transgender (with Aniruddha Dutta, Routledge 2026), and Aloof: On Seeing Less than you Should, which details David’s lifelong social and logistical adventure with their ocular albinism, a rare congenital visual Disability.

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First published: 16 July 2025