Abstract
This presentation reconceptualizes the National African Language Resource Center (NALRC) as an institutional knowledge infrastructure that organizes and sustains African language pedagogy in the United States. African language instruction has historically moved through recurring phases of marginalization, expansion, and renewed precarity, often relying on instructors or small programs with limited institutional coordination. These conditions have produced uneven pedagogical development and fragile professional networks, challenges the NALRC has consistently sought to address through national coordination.
Rather than framing the NALRC merely as a programmatic support unit, this talk positions it as a mediating epistemic institution that contributes to scholarly field formation. Engaging selectively with insights from Ngũgĩ’s Decolonising the Mind, it emphasizes that language functions as an epistemic system through which knowledge and cultural interpretation are organized. Drawing on perspectives from applied linguistics and scholarship on communities of practice, the presentation argues that language resource centers help stabilize academic domains by shaping pedagogical standards, supporting instructor development, facilitating materials production, and fostering collaborative networks.

The central claim is that the vitality of African language instruction in diasporic contexts depends on institutional infrastructures that enable African languages to function not only as objects of study but also as media of scholarly knowledge production within the academy.

Bio
Kazeem Kẹ́hìndé Sanuth is a faculty member at the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. He holds a Ph.D. in second language acquisition with a minor in the pedagogy of less commonly taught languages, as well as an master of arts degree in African languages and literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research examines the social, cultural, and linguistic dimensions of study abroad in multilingual West Africa. He serves as director of the National African Languages Resource Center. An experienced educator and administrator, he works to advance African language pedagogy, expand access to instructional resources, and strengthen national and international collaboration.