I feel sympathy for Dr Kumaravadivelu. Like “The musician formerly known as Prince”, he name had devolved into a sentence that lazy people used rather than take the effort to work through the seven syllables. I think he was even introduced as “Dr Kumara…whose name I can’t pronounce”. I may have misremembered that but certainly everyone described him that way when mentioning his talks. Justin McNulty, who introduced Kumaravadivelu, was nearly the sole exception went out of his way to pronounce the man’s name repeatedly in his introduction. This prompted the man in front of me to mutter, “show off.”
This is especially ironic as his talk was about using language teaching to transport and share cultural beliefs and practices. Morrison, described (very) briefly in a previous post, discussed how Jin-hye comes to English class and becomes “Jenny” and how this is wrong. I think Kumaravadivelu would agree.
