Resumen de Beyond the mechanism: moral agency and language policy implementation in the Global South

Salim Bouherar

• This paper examines teacher agency in the context of a state-initiated online English language programme in Global South higher education. Drawing on in-depth interviews conducted in Arabic alongside media documents, it argues that language policy implementation in this context was shaped by two distinct and partially competing registers of agency. The first is fractured agency as a political mechanism which is a governance arrangement that operates through the deliberate spatiotemporal organisation of teachers’ professional autonomy. The second is moral agency which is a multi-layered force grounded in locally embedded virtues and religious epistemologies that sustained policy implementation independently of, and at times despite, the structural conditions imposed upon teachers. In reconceptualising moral agency through local epistemologies and Islamic ethical frameworks, the paper responds to calls for Southern theory in applied linguistics and contributes to understanding how language policy is lived, felt, and sustained in postcolonial contexts where institutional governance and moral selfhood operate according to fundamentally different logics.