Language Learning ISSN 0023-8333 IN PERSPECTIVE Premises, Pitfalls, and Possibilities of Undoing Competence: A Response to Open Peer Commentaries Jonathan Rosa a and Nelson Flores b a Stanford University b University of Pennsylvania Keywords race; competence; coloniality We want to thank all of the commentators for their thoughtful engagement with our ideas and their efforts to move them in new directions that we had not considered. We are encouraged by growing interest in critical examinations of the origins of applied linguistics as a point of entry for reconsidering some of its key frameworks. This commitment to interrogating intellectual origins is central to Heller and McElhinny’s (2017) expansive analysis of how modern paradigms and fields of language study have taken shape in conjunction with capitalist, colonial, and imperial expansion. Central to this line of investigation is critical engagement with progress narratives connected to discourses of linguistic and communicative competence. Specifically, Heller and McElhinny noted the shift from a deficit to difference paradigm that coincided with Hymes’s (1966) initial articulation of communicative competence as well as how subsequent paradigms focused on dominance have questioned the anal- ysis of power and theory of change that informed both deficit and difference approaches. In our attention to how conceptualizations of communicative competence reconfigure the racist exclusions of universalizing liberal human- ism and pathologizations associated with culture of poverty frameworks, we sought to build on this attention to dominance, including work by colleagues who have critically engaged with neoliberal discourses of competence across Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Jonathan Rosa, Stanford Univer- sity, Graduate School of Education, 485 Lasuen Mall, Stanford, California 94305, United States. Email: jdrosa@stanford.edu The handling editor for this article was Teresa Satterfield. Language Learning 0:0, February 2023, pp. 1–7 1 © 2023 Language Learning Research Club, University of Michigan. DOI: 10.1111/lang.12564