Language, Culture and Society - Volume 5, Issue 2, 2023

This article examines three sets of infrastructures that give shape to the academic knowledge economy, namely: institutional infrastructures (universities and conferences); gate-keeping infrastructures (journals and publishers); and validation infrastructures (competitive assessments of individuals and institutions). We analyse the tensed interplay between critical perspectives in applied linguistics and the influence of academic neoliberalism. We develop our argument in three parts: (1) Academic critique and its emancipatory epistemologies are intertwined with established systems and coexist with mechanisms that perpetuate inequalities. (2) Inequalities in knowledge production reverberate in knowledge dissemination, where the hegemonic role of English as the language of academic publishing reinforces the unequal position of different actors in their academic fields. (3) These inequalities (that originate in institutional and gate-keeping infrastructures) extend to the validation of knowledge, which is entrenched in the audit culture that pervades academia and further reinforces neoliberal competitive dynamics. We conclude by reflecting on the possibilities for change at these three levels.

This article describes how the copycat implementation of foreign protocols of assessment is transforming the production of knowledge within the Italian social sciences. Focusing on the gatekeeping process whereby the national agency for the evaluation of university research (ANVUR) publishes yearly lists of “Class‑A” journals, my analysis draws on interviews, first-hand observations, my own experience as a returning migrant-scholar, as well as comparisons with historical Italian journals. My aim is twofold: on the one hand, I reflect on the parallel misrecognition of scale and context underlying neoliberal capitalism; on the other hand, I describe the paradoxes of excellence and the forms of reflexive alienation engendered by the contemporary knowledge economy.

Focusing on French social science and humanities journals, this article examines the digital communication surrounding the submission of articles by scholars based in Africa. Using Cameron’s concept of verbal hygiene ([1995] 2012), I analyze the case of negative reactions from editors triggered by stylistic and rhetorical features related to politeness. Through a detailed case study, the paper shows that such negative reactions involve semiotic processes of linguistic and social differentiation that articulate the moralized persona of the author and the scientific value of his/her work. However, editors’ verbal hygiene attitudes are also intertwined with political concerns aimed at promoting the inclusion of scholars from the Global South. In that context, the analysis reveals a complex interplay between the desire for openness and structural patterns of exclusion that enact long-standing hierarchies in knowledge production. Drawing on Inoue’s (2003) theory of the listening subject, I argue that this paradox arises from the reader’s particular position within the globalized academic landscape and from the power structures inherent in the circulation of texts between African and French academic contexts.

This paper discusses a poetic output of a research project at the intersection of linguistic ethnography (LE) and poetic inquiry (PI) which explores the barriers experienced by refugee and asylum seekers, seeking access to Higher Education. The research draws on Jan Blommaert’s applied ethnopoetics (AEP) work to reconstruct silenced voices (Blommaert, 2006). AEP as a ‘means of recognition’ of marginalised voices is explored. The paper goes on to explore the transformative possibilities for knowledge production offered by combining AEP with PI. This innovative approach and output are presented as act of resistance to normative expectations within academia which freeze conditions for voice (Blommaert, 2008). Questions are then offered to consider how we might advance the approach and its emancipatory potential further.

This paper critically revisits traditional perspectives on technology within academic and scientific writing studies. It aims to comprehend the intricate, emerging, and dynamic sociotechnical configurations that underlie contemporary scientific practices. These practices increasingly involve language, text, and literacy practices, seen as products of the collaboration between humans and machines. The paper draws on empirical research on influential institutional metadiscourses in high-impact scientific writing produced and/or disseminated by public universities and a research institute in the State of São Paulo (Brazil), whose local policies of globalization are driven by international university rankings. I use a qualitative content analysis approach grounded in socio-anthropological, socio-semiotic, and pragmatic studies of linguistic ideologies to shed light on how ideological and socio-semiotic processes support the metapragmatics of scientific writing in university policy documents. This metapragmatics is utterly alien to the role of performative sociotechnical infrastructures in the production, distribution, and hierarchization of scientific texts. Additionally, these documents do not account for the diverse conditions and restrictions that shape the production and circulation of academic knowledge in geopolitically marginal and equally diverse regions within the country, including those within São Paulo.

This article adopts the notions of chronotope and scalar intimacy to discuss collective identification, in particular Hanfu identity among Chinese youth in the context of contemporary Chinese nationalism. Drawing upon ethnographic interviews and observations of self-identified Hanfu fans in Beijing, China, this paper analyzes how they, through invoking and shifting back and forth across multiple spatiotemporal scales, discursively enact collective and intimate identification among individuals, among Hanfu fan groups (on a local scale), and the general Chinese population (on a larger, national scale). This paper suggests that the great ancient China chronotope (GACC) has played a crucial role in establishing continuity between the present (or other time-spaces) and the ‘past,’ ultimately legitimizing the inseparable link between Hanfu groups and collectives and solidifying great China and collective identity ideologies. It also demonstrates that modern Chinese youth are internalizing the Chinese nationalist ideology in order to establish a sociocultural relationship of belonging to and sharing with Chinese collectives as a way to empower themselves to cope with uncertainty.