This volume investigates the interconnections of language, scholarly publishing, and the knowledge economy in contemporary academia across different European settings. The chapters included revolve around aspects that are related to the knowledge economy cycle, from the individual and systemic conditions that enable knowledge production, to the currently existing channels and frameworks that give shape to and condition its circulation, uptake, and consumption. All the chapters combined provide a coherent and holistic overview of the affordances and limitations that different social actors experience when participating in such cycles, including the different modes of access to resources across geographic contexts and disciplinary traditions. An important contribution of the volume is the multi-layered angle that it incorporates into analysing issues of scholarly publishing in today's academia, placing language as a social practice at the heart of the structuring processes that condition the creation, dissemination, and consumption of knowledge in contemporary societies. Given the centrality of English in these processes, a particular focus on this language runs through the whole volume, but the tensions and intersections with other languages are usefully explored by all authors, with calls for greater sensitivity towards and real acknowledgement of linguistic diversity in the present-day knowledge economy cycle.

This study aims to contribute to the ongoing scholarly debate about linguistic privilege in academia. The article pushes this debate forward by considering the role of English in the career development of academics in Anglophone universities. More concretely, our study empirically explores the career trajectories of multilingual scholars in Ireland who speak English as an additional language (EAL). Adopting a Bourdieusian lens, the article conceptualises academia as a locus of competitive struggle over authority, recognition, and prestige, in which scholars avail themselves of different kinds of capital, including linguistic capital, and deploy strategies to flourish. Through a qualitative approach, the article examines data from university documents and procedures, from interviews with EAL scholars in different disciplines and at different stages of their career, and from interviews with academics holding senior management positions in three universities in Dublin. We analyse the language-related challenges that EAL scholars encounter and the affordances with which Anglophone universities provide them, as well as the ways in which language impacts on their career progression. The empirical data reveals a complex and nuanced interplay between language and other academic factors. Our findings suggest the need to go beyond simple hierarchies of academic privilege or disadvantage based on a scholar’s first or additional language alone.

Public intellectual life is an area of inquiry that has not received a great deal of attention within the field of sociolinguistics. This article investigates the performative dimension of public intellectual engagement in the area of language and gender and, more specifically, how epistemic authority about gender-neutral language is constructed in public intellectual contributions in Catalonia, Spain. Adopting Arendt’s notion of truth claim and the Foucauldian concepts of regimes of truth and epistemic sovereignty, we empirically examine the mechanisms of reception and validation of the public engagements of one highly visible linguistic scholar. Our study shows the ways in which this intellectual figure strives to be recognised as having exclusive scientific authority about language. We argue that pursuing the allegedly impartial standpoint of epistemic authority about gender and language inevitably advances the interests of specific political actors and large media corporations of a conservative strand that fervently oppose gender-neutral language. 

L’àmbit intel·lectual públic és un terreny que fins ara ha estat relativament poc investigat des d’una perspectiva sociolingüística. Aquest article indaga en la dimensió performativa d’aquest àmbit en el context d’un debat sobre llengua i gènere i, més concretament, analitza com es construeix l’autoritat epistèmica sobre el llenguatge neutre en les aportacions intel·lectuals públiques a Catalunya. Adoptem la noció d’afirmació de la veritat d’Arendt i els conceptes foucaultians de règims de veritat i sobirania epistèmica per examinar empíricament els mecanismes de recepció i validació de les intervencions públiques d’una experta lingüista amb molta visibilitat pública. El nostre estudi mostra com aquesta figura intel·lectual s’esforça per ser reconeguda com a autoritat científica exclusiva en relació amb la llengua. Argumentem que buscar un punt de vista presumptament imparcial d’autoritat epistèmica sobre llengua i gènere promou inevitablement els interessos d’actors polítics concrets i de grans corporacions mediàtiques d’una línia conservadora que s’oposen fervorosament al llenguatge neutre.

This article analyses some of the linguistic tensions derived from international academic mobility in English-medium instruction multilingual university contexts, focusing on local and international academic staff’s interests from a linguistic justice viewpoint. Firstly, we develop a normative argument to explore whether international academic mobility and increased use of English can become a source of linguistic domination for local staff, or if suggested countermeasures, such as requiring international scholars to learn the local language, might lead to linguistic discrimination against the latter group. Secondly, via a qualitative analysis of survey data, we ask local and international scholars at the University of Tartu about their views on the language policy regime at the university. Protective language policies that encourage locals to use Estonian more and require internationals to learn some Estonian could help enhance linguistic justice, according to local staff. However, international scholars may perceive such requests as discriminatory. Linguistic domination and discrimination play a key role in the clashing interests of stakeholders, creating tension. The study highlights the complexity of the dilemmas faced by many university officials today in their attempt to balance institutional goals with on-the-ground realities.

This article looks at English-medium instruction (EMI) contexts in higher education from a linguistic justice perspective and offers a theoretical argument to discuss the potential for EMI to be defended as a positive and valuable phenomenon, beyond economic and competitive arguments. In the final keynote panel at the 2022 ICLHE conference, Philippe Van Parijs pondered how EMI teachers might be seen: either as killers, traitors, sellers, saviours, upgraders, or liberators. After providing characterisations for each of these labels, Van Parijs suggested that EMI teachers should be better conceived of as civilisers, not in a missionary sense of civilising the barbarian, but in the Aristotelian meaning of civic virtue, of citizens being part of public life, actively involved in discussion of public affairs. This seems to imply a specific view of English, one that almost naturally equates the language to democratic progress and consensus. In the article, I challenge this assumption and suggest that for English to be a democratising agent and EMI truly a gate-opener to higher education, emphasis needs to be placed on listening subject positions and regimes of uptake as key aspects of democratic deliberation and key elements to overcome prejudiced views of accents and voices.

The aim of the present study is to investigate the conceptions and beliefs of Iranian medical faculty members and their experiences in academic publishing in English. There has been a recent and heated controversy over the weight or even the very reality of such biases in the literature of publication research. To contribute to the debate from an empirical perspective, we approached 40 publishing Iranian faculty members (aged from 30 to 62) and elicited their narrated experience as writers/authors dealing with the perceived inequalities in scientific publication in English. Through thematic analysis, four categories were identified as the loci of interaction between the participants’ self as micro academic agents and the macro agents in the academic community: 1) plagiarism and unauthenticity; 2) editing and inferiority; 3) journals’ criteria and submission; and 4) reliance on students and seniority. In addition, semantic analysis of the adjectives used in the participants’ narrated experience revealed self-image profiles that show how the faculty members perceive their authorial self in connection to the perceived structural and linguistic injustice in academic publishing. The findings suggest that linguistic (discursive) and structural (non-discursive) injustices in academic publishing are closely intertwined and must be investigated as such.

In this article, we investigate how different varieties of English are represented in a selection of materials used in upper-secondary schools in Sweden. A 2011 policy reform of the curriculum for the teaching and learning of English at upper-secondary level underscored the global dimension of the language, taking a distance from the traditional focus on British English. Findings from our content analysis of two selected textbooks suggest that despite this policy change, emphasis is still placed on standard varieties of Inner Circle countries. When other varieties are represented, the characters that utilise them are often portrayed in a more negative light than their Inner Circle counterparts. We suggest that this is indicative of a policy–practice disconnect. We discuss the pedagogical implications for the students of the limited exposure to linguistic variation in English that emerges from the textbooks and point at different ways to continue investigating this issue. 

Predatory publishing has attracted much scholarly attention recently, but little is known about the actual material published in predatory journals. In this paper, we address this gap focusing on syntactic complexity. Using both traditional syntactic complexity measures and more fine-grained indices of phrasal and clausal complexity, the study explores the similarities and differences between two corpora consisting of 220 research articles drawn from two comparable journals in the discipline of Political Science, one purportedly predatory and one top-ranking. The results show that the articles look similar in many respects (e.g., mean length of sentences/T-units, number of T-units per sentence). Differences are found in more fine-grained indices such as clausal complements, adverbial clauses, and noun phrases with noun premodifiers, which are associated with discipline-specific rhetorical and ideational functions. The study demonstrates the potential of linguistic analyses in contributing to our understanding of predatory publishing as a complex phenomenon. 

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.