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.

Becoming expert academic writers requires students to develop understanding, awareness and skills with regards to discipline-specific discourses. To develop such knowledge, talk around drafts is essential. Various studies traced how students develop knowledge about and of academic writing, but few explored how such knowledge is invoked and developed in interaction. The study therefore investigates the dynamics of introducing and using academic writing knowledge when tackling writing issues in interaction. The interaction is situated in a facilitated writing group – an important yet under-researched arena for talk around text. The data consist of video-recordings of group meetings with six postgraduate students who use English as an additional language, collected over 8 weeks at a Swedish university. To investigate how knowledge was introduced and used in the group, the study takes a socio-cultural perspective and applies the Vygotskian notion of cultural tools combined with discourse analytic approaches. The analysis shows how students draw on complex techniques to negotiate academic writing knowledge. Their interactional text work oscillates between abstract norms and concrete texts. Concepts of academic writing (e.g. research aim) are partly unpacked frontstage in the group, and partly backstage in individual notes. The results call for extending genre-pedagogic approaches of learning by discovery.

The move towards EMI in higher education has been connected to university internationalisation, which reflects neoliberal trends. Research has underscored the need to consider socio-economic factors, materialities and ideologies surrounding EMI. Our study taps into this line of inquiry by focusing on how Swedish universities promote EMI programmes in business and economics in four videos. We take a novel approach to examine discursively constructed ideologies surrounding EMI by conducting a critical multimodal analysis of the videos. The analysis reveals how the use and representations of English – combined with different symbols, artefacts and concepts – are used to position these EMI programmes as both global and local. References to international rankings and multinational business partnerships position them on the global education market. At the same time, the programmes are locally situated in the academic tradition and entrepreneurial context of Sweden. Images of nature, the fika, or Scandinavian design present them in a way similar to tourist destinations. Tokens of economic and cultural eliteness create an extra layer of distinction, contributing to the added ‘elite’ value of EMI, where English is both taken for granted and serves a gate-keeping function. Findings provide insight into how EMI is promoted to international students.

This chapter surveys language in the multilingual university at the levels of institutional policies, language practices in higher education and professional activities, and related beliefs about language use. The distinct political and historical contexts that shape language use in universities are taken into account by drawing on studies from various geo-linguistic contexts. Among the languages used, English plays a prominent role as the major language for research communication and increasingly as a viable language choice for teaching and learning in non-anglophone countries. Yet, language is not a neutral medium for accessing knowledge but entangled in questions of social justice.

The article examines transnational students’ experiences of participation in European higher education by applying the notion of voice that encompasses the capacity to communicate and to be heard (Hymes 1996. Ethnography, linguistics, narrative inequality: Toward an understanding of voice. London: Taylor & Francis). Relating voice to access and participation, the article moves forward debates around incorporating students’ multilingual knowledge resources in diverse writing practices in academia. It takes into account structural and ideological conditions as well as the creative potential of translanguaging in students’ knowledge production. The instrumental case study explores the lived experiences of three multilingual students with highly diverse linguistic and educational backgrounds, who are enrolled in humanities master’s programmes at a Swedish university. It investigates the students’ perceptions of how they can make use of their linguistic and educational repertoires. The data derive from interviews around texts and audio-recorded writing diaries. The results demonstrate how translanguaging is mainly connected to writing for personal use and limited or regulated in assignment writing. They reveal multiple and contrasting ideological views on language use and knowledge, and highlight possibilities and obstacles for appropriating and recontextualising knowledge across languages, educational contexts and disciplines. The article thus connects translanguaging to questions of participation and access more broadly.

Student engagement and dialogue around writing are central to a genre-based academic writing pedagogy. These pedagogical principles are more difficult to achieve in emergency remote teaching such as the one imposed by the coronavirus pandemic. The sudden shift from face-to-face to online teaching required changes in course design. This chapter reports on the Swedish experience of teaching an interdisciplinary postgraduate EAP course during a period of emergency remote teaching and how what was learnt can be applied in the future. It describes how the university-wide implemented video conferencing tool and online learning platform were used in line with the pedagogical ethos of the course. While these tools provided a space for learning and synchronous and asynchronous communication, they also presented challenges in terms of the ability to interact spontaneously and the additional time needed to organize activities in a virtual learning environment. Cognizant of the opportunities and constraints of these tools, core elements of the course were redesigned through teacher collaboration and co-learning. This was done with the aim of better enabling student activity through small-group peer interaction and scaffolded peer feedback. These measures were intended to counteract the students’ sense of social isolation and help them feel a part of an academic community. The chapter concludes with a reflection on how the lessons learnt could be used when returning to the classroom.

Ethnography has become a bit of a buzzword in applied linguistics. Having trained in new literacy studies with its strong ethnographic orientation, I am aware of the contested nature of the term ethnography in various branches of applied linguistics. I have seen it being claimed when referring to studies that adopt one or several qualitative methods associated with ethnographies (e.g. interviews, observations) as well as studies with a more distinct ethnographically-informed stance on the role of participants, the researcher and theoretical interpretations. I therefore welcome the edited volume by Guillén-Galve and Bocanegra-Valle, which elucidates the variety of meanings, uses and innovative contributions associated with ethnography in current academic writing research.

This chapter focuses on questions surrounding universities’ societal responsibilityin connection to language use, going beyond the national language(s) versus Englishdichotomy. As a result of university internationalisation and increased migration, bothstudent and faculty populations at Nordic universities have diversified. Nordic universities are currently facing multiple challenges: to maintain academic autonomy andfreedom of thought, to protect democratic ideals, to prove the validity of scientificfindings, and to conduct most of their activities with the support of digital media.Drawing on findings from recent research conducted in Sweden and Finland and thelatest Nordic language policy document (Gregersen et al., 2018), our chapter critically discusses how researchers and students with transnational trajectories perceivetheir language use. In particular, we consider the role of English vis-à-vis the nationallanguage(s) and other languages for purposes of research outreach and widening participation. W e argue that there is a mismatch between university policies assumingthat societal responsibility concerning language use is largely limited to local nationaland (to a lesser extent) minority languages, and the translocal experience of universitystakeholders who often deal with a range of linguistic resources on a daily basis.