Volume 2021, Issue 267-268 - Special Issue: Prefiguring Knowledge Production in the Sociology of Language; Issue Editors: Alexandre Duchêne, Sibonile Edith Ellece, Ruanni Tupas, Maria Sabaté-Dalmau, Virginia Unamuno and Jacqueline Urla

Reviewing is an act of power and not a mere act of applying shared academic standards of rigor. As such, it is inevitably implicated in the cultural politics of “naming”. In this paper we animate this taken-for-granted statement in the context of naming the sociopolitical struggles against dictatorial regimes in the Arab world. Since the end of 2010, the Arab world has witnessed a relatively organized series of protests and the peoples have named them “revolutions”. Western cultural political discourse has renamed these (trans)locally constituted struggles the “Arab Spring”. If we take sociolinguistics seriously as the “study of language in use”, we should consider the peoples in the Arab world as “subjects” of their own definitions, rather than as “objects” of Western constructions. We contend that reviewers, as gatekeepers, are implicated in the politics of voice when they uncritically accept the use of Western inventions as the “only” appropriate way of naming the world, and in so doing they effectively subvert the revolutionary interests in the Arab world.

This article examines the issue of joint authorship in (socio)linguistic publications. On the assumption that research work in the humanities has traditionally been performed on a “lone scholar” basis, discussion of authorship attribution has not dominated conversations in the arts and humanities as compared to the natural, health and engineering sciences. However, considering the increasing occurrence of collaboration in (socio)linguistics and its resultant joint publications, this article considers author trends in the humanities generally and linguistics in particular, who qualifies to be an author and how authorship ordering and assigning should be addressed in both an ethical and a fair manner. Considering the rise of collaborations in sociolinguistic research, varied sources of data used, and the growth of multi-site projects, authorship discussions in arts and humanities disciplines can no longer be muted.

Women make up less than 20% of the faculty in Cameroon and continue to work in male-dominated workplaces against a context of patriarchal gendered ideologies. This paper explores women’s experiences in the academy in Cameroon, highlighting the way they navigate these challenges to position themselves in higher education. Through autoethnography and critical discourse analysis, it examines literature within the area of gendered discourse and texts on higher education, and the author’s personal experiences as a female academic in Cameroon. It is argued in this paper that the challenges of women are higher and include rendering content of teaching and research gendered, appropriating gendered identities as women, and asserting themselves in research, publication, and administration. Language is considered as the vehicle for disempowering women in the academy. Thus, women are called upon to demystify stereotypes about femininity and women’s place in the academy through language use. That deconstruction of roles must start with gender-sensitive language use. Résumé Les femmes représentent moins de 20% du corps enseignant au Cameroun et continuent de travailler dans des milieux à prédominance masculine dans un contexte idéologique patriarcal. Cet article explore le vécu des femmes dans le milieu universitaire au Cameroun, en soulignant la façon dont elles relèvent les défis qui en découlent pour se positionner dans l’enseignement supérieur. À travers l’auto-ethnographie, il examine la littérature dans le domaine du discours de genre et les textes sur l’enseignement supérieur, ainsi que l’expérience personnelle de l’auteur en tant que femme universitaire au Cameroun. L’auteure soutient que les défis des femmes sont plus importants et qu’ils consistent à rendre de façon genrée le contenu de l’enseignement et de la recherche, à s’approprier les identités sexospécifiques en tant que femmes et à s’affirmer dans la recherche, la publication et l’administration. La langue est considérée comme le véhicule de la déresponsabilisation des femmes dans l’académie. Ainsi, les femmes sont appelées à démystifier les stéréotypes sur la féminité et la place des femmes dans l’académie à travers l’usage linguistique. Cette déconstruction des rôles doit commencer par un usage linguistique qui tienne compte des spécificités de genre.

Botswana is a multilingual country. It has about 28 languages (see Anderson, Lars-Gunnar & Tore Janson. 1997. Languages in Botswana . Gaborone: Longman Botswana). Although multilingualism breeds bilingualism or vice versa, bilingualism in Botswana is not as extensive and as widespread among the 28 languages. It is mostly concentrated amongst certain groups of people and a limited number of languages. This paper interrogates the pattern of bilingualism in Botswana and the role that education plays in shaping it. Further, the paper examines the extent to which the pattern of bilingualism in Botswana fits into Liddicoat, Anthony. 1991. Bilingualism and bilingual education. NLIA Occasional Paper 2. 1–21 folk and elite bilingualism categories. The paper argues that even though bilingualism in Botswana is fostered by education, it is not elite. Most bilinguals in Botswana are speakers of minority languages who feel obliged to learn English and Setswana. There are not many speakers of English who also speak Setswana and not many speakers of Setswana who also speak the minority languages. The paper hights one of the inadequacies of multilingualism, its inability to create equality and interrelationship between languages. This paper argues that the pattern of bilingualism found in Botswana is asymmetrical and is heavily influenced by the socio-economic-cultural power relations that exist in the country. Thus, the pattern of bilingualism that is found in Botswana does not support multilingualism, instead it is detrimental to it.

This essay stems from our growing concern about the carbon intensity of academia, and of conferencing as an epitome of this. Face-to-face conferencing is widely recognised as both unsustainable and inequitable. Against this backdrop, digital conferencing (online only, or in hybrid form) offers a viable alternative. However, shifting to digital forms of conferencing does not automatically bring about equity. Drawing on white papers, academic discussions and results from a PollEverywhere survey, this essay explores issues of sustainability and equity across modes of face-to-face and digital conferencing, with the aim of charting a path towards more sustainable and accessible digital practises for a diverse community of linguists.

The aim of this essay is to propose some key challenges and problems in the field of language in society. In the current context of global crisis, we have the opportunity to design a research agenda for an uncertain future from a dark present. But there is no reason why that agenda should also be uncertain and dark. An agenda thus established can start from three aspects that I explore in this article: the recognition and appreciation of multiple voices, organized and collective agency, and an unwavering and explicit bias for hope.

In this essay, using as a point of departure his dilemma to accept or not the invitation to be a member of IJSL’s Editorial Board, del Valle discusses the limitations that academic publishing places on scholars in the humanities and interpretive social sciences: their choice of objects and analytical protocols, and the modes of distribution and dissemination of their production. The constraints imposed by highly bureaucratized universities and publishing companies are set against the intellectual imperative to build academic fields grounded in equality and inclusion. The essay concludes with some thinly drawn goals towards more dynamic trans-collaborative forms of knowledge production, distribution and dissemination.

In the mid-1960s, a catchphrase in academic circles was, « Des chercheurs qui cherchent, on en trouve; mais des chercheurs qui trouvent, on en cherche », pointing out that many researchers were “Chindōgu researchers”, that is to say researchers engaging in “useless” research, rather than coming up with actionable research findings. Along the same lines, this paper sets out to offer an analytical perspective on sociolinguistic research output and focus in sub-Saharan Africa and suggest a number of sociolinguistic research priorities.

This article touches upon the problem of inequalities in academia resulting from neoliberal capitalism and existing publishing policy and discusses its possible consequences. Building on the author’s own experiences as a researcher working on linguistic minorities and as an academic administrator, it explores how power relations work in parts of the scientific world situated on the peripheries of the Western “centre” – via the neoliberal economy, access to funding and international recognition. Publishing in high-status, English-language journals requires “non-centre” academics to adopt Western conventions of publishing, including in the style of reasoning, the structure of the text, and preferring references from the Anglo-American academic tradition. Only by complying can such researchers secure a place in academia and further their careers. However difficult it may be, the author argues, the hegemony of Western-model knowledge construction may only be questioned from inside, by the “centre” academics.

This short paper discusses language and globalization in the context of COVID-19. The pandemic has important impacts on people across the globe, and in particular the absence of face-to-face interaction results in new forms of communication and may lead to new ways of language change. This paper revisits sociolinguistics and globalization, and discusses challenges brought about by COVID-19 and its containment measures. The pandemic generates particularly discourses, especially from those who are affected the most. This paper includes a vignette of such discourses to show that mobility and inequality remain key issues in the current stage of globalization.

This commentary proposes raciolinguistic genealogy as a methodological approach to the sociology of language. It briefly defines three components of this approach: 1) a genealogical stance; 2) a materialist framing of racism; and 3) a raciolinguistic perspective. It offers the case of bilingual education in the United States as an illustration of the affordances of raciolinguistic genealogy in moving the field forward.

This article suggests that one of the understudied and substantive ways in which actors produce and transform social hierarchies and classifications is by aligning and mis-aligning genres. Alignments within and across genres have furnished methods for construing and evaluating qualities of people – as examples, the genre repertoires of job applications or promotion dossiers. A fine attunement to new and emergent semiotic alignments via genres can also reveal how people are engaging with social and technological transformations. To study this, we advocate turning to four focal points: shifting genre hierarchies, stabilizing genres, cross-genre identities, and empty genres.

This essay considers the challenges faced by academic journals such as this one at this moment of crisis of capitalism, with pressures on the one hand to democratize and decolonize, and on the other to produce profit through intensification, flexibilization and precaritization.

This essay contemplates how we adapt existing sociolinguistic theoretical concepts, methodologies, and analytical units to the world we live in today. Regardless of one’s location on the globe, our lives are profoundly affected by increasingly intense global interconnections and, at the same time, equally intense differentiation of space attending late global capitalism and the evolving nation-state system. While sociolinguistics has attended the heterogeneity within the speech community, in the world today as such, the idea of speech community as bounded is no longer tenable. In envisioning the future direction of IJSL and its leadership in the field, this essay suggests that speech community as an analytical concept would be significantly advanced through the theoretical integration of the space/place distinction and the historicity and materiality of language into its architectonics. By drawing on some of the recent works for guiding models, the essay argues that the reconceptualization of speech community would also demand radical openness to interdisciplinary approaches.

A sensitisation to the disciplinary past offers a way forward for sociolinguistic inquiry. Historicisation may add reflexive distance to our current concerns and debates. It may serve to detect, put into perspective and ease epistemological and ideational tensions. It is equally useful for determining the extent to which past ideas and practices linger among us, and for clarifying the effects of such forms of retention. Historicisation may be brought to bear on the ways in which we engage with our objects of study, and on the ways in which we understand our acts of engagement. A critical interest in the disciplinary past could provide a shared historical ground for all strands of sociolinguistic inquiry. It could help us to counteract disciplinary fragmentation, while at the same time stimulate disciplinary renewal and constructive exchange. For these reasons – I argue – a sensitisation to the history of sociolinguistics is of immediate relevance to the readership of the IJSL.

Control mechanisms for written, spoken, and multimodal discursive practices are, in my view, a priority item on today’s strategy agenda for a socially conscious approach to language in the peripheral countries of the global economic system. After describing and analyzing certain procedures for discursive regulation in Spanish language, and adopting the critical focus that glottopolitics provides, I zero in on the effects of this regulation and the subjectivities it shapes. Discursive restraints stem from several, often interconnected, sources: market dynamics, the search for greater productivity in the technologizing of the word, digital platforms, and as a condition for the approval of country loans by international economic organizations. The aim is to emphasize how discursive control reproduces the established social order and thus reinforces linguistic inequality. Resumen Uno de los temas prioritarios de la agenda estratégica para un abordaje socialmente relevante del lenguaje en los países periféricos del sistema (economía)-mundo actual es, desde mi perspectiva, la cuestión de los dispositivos de control de las prácticas discursivas escritas, orales y multimodales. Mediante la adopción de un enfoque crítico como es el glotopolítico, luego de relevar y describir algunos procedimientos de regulación discursiva en español, me detengo en remarcar cuáles son los efectos que esto trae aparejado y cuáles son las subjetividades que se modelan. Los condicionamientos discursivos provienen, en algunos casos de forma articulada, de las dinámicas del mercado, de la búsqueda de mayor productividad de las tecnologías de la palabra y las plataformas digitales, y como contrapartida del otorgamiento de préstamos por parte de los organismos internacionales de crédito. Se intenta destacar, así, cómo el disciplinamiento discursivo reproduce el orden social establecido y refuerza, por consiguiente, la desigualdad lingüística.

This piece argues for the importance of centering regimes of perception and the dynamics of power in sociolinguistics, drawing upon cases where Chinese and Korean terms have been heard and enregistered as English slurs. It notes how different interlocutors mobilize phenomena at various scales in invocations of context. It calls for greater attention to the range of subject positions that are produced by speakers, perceivers, and institutions and a reconsideration of the moral certainty of our analyses. It challenges us to rethink the ontological status of the linguistic sign as a self-presenting entity and to develop frameworks of analysis that can look across scales.

Inequality is the pervasive structural characteristic of academic knowledge production. To dismantle this inequality, the challenge raised by prefigurative politics which is based on an ethos of congruence between means and ends must be taken up by the International Journal of the Sociology of Language . The IJSL’s peer review process, its academic conventions and its access model can potentially be spaces for concrete practices that prefigure parity in academic knowledge production.

This article reflects on the different inequalities that cut across academic spaces and the role that language plays in them, and uses this reflection to move towards proposing transformative strategies to overcome the current status quo. First, it explores the impact of the unequal distribution of economic and symbolic resources and the lack of recognition or misrecognition of many academics, both of which result in unbalanced participation in the field. These processes are illustrated through examples of research trajectories shared by women academics from generations who have experienced profound social transformations, even if incomplete. Second, in coherence with the goal of transformation, it explores what can be done in the here and now to change the academic field. Given the reticular functioning of power and resistance, I propose two paths forward: (1) taking action within the institutions we participate in, and (2) engaging in broader collective initiatives to combat oppressive hierarchies. Only by becoming collectively willing and capable of imagining beyond our current possibilities will we be able to overcome the contradictions we experience between the inertia that leads to reproduction and the impulse to transform the situation we live in. From this position we will then contribute to an inclusive epistemology that allows the building of more balanced, just, and reflexive communities and workspaces for all researchers and academics.

This short article argues that notwithstanding theoretical advances that have sought to unsettle the hegemony of mainstream theoretical frameworks, language in society researchers and other social science scholarly communities from the Southern orbit of the globe, continue to be wedded to conventional Euro-modernist methodologies. I suggest that the need to delink from imperial logics of doing research is a must and not an option. We need a language to explore spaces and modes of being that do not exist in the spaces of current Euro-modernist frameworks but that do exist in the majority of other communities around the world. In advancing this line of argument, I join ongoing conversations among indigenous and decolonial scholars speaking from the margins of the mainstream on the need for epistemic reconstitution of the discourse and praxis of research.

This article proposes to question two aspects that may be faced by research in the social sciences of language that wants to be politically engaged. The first concerns the choice of “sensitive” corpora, which can be ethically problematic when research draws only disciplinary conclusions, despite their socially important nature. The second question is that of the dissemination of research outside the academic sphere: in sometimes innovative forms that can themselves be reclaimed and supervised by the university institution, they lose their primary emancipatory ambitions. To conclude, this article proposes to materialize our political commitments through a reinvestment in teaching and a possible renunciation of academically valorized research products. Résumé Cet article se propose de questionner deux aspects auxquels peuvent se heurter les recherches de sciences sociales du langage qui se veulent politiquement engagées. Le premier concerne le choix de corpus « sensibles », qui peut s’avérer éthiquement problématique lorsque les recherches n’en tirent que des conclusions disciplinaires, malgré leur caractère socialement important. La deuxième question est celle de la diffusion de la recherche hors de la sphère académique, cette diffusion sous des formes parfois innovantes pouvant être elle-même récupérée et encadrée par l’Institution universitaire en perdant son ambition émancipatrice première. Pour conclure, cet article propose de matérialiser notre engagement politique par un réinvestissement dans l’enseignement, et un renoncement éventuel aux produits de la recherche académiquement valorisés.

Academic journals are a site of tension between the perspective of the transnational and international – between an emphasis on the agency and creativity of linguistic practice that transcends boundaries of nations and languages and a focus on the enduring relations of colonial capitalism that impose bounded and hierarchized order upon our social and linguistic life. Being an international journal in transnational times comes with the challenge of having to facilitate transnational flows of knowledge without reifying the oppressive structure of the political economy of knowledge production. The International Journal of the Sociology of Language’s response to this challenge may lie in its commitment to solidarity and collaboration, where it serves as a ground for resisting the pressures of academic capitalism and for collectively seeking an agenda for research which dismantle hierarchies and boundaries that sustain and rationalize inequalities.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze how research approaches and methods in language education policy could serve to erase local multilingualism and its associated epistemologies while reproducing inequalities of languages. This paper builds on “epistemicide” (Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. 2014. Epistemologies of the South: Justice against epistemicide . New York: Routledge) to critique how the knowledge constructed on the basis of the evidence collected by using research questions in binary/conflictual terms misrepresents the real experiences and voices of multilingual participants, particularly those from language-minoritized communities. This paper argues that advancing research and building educational practices upon the lived experiences of the people, particularly Indigenous and ethnic minorities, could help us resist the destruction of languages, epistemologies, and linguistic/epistemic self-determination of communities. I use the case of Nepal not only because I am familiar with its historical, sociopolitical, and cultural contexts (so I can provide an insider’s reflective perspective), but also because Nepal’s case offers new insights into understanding language ideological issues in the discourses of language education policies from the vantage point of “peripheral multilingualism” (Pietikäinen, Sari & Helen Kelly-Holmes. 2013. Multilingualism and the periphery . Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Assemblage is one way to examine complexities in today’s world. In Deleuzian thinking, assemblage refers to both the act of assembling diverse elements and the arrangements of these elements for a specific purpose. Importantly, it is the interaction between elements that allows the assemblage to become more than the sum of its parts. Applying this concept to long-term research on Cold Rush – the transformation of the Arctic commons into commodities – I argue that examining the boom, bust, and buzz around the commons can be fruitfully conceptualised and studied with assemblage. This approach brings with it an ontological shift from binaries into multiplicities and multiple temporalities. Assemblage also sheds light on the role of discourse in these transformations and shows how language gains its productive force only in collaboration with other elements.

This paper engages with the aspects of discursive hegemony in terms of both Metropolitan and disciplinary position and privilege, using the sociology of the language that has been produced on Malaysian Indian identity as my point of reference. It contends that these observations and articulations are able to rise to the surface more easily when they are securely located within disciplinary domains often related to determinacy. I argue that viewed as a whole, it becomes apparent that these discourses are coloured by the subjective desire of the accumulation of knowledge on the subject matters of their writings. As such, they are as much stories that are told of the Malaysian Indian community as those found in literary narratives and can ultimately lead to unequal discursivities.

Some key categories in the study of language and society – such as the notion of identity and the very notion of language itself – have come under critical scrutiny with the rise of concepts such as translanguaging. While acknowledging the epistemological and political necessity of this critique I caution against the conflation of concepts with social realities. At the same time, I argue for a critical practice that does not subsume the local in favor of global theoretical trends, which can result from conceptual reification occurring due to an insidious nexus between neo-liberal forces and global inequalities in knowledge production.

In this short article we call for decolonization strategies in the Sociology of Language through a focus shift towards the global South, in particular Africa and a heightened attention to “race” as a significant category. We highlight three primary points that require critical attention in a decolonized Sociology of Language: (i) the identification of northern sociolinguistic theories which have been masked as universal and a critical shift towards theoretical frameworks emerging from the South; (ii) the acknowledgement of “white” privilege and “white fragility” in language studies and its related problem of ignoring “race” as a significant category, in scholarship as well as among authors/editors; and (iii) the under-representation of (especially female) scholars of colour in sociolinguistic research.

By focusing predominantly on discourse production and language management, language policy research de-emphasizes the material sources of inequality. The paper argues that language management, often restricted by ritualistic and symbolic gestures, cannot rectify historically formed relations of power and calls for critical examination of both sociolinguistic and socio-economic consequences of language reforms.

The notion of agency is typically understood as stemming from the goals and desires of human actors. This is an assumption that has been taken on board in the study of language in society as well. In this article, I point out the problems with this assumption as well as another: the tendency to downplay if not dismiss the roles of non-human entities. I argue that these points about agency carry serious implications for the study of language in society. It is undeniable that various technological advancements ranging from relatively simple computer programs to highly developed artificial intelligence (AI) are increasingly involved in our use of language for communication. These are cases where the human element is increasingly distant from the use of language for communicative purposes. They pose conceptual challenges for the study of language in society and require a willingness to rethink the nature of agency.

In this brief essay, and making use of my own research in Peru, I raise two issues that I have been reflecting on throughout my career and that I believe constitute challenges in addressing language in society. The first refers to the importance of studying the processes of meaning production from an ethnographic perspective, and the second, to the centrality of articulating the production of these meanings with the material conditions of existence that make them possible or difficult. These two points are committed to combining ethnographic sociolinguistics and glotopolitics, as critical perspectives that are enhancing sociolinguistics in Latin America.