Language, Culture and Society

01/06/2023

The Cambridge Element 'Writing Banal Inequalities. How to Fabricate Stories Which Disrupt' edited by Hannah Cowan and me is finally out. You can download it for FREE for the next 2 weeks!

Thanks to Will Nyerere Plastow, Natassia Brenman, Amal Latif, Sibo Kanobana for their fantastic pieces!

Very proud of this project!

In this Element, the authors write about the everyday production and experiences of banal inequality. Through a series of sections, each comprising of a blogpost written for Disruptive Inequalities, and a commentary from the author on the predicaments they encountered in the writing process, this Element shares, and confronts, the ways we fabricate stories and use writing to resist. It makes visible the choices, practices, and reflections that have led to the writing of our stories and offers the tools we have used to fabricate them, to all those who may find them meaningful to appropriate, adapt, and translate to fight the struggles that they want to fight. These tools are formulated in a way for writers to develop their own methods of storytelling and activism. The authors hope this Element contributes to an ongoing debate on how writing serves banal resistance.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/writing-banal-inequalities/36DC82E434FB597A66FE3F5170B64FA5?fbclid=IwAR2eEVICozjGLx1CYi75eLRCuT8uinJPMKxJ-RceFZi-qOlMtfcl3xapy6o

Cambridge Core - Applied Linguistics - Writing Banal Inequalities

16/01/2023

Language, Culture and Society (LCS) invites abstract submissions for its 2023 special issue “Manufacturing (Academic) Knowledge.” (Abstracts due: February 16, 2023)

CALL FOR PAPERS

Language, Culture and Society

Manufacturing (Academic) Knowledge

In line with its intellectual and political agenda developed over the past three years, Language, Culture and Society invites contributions to a special issue on Manufacturing Academic Knowledge. This Special Issue aims at expanding the reflection we launched on Language, Epistemology, and the Politics of Knowledge Production in issue 3(1), in which contributors reflected on the valuation and legitimation of knowledge and their producers, as well as on how the kind of knowing manufactured in the Academy cannot be disentangled from the sociopolitical context in and from which it is produced and from the positionalities of the knowers.

In this Special Issue, we go a step farther, seeking to open the black box of knowledge production and consumption. The scholarly knowledge as entextualized in journal articles is the outcome of a series of authorships and authorities from the initial writing of the paper, its submission to a given journal, its assessment by the journal editor(s), its several rounds of reviewing by external adjudicators, and the final input of the copy editor. Each of these steps is imbued in ideology and politics about what constitutes knowledge, how significant or original the submitted contribution to the academic field is, how relevant to the journal editorial line the paper is, how sound the data and the methodology adopted in the article are, how well informed and up to date the author is on the relevant subject matter, how competent the author is deemed to be in mastering the hegemonic British or American written English varieties of international publications, etc. All these activities are taking place in a field where people compete for the monopoly of scientific authority and legitimacy as well as where those who ‘judge’ an article are also parties fighting to secure their position of power within the discipline. An assessment of the state of language-related disciplines (viz., sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, linguistics anthropology) and the way they promote or silence certain social and political issues, theoretical frameworks or dismiss certain voices cannot be done without opening the pandora box of how we, as scholars, operate as producers, adjudicators, gatekeepers or consumers of knowledge. For this special issue, we invite papers that address tensions, conditions of possibility, and constraints in the production of academic knowledge, as well as the unveiling of the gatekeeping mechanisms at play at each stage of the knowledge production and circulation.

We are interested in contributions from scholars in diverse positions regarding academic seniority, geographic location, dominant language(s), and role such as editor, reviewer, copyeditor, author, or translator of academic publications.

Expected length of paper: not more than 4000 words

Please submit a 350-word abstract describing the issues you intend to cover in your paper to Cécile B. Vigouroux: [email protected].



Timeline:

Abstract: February 16, 2023

Feedback on abstract: February 22, 2023

Paper due : September 1st, 2023

07/12/2021

Tomorrow please join!

Seminar Series: Language, Culture and Society

23/06/2021

We are pleased to announce that our Spring 2021 (3.1) issue is now out!! See: https://benjamins.com/catalog/lcs.3.1

The contributors with full-lenght articles are: Andrea Ciribuco; Adriana Patiño-Santos; Dana Osborne; Judit Kroo; and Ilajna P. Anderson.

You can find and download our full editorial for this issue here: https://www.academia.edu/49346416/Language_Culture_and_Society_Editorial_1_3_2021_

In our previous issues, we have outlined our commitment to strengthen the focus on Society by critically examining the categories on which we build our work as scholars of language […] But so far we have done this without explicitly addressing the very institutional position from which many of us produce knowledge: the University – the big elephant in the room. And it is not always easy to do so. After all, the university is the workplace that structures our knowledge production while at the same time providing the means which ratify the social and intellectual legitimacy of what we do (including having access to editorial positions), even if this is under conditions of increasing precarity and instability. […] The five articles in the present issue offer us, in our view, with avenues for deepening reflection on these matters. Although authors weren’t exactly reacting to a particular call, we read their contributions as speaking to these concerns. We do so with two goals in mind. First, to insist that it is worth keeping an eye on the social relations of inequality that we continue to mystify as knowledge producers who write from within higher education institutions. Second, to sustain venues where we can continue talking about this openly and honestly, in ways that don’t paralyse us but which rather propel us to generate productive forms of transgression and counter-conducts within our universities – not only in the sense envisioned by Foucault (2007) but also in connection with the reactivation of a variety of non-European indigenous systems of knowing (Mbembe, 2003). More specifically, the contributions in this issue help us delve in a critique of the relations of power and inequality that frame and inform our work and that we have shaped. This includes a critique of: (a) our roles as researchers and knowledge producers; (b) the categories we mobilize when doing research; (c) the histories of our own academic disciplines; (d) the learning spaces that we contribute to create as teachers; and (e) our recruitment practices in universities.

Issue of Language, Culture and Society

23/04/2021

We are glad to announce that the Spring 2021 (3.1) issue is in production! see https://benjamins.com/catalog/lcs.3.1

Contributors are : Andrea Ciribuco; Adriana Patiño-Santos; Dana Osborne; Judit Kroo; Ilajna P. Anderson

In our previous issues, we have outlined our commitment to strengthen the focus on Society by critically examining the categories on which we build our work as scholars of language […] But so far we have done this without explicitly addressing the very institutional position from which many of us produce knowledge: the University – the big elephant in the room. And it is not always easy to do so. After all, the university is the workplace that structures our knowledge production while at the same time providing the means which ratify the social and intellectual legitimacy of what we do (including having access to editorial positions), even if this is under conditions of increasing precarity and instability. […] The five articles in the present issue offer us, in our view, with avenues for deepening reflection on these matters. Although authors weren’t exactly reacting to a particular call, we read their contributions as speaking to these concerns. We do so with two goals in mind. First, to insist that it is worth keeping an eye on the social relations of inequality that we continue to mystify as knowledge producers who write from within higher education institutions. Second, to sustain venues where we can continue talking about this openly and honestly, in ways that don’t paralyse us but which rather propel us to generate productive forms of transgression and counter-conducts within our universities – not only in the sense envisioned by Foucault (2007) but also in connection with the reactivation of a variety of non-European indigenous systems of knowing (Mbembe, 2003). More specifically, the contributions in this issue help us delve in a critique of the relations of power and inequality that frame and inform our work and that we have shaped. This includes a critique of: (a) our roles as researchers and knowledge producers; (b) the categories we mobilize when doing research; (c) the histories of our own academic disciplines; (d) the learning spaces that we contribute to create as teachers; and (e) our recruitment practices in universities.