Cover not available

Article published In: Language, Culture and Society
Vol. 3:1 (2021) ► pp.107–141

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
authorization required

Linguists on the move in the global landscape?

Mobility, metapragmatics and markets in academic capitalism

Published online: 18 June 2021
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/lcs.20006.and
Abstract
This paper focuses on the sociolinguistic effects of tightening job markets in applied linguistics, and situates the discussion within the time-space compression of late modernist capitalist enterprises using frameworks in the sociolinguistics of mobility, political economy and raciolinguistics. The paper focuses on single-utterance speech acts of reservation conspicuously invoked to frame the discourse of dissent on the part of committee members in high-stakes interview encounters. Focusing on locally-sourced data collected in a publicly-funded, U.S. university, the paper examines how macro-contexts of skill oversaturation in the job market serve to frame enactments of stance in these high-stakes interactional microcosms while pointing to novel epistemological trending in complexity, conviviality and cosmopolitan encounter.
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Complexity, conviviality and cosmopolitan encounter
  • Raciolinguistic frameworks and free market capitalism
  • Background details: Market triggers
  • Academic markets – The consequences
  • Data collection dilemmas
  • The on-campus interview
  • Conviviality, indexicality and meta-level perlocutionary evaluations in the hiring process
  • Demeanor indexicals: A study in disqualifiers
  • On being ‘Out of place’: Linguistic (in)comprehensibility
  • Spotlighting the sociolinguistics of onomastics
  • The “space” for difference in academia
  • New prejudices or ancient anxieties in the academy?
  • Language in society: Theoretical implications
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
References (97)
References
Agha, A. (2007). Language and social relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Alim, H. S., Rickford, J., & Ball, A. (2016). (eds.), Raciolinguistics: How language shapes our ideas about race. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Appadurai, A. (2006). Fear of small numbers: An essay on the geography of anger. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2016). Aspirational maps: On migrant narratives and imagined future citizenship. Eurozine, February 19. Retrieved from: <[URL]> (2 May, 2018).
Baran, D. M. (2018). Narratives of migration on Facebook: Belonging and identity among former fellow refugees. Language in Society, 47(2), 245–268. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bayliss, A. (2010). First impressions and interaction outcomes: A Chinese EFL speaker in an employment interview. Australian Journal of Communication, 35(3), 101–118.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Behtoui, A., & Leivestad, H. H. (2018). The ‘stranger’ among Swedish ‘homo academicus’. The International Journal of Higher Education Research, 771, 213–228.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Behtoui, A., & Neergaard, A. (2010). Social capital and wage differentials between immigrants and natives. Work, Employment and Society, 24(4), 761–779. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Blackledge, A., Creese, A., & Hu, R. (2015). Investigating voice in a city market. Working Papers in Translanguaging and Translation, paper 91:1–35. Birmingham: University of Birmingham.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Blackledge, A., & Creese, A. (2017). Language and superdiversity: An interdisciplinary perspective. Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies, paper 1871:1–29, Tilburg: Babylon.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Blommaert, J. (2013). Ethnography, superdiversity and linguistic landscape. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2015). Chronotopes, scales and complexity in the study of language in society. Annual Review of Anthropology, 441, 105–116. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2017). Commentary: Mobility, contexts and the chronotope. Language in Society, 461, 95–99. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Blommaert, J., & De Fina, A. (2016). Chronotopic identities: On the timespace organization of who we are. Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies, paper 1531:1–26, Tilburg: Babylon.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bonilla-Silva, E. (2014). Racism without racists: Colorblind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in America (4th ed.). Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bucholtz, M. (2016). On being called out of one’s name: Indexical bleaching as a technique of deracialization. In S. Alim, J. R. Rickford & A. F. Ball (Eds.), Raciolinguistics: How language shapes our ideas about race (pp. 273–289). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2018). White affects and sociolinguistic activism. Language in Society, 47(3), 350–354. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bunce, P., Phillipson, R., Rapatahana, V., & Tupas, R. (Eds.). (2016). Why English? Confronting the hydra. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bunnell, T., Gillen, J. & Lynne-Ee Ho, E. (2018). The prospect of elsewhere: Engaging the future through aspirations in Asia. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 108(1), 35–51. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Canagarajah, S. (2017). The nexus of migration and language: The emergence of a disciplinary space. In S. Canagarajah (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of migration and language (pp.1–28). New York, NY: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cantwell, B., & Kauppinen, I. (Eds.). (2014). Academic capitalism in the age of globalization. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Celce-Murcia, M. & Larsen-Freeman, D. (1999). The grammar book: An ESL/EFL teacher’s course. Boston: Heinle & Heinle.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Choi, P. K. (2010). ‘Weep for Chinese university’: A case study of English hegemony and academic capitalism in higher education in Hong Kong. Journal of Education Policy, 25 (2), 233–252. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chun, C. W. (2017). The discourses of capitalism: Everyday economists and the production of commonsense. New York, NY: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Colic-Peisker, V., & Hlavac, J. (2014). Anglo-Australian and non-Anglophone middle classes: ‘Foreign accent’ and social inclusion. Australian Journal of Social Issues, 49(3), 349–394. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Couper-Kuhlen, E., & Selting, M. (2018). Interactional linguistics: Studying language in social interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cuthbert, D., & Molla, T. (2015). PhD crisis discourse: A critical approach to the framing of the problem and some Australian solutions. Higher Education, 691, 33–53. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Del Percio, A., Flubacher, M. & Duchêne, A. (2017). Language and political economy. In O. García, N. Flores, & M. Spotti (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of language and society (pp.55–75). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dong, J., & Blommaert, J. (2009). Space, scale and accent: Constructing migrant identity in Beijing. Multilingua, 28(1), 1–24. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Duff, P. A. (2015). Transnationalism, multilingualism and identity. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 351, 57–80. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Eckert, P. (1989). Jocks and burnouts: Social categories and identity in High-school. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
English, J. F. (2012). The global future of English studies. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Espeland, W. N., & Sauder, M. (2007). Rankings and reactivity; how public measures recreate social worlds. American Journal of Sociology, 113(1), 1–40. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gilroy, P. (2006). Multiculture in times of war: An inaugural lecture given at the London School of Economics. Critical Quarterly, 48(4), 27–45. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Giridharadas, A. (2018). Winners take all: The elite charade of changing the world. New York, NY: Knopf.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Goebel, Z., & Manns, H. (2018). Chronotopic relations and scalar shifters. Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies, paper 2041: 1–30. Tilburg: Babylon.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hilton, S. (2018). Positive populism: Revolutionary ideas to rebuild economic security, family and community in America. New York, NY: Penguin Random House.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Higgins, C. (2017). Space, place and language. In S. Canagarajah (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of migration and language (pp. 102–116). New York, NY: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Horner, K., & Dailey-O’Cain, J. (Eds.). (2019). Multilingualism, im(mobilities) and spaces of belonging. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Inoue, M. (2003). The listening subject of Japanese modernity and his auditory double: Citing, sighting, and siting the modern Japanese woman. Cultural Anthropology, 18(2), 156–93. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jaffe, A. (2016). What kinds of superdiversity are super? Hidden diversities and mobilities on a Mediterranean Island. Language and Communication, 441, 72–81.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
June, A. W. (2013). The long odds of the tenure-track job search. The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 19, 2013.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jung, M. K. (2015). Beneath the surface of white supremacy: Denaturalizing U.S. racisms past and present. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kidman, J., & Chu, C. (2017). Scholar outsiders in the neoliberal university: Transgressive academic labour in the whitestream. New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies, 521, 7–19. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kim, T. (2017). Academic mobility, transnational identity capital, and stratification under conditions of academic capitalism. Higher Education, 731, 981–997. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kramsch, C., & Whiteside, A. (2008). Language ecology in multilingual settings. Towards a theory of symbolic competence. Applied Linguistics, 29(4), 645–671. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kusters, A., Spotti, M., Swanwick, R., & Tapio, E. (2017). Beyond languages, beyond modalities: Transforming the study of semiotic repertoires. International Journal of Multilingualism, 14(3), 219–232. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Labov, W. (1966). The social stratification of English in New York city. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lising, L. (2017). Language in skilled migration. In S. Canagarajah (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of migration and language, (pp. 296–311). New York, NY: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lo, A. & Choi, L. J. (2017). Forming capital: Emblematizing discourses of mobility in South Korea. Language in Society, 461, 77–93. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lo, A., & Park, J. (2017). Metapragmatics of mobility. Language in Society, 461, 1–4. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lye, C. (2005). America’s Asia: Racial form and American literature 1893–1945. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Maeso, S. R. (2015). ‘Where are you really from? Notes on the social sciences and the crisis of the homogenous society. International Journal on Collective Identity Research, 3(138), 1–18.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Massey, D. (2005). For space. London: Sage.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Meissner, F. (2018). Legal status diversity: Regulating to control and everyday contingencies. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 44(2), 287–306. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ndhlovu, F. (2017). Language, migration, diaspora: Challenging the big battalions of groupism. In O. García, N. Flores, & M. Spotti (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of language and society (pp. 141–159). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pandey, A. (2016). Monolingualism and linguistic exhibitionism in fiction. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2019). ‘Authorized to work in the US’: Examining the myth of porous borders in the era of populism for practicing linguists. Ethnicities, 1–33. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Park, J. S. (2014). Cartographies of language: Making sense of mobility among Korean transmigrants in Singapore. Language & Communication, 391, 83–91. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Piller, I., & Cho, J. (2015). Neoliberalism as language policy. In T. Ricento, (Ed.), Language policy and political economy: English in a global context (pp.162–186). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Planchenault, G. (2015). Voices in the media: Performing French linguistic otherness. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Prinsloo, M. (2017). Spatiotemporal scales and the study of mobility. In S. Canagarajah (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of migration and language (pp. 296–311). New York, NY: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Reed, A. (2018). The state of linguistics in higher education. Washington DC: Linguistic Society of America. Retrieved on from <[URL]> (14 September, 2018).
Richards, J. C., & Rodgers, T. S. (2014). Approaches and methods in language teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ricento, T. (Ed.). (2015). Language policy and political economy: English in a global context. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rosa, J., & Bonilla, Y. (2017). Deprovincializing Trump, decolonizing diversity, and unsettling anthropology. American Ethnologist, 44(2), 201–208. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rosa, J., & Flores, N. (2017). Unsettling race and language: Toward a raciolinguistic perspective. Language in Society, 461, 621–47. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Salö, L. (2018). Universities, their responsibilities, and the matter of language. On supplementary-language summaries in internationalizing academia. Language and Education, 32(6), 548–563. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Schulze-Cleven, T., Reitz, T., Maesse, J., & Angermuller, J. (2017). The new political economy of higher education: Between distributional conflicts and discursive stratification. Higher Education, 731, 795–812. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Slaughter, S., & Rhoades, G. (2004). Academic capitalism and the new economy: Markets, state and higher Education. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Silverstein, M. (2003). Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. Language and Communication, 231, 193–229. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Slotta, J. (2015). The perlocutionary is political: Listening as self-determination in a Papua New Guinean polity. Language in Society, 441, 525–552. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Smitherman, G. (1994). Black Talk: Words and phrases from the hood to the amen corner. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Spotti, M., & J. Blommaert. (2017). Bilingualism, multilingualism, globalization, and superdiversity: Towards sociolinguistic repertoires. In O. García, N. Flores, & M. Spotti (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of language and society (pp.161–178). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
St. Clair, R. N. (2003). The social and cultural construction of silence. Intercultural Communication Studies, 12(3), 87–91.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Stephan-Emmrich, M. (2018). iPhones, emotions, mediations: Tracing translocality in the pious endeavors of Tajik migrants in the United Arab Emirates. In M. Stephan-Emmrich (Ed.), Mobilities, boundaries, and traveling ideas: Rethinking translocality beyond central Asia and the Caucasus, (pp.292–317). Cambridge: Open Book Publishers. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sue, D. W. (2010). Microaggressions in everyday Life: Race, gender and sexual orientation. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tannen, D. (1990). “You just don’t understand”: Women and men in conversation. New York, NY: HarperCollins.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Teranishi, R., & Briscoe, K. (2007). Social capital and the racial stratification of college opportunity. In J. C. Smart (Ed.), Higher Education: Handbook of theory and research. (pp.591–614) Dordrecht: Springer.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Thurlow, C., & Jaworski, A. (2017). The discursive production and maintenance of class privilege: Permeable geographies, slippery rhetorics. Discourse &Society, 28(5), 535–558. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tran, A., & Lee, R. M. (2014). ‘You speak English well’! Asian Americans’ reactions to an exceptionalizing stereotype. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 61(3), 484–490. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Urry, J. (2005). The complexity turn. Theory, Culture and Society, 22(5), 1–14. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Valentine, G., Piekut, A., Winiarska, A., Harris, C., & Jackson, L. (2015). Mapping the meaning of ‘difference’ in Europe: A social topography of prejudice. Ethnicities, 15(4), 568–585. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Valentine, G. (2013). Living with difference: Proximity and encounter in urban life. Geography, 98(1), 4–9. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Vertovec, S. (2006). The emergence of super-diversity in Britain. Working paper No. 25. (1–44) Centre on Migration, Policy and Society. Oxford: University of Oxford.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2009). Transnationalism. New York, NY: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2017). Mooring, migration milieus and complex explanations. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 40(9), 1574–1581. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Vincent, C., Neal, S., & Iqbal, H. (2018). Friendship and diversity: Class ethnicity and social relationships in the city. Houndmills: Palgrave-Macmillan. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Vigouroux, C. B. (2011). Magic marketing: Performing grassroots literacy. Diversities, 13(2), 53–69.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2017). The discursive pathway of two centuries of raciolinguistic stereotyping: ‘Africans as incapable of speaking French.’ Language in Society, 461, 5–21. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wallerstein, I. (2004). World-systems analysis: An introduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wang, J., Leu, J., & Shoda, Y. (2011). ‘When the seemingly innocuous stings’. Racial microaggressions and their emotional consequences. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 371, 1666–1678. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Welch, S., & Long, C. P. (2014). Where are they now? The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 19, 2013, February 10, 2014.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wessendorf, S. (2014). Commonplace diversity: Social relations in a super-diverse context. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wise, A., & Noble, G. (2016). Convivialities: An orientation. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 37(5), 423–431. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Zentella, A. C. (2016). “Socials,” Poch@s,” “Normals” y los demás: School networks and linguistic capital of High-school students on the Tijuana-San Diego border. In S. Alim, J. R. Rickford, & A. F. Ball (Eds.), Raciolinguistics: How language shapes our ideas about race, (pp. 327–346). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Zwiers, J., & Crawford, M. (2011). Academic conversations: Classroom talk that fosters critical thinking and content understanding. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue