* with apologies for cross-posting *

UCL IoE Centre for Applied Linguistics Research Seminar Series

 

Capitalist Multilingualism as an Academic Challenge

 

Prof. Alexandre Duchêne, University of Fribourg

 

5:30-6:30 pm Wed 20 February, 2019, Jeffery Hall, UCL IoE, 20 Bedford Way

Capitalist Multilingualism as an Academic Challenge

Nowadays, multilingualism is a legitimate area of inquiry and a scientific field with its own journals, research centres and conferences. Applied linguists, psycholinguists and sociolinguists have significantly contributed to challenging pervasive assumptions around the superiority of monolingualism over multilingualism and have impacted both on the study of language and the politics of language. I see these achievements as an opportunity to reflect on our own scientific production by looking back at the key intellectual debates in the field and by looking forward to the future development of our scholarship. I argue that this is particularly needed since the institutionalization of multilingualism studies parallels the increased recasting of multilingualism as a corporation in various social, political and economic spaces.

If monolingualism remains a site for the production of social inequalities, multilingualism is simultaneously valued in terms of "market expansion", "productivity" or "creativity" and is framed as a potential resource that can be transformed into capital. In this context, scholarly work is mobilized and instrumentalized. Cognitive advantages or economic benefits, two issues that are widely debated in our field, are convoked as arguments in order to frame multilingualism as added value. Under these conditions, we are forced to question what it means when multilingualism becomes the object of such appropriation, what it does to whom, and what consequences it has for our academic stance.
I argue that monoglot ideologies may no longer be the sole terrain to which multilingual studies should contribute and that enthusiasm around multilingualism has to be scrutinized since it might produce undesirable effects. I suggest that the achievements that characterize our field should not prevent us from restlessness and criticality. Rather they should be seen as an invitation to continue challenging social and political assumptions as well as to reflectively interrogate our very own knowledge production and its political implications.

Alexandre Duchêne is a Full Professor of the Sociology of Language at the University of Fribourg and is a Co-Director of the Institute of Multilingualism. His research is situated at the interface between linguistics and social science and is concerned with the role of language in the production of differences and social inequalities. He was invited professor at ENS Lyon (France), the University of Jyväskylä (Finland), the Université Laval (Canada) and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (USA). He is the General Editor of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language and, together with Deborah Cameron, he co-edits the Routledge series The Politics of Language. His publications include Ideologies across Nations (de Gruyter), Language in Late Capitalism: Pride and Profit (with Monica Heller, Routledge) and Language Investment and Employability (with Mi Cha Flubacher and Renata Coray, Palgrave).