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On Mon, 6 Jul 1998, Alastair Owens wrote: > 'critical geography' has been founded upon a recognition that the > production of knowledge is positioned and thereby politicised. Language > reference spotting - as Steve Pile has shown - is surely a very crude way > of assessing positionality. You think this way because you speak English. To you it is a triviality that journals and conferences are in English: therefore you can not see this as positioned or located. To you it is as self-evident as the fact that journals are printed with ink. So you replicate the reaction of universities, to complaints that women were under-represented: "That's not what counts!". Thousands of other Anglo academics think the same way. If you had to hand in your articles in Bulgarian or Hungarian, you would not find it trivial any more. (You would probably claim that the question of langauge of publication was "at the heart of academic freedom"). And that is exactly what I am suggesting. For those who missed it in an earlier reply: English-language academic activity in Europe should be discontinued. English-language university staff should learn a second language, or lose their jobs. That is the exceptional but effective remedy for this monolingualism. Since you do not agree there is a problem, you will reject this solution: that is a political difference. (More on the politics after the summer). pt %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%