The politics of language scholarship: There are no truly global concerns

Abstract

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.