“Hot Spots, Dark-Side Dots, Tin Pots”: The Uneven Internationalism of the Global Academic Market

Abstract

The international community of social scientists has become increasingly sensitive not only to the fact that language and context are crucially related in the construction of scientific accounts, but also to the forms of power (or geopolitics) involved in such relations. The role of language and the links between knowledge and power have also become significant issues in human geography, where many scholars have challenged so-called Anglophonic hegemony. This article will scrutinize how human geography, a context-bound social science, has become understood as international, what internationality means in this new constellation, and how power relations and hegemony are structuring (and are structured in) practices and discourses related to internationality. The paper shows how many institutions—national governments and ministries included—are struggling to transform the operation of the global scientific community according to one format, which increases the importance of the English language as an almost self-evident lingua franca.