Abstract

Higher education is a sector of society where neoliberal discourses are especially prominent, as universities seek to demonstrate international relevance and financial viability (Hadley, 2015; Pusser, et al., 2012). While neoliberalism has been recognized in economics for over eighty years, a critical focus on relationships between language and political economy has relatively recently gained greater prominence in applied linguistics (Block, Gray & Holborow, 2012). Language, and English in particular, is becoming intertwined with neoliberal ‘free market’ ideologies in order to serve government and corporate capitalist agendas (Springer, 2012). 

In this talk, Professor Francis M. Hult discusses neoliberalism and the role of English in university life. He offers an overview of how concepts of neoliberalism intersect with language and, in turn, how this relationship has taken shape in relation to teaching and research, with attention to the functions of English in instruction and writing for publication. He considers neoliberal tensions in framing English as a resource (Hult & Hornberger, 2016; Ricento 2005; Ruiz, 1984) as well as how the dominant focus on English undermines the potential of universities as fertile lands for the cultivation of multilingualism (e.g., Hult, 2018; Källkvist & Hult, 2020). He then explores possibilities for an ecological orientation to language planning and how it can be used to account for the development of multilingual repertoires in university settings (Ou, Hult & Gu, 2022).

Francis M. Hult

About the Higher seminar in Research on Bilingualism