This volume investigates the interconnections of language, scholarly publishing, and the knowledge economy in contemporary academia across different European settings. The chapters included revolve around aspects that are related to the knowledge economy cycle, from the individual and systemic conditions that enable knowledge production, to the currently existing channels and frameworks that give shape to and condition its circulation, uptake, and consumption. All the chapters combined provide a coherent and holistic overview of the affordances and limitations that different social actors experience when participating in such cycles, including the different modes of access to resources across geographic contexts and disciplinary traditions. An important contribution of the volume is the multi-layered angle that it incorporates into analysing issues of scholarly publishing in today's academia, placing language as a social practice at the heart of the structuring processes that condition the creation, dissemination, and consumption of knowledge in contemporary societies. Given the centrality of English in these processes, a particular focus on this language runs through the whole volume, but the tensions and intersections with other languages are usefully explored by all authors, with calls for greater sensitivity towards and real acknowledgement of linguistic diversity in the present-day knowledge economy cycle.

This study investigates how academic writing practices at university are represented and introduced through instructional models in Swedish and English teaching materials. The scaffolding power of such models is often assumed without scrutinizing how these models can provide entrance points to writing practices for students dealing with specific writing tasks. Grounded in an interest in learning, the study analyses selected models in frequently-used teaching materials for academic writing in Sweden. Findings are: the same model is used to present writing as a matter of language or as academic work; the introduction of the models positions students as responders to assignment tasks in the Swedish materials or as actors on the global research market in the English materials. How writing can become relevant for learning by connecting students’ prior knowledge – gained from writing in different contexts and in different languages – with engaging in current writing tasks remains tacit.

Becoming expert academic writers requires students to develop understanding, awareness and skills with regards to discipline-specific discourses. To develop such knowledge, talk around drafts is essential. Various studies traced how students develop knowledge about and of academic writing, but few explored how such knowledge is invoked and developed in interaction. The study therefore investigates the dynamics of introducing and using academic writing knowledge when tackling writing issues in interaction. The interaction is situated in a facilitated writing group – an important yet under-researched arena for talk around text. The data consist of video-recordings of group meetings with six postgraduate students who use English as an additional language, collected over 8 weeks at a Swedish university. To investigate how knowledge was introduced and used in the group, the study takes a socio-cultural perspective and applies the Vygotskian notion of cultural tools combined with discourse analytic approaches. The analysis shows how students draw on complex techniques to negotiate academic writing knowledge. Their interactional text work oscillates between abstract norms and concrete texts. Concepts of academic writing (e.g. research aim) are partly unpacked frontstage in the group, and partly backstage in individual notes. The results call for extending genre-pedagogic approaches of learning by discovery.

The move towards EMI in higher education has been connected to university internationalisation, which reflects neoliberal trends. Research has underscored the need to consider socio-economic factors, materialities and ideologies surrounding EMI. Our study taps into this line of inquiry by focusing on how Swedish universities promote EMI programmes in business and economics in four videos. We take a novel approach to examine discursively constructed ideologies surrounding EMI by conducting a critical multimodal analysis of the videos. The analysis reveals how the use and representations of English – combined with different symbols, artefacts and concepts – are used to position these EMI programmes as both global and local. References to international rankings and multinational business partnerships position them on the global education market. At the same time, the programmes are locally situated in the academic tradition and entrepreneurial context of Sweden. Images of nature, the fika, or Scandinavian design present them in a way similar to tourist destinations. Tokens of economic and cultural eliteness create an extra layer of distinction, contributing to the added ‘elite’ value of EMI, where English is both taken for granted and serves a gate-keeping function. Findings provide insight into how EMI is promoted to international students.