20 years of critical inquiry in language studies

This year, the international journal Critical Inquiry in Language Studies (CILS) publishes its 20^th volume, marking twenty years of contribution to critical scholarship in the broad, interdisciplinary field of language studies. Launched in 2003 as the flagship journal for the International Society for Language Studies (ISLS), the journal was conceptualized to create a venue, at that time largely lacking, in critical perspectives on languages, language education, and related research through a peer-reviewed publication.

Founding editors Timothy Reagan and Terry A. Osborn worked closely with authors to disseminate works to further the aims of critical pedagogy and social justice. Reagan and Osborn approached Naomi Silverman, then an editor at Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, proposing the journal and her support of the project was unwavering. At the outset, the editors were responsible for copyediting and even typesetting the journal, saving costs because they believed so strongly in the aims of the organization and the need for the journal. After ten years, Reagan and Osborn stepped aside as Paul Chamness Iida assumed the journal’s leadership, which continued until 2020 (see tribute to Paul published in this journal, Mikulec & Wooten, 2022).

CILS, under the auspices of ISLS, comprises a volunteer-based organization of scholars committed to grassroots effort to bring together critical, interdisciplinary, and emergent approaches to language studies. For two decades, the organization and the journal have led global discourses on language and communication relating to equity, equality, and social justice. Drawing on critical social theories to connect linguistic and social issues, CILS has contributed significantly to carving out a field of heterogeneous research and scholarship in critical language studies. This area of inquiry has grown rapidly in recent decades, drawing on related fields of critical language awareness (CLA), critical discourse analysis (CDA), critical discourse studies (CDS), critical applied linguistics (CAL), and critical sociolinguistics, including linguistic anthropology, interactional sociolinguistics and variationist sociolinguistics.

As a volunteer-based, nonprofit organization, ISLS met with immense financial challenges brought about by pandemic-related issues. Such barriers have exacerbated and intensified, exposing critical scholars and the communities they work with to magnified social and economic inequities. In these precarious circumstances, ISLS operations wound down in 2022.

CILS now operates as an independent journal published by Taylor and Francis. It continues to uphold the inaugural goals and objectives of ISLS and sustain critical knowledge sharing among scholars from diverse global locations. The journal aims to cultivate a community of scholarly inquiry and practice for alliance across asymmetrical conditions of power and privilege to nurture coexistence and co-learning of plural knowledges.

Facing the sociopolitical and ecological crises of the present turbulent times, alongside rapid technological advancement and geopolitical reconfigurations of the Global South and Indigenous communities (Blommaert, 2010; Heller, 2020; Kubota & Miller, 2017; Mackey et al., 2022; Pennycook, 2022), it is all the more crucial that CILS maintains the space for critical dialogue that was begun by its founders. Under harsh conditions, the opportunities for critical engagement can easily disappear, rendered invisible or pushed underground. These circumstances need to be identified, documented, spoken about, and reflected upon.

As part of a collective, bottom-up effort across the transdisciplinary fields of language studies, CILS aims to foster equity, advocacy and pluriversality in language-related policy and practice, research, scholarship, and education. Our current editorial team was privileged to pick up the mantle as coeditors in 2020. Assuming our role, we saw an opportunity to take stock of the journal’s contributions thus far and to reflect on how we might shape the journal’s aims and scope in response to ongoing developments in critical language studies. Notably, the field has grown immensely, accompanied by a welcome proliferation of scholarship in various sub-fields of language studies (e.g., area studies, gender studies, queer studies, discourse analysis, multilingualism, curriculum studies, language policy, among others). Collectively, this research and scholarship has contributed new ways of understanding and addressing language issues through the lenses of postcolonialism, feminism, critical race theory, translanguaging and so on (Kubota & Miller, 2017). Taken together, these perspectives push us to consider how we might re-envision criticality in the future and continue to advance the broad field of critical language studies.

Toward these aims, we introduce several new directions. CILS’ aims and scope have been revised to focus more specifically on the fields of applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, language policy and planning, literacy studies and education. This move aims to encourage more focused submissions and engage reviewers with related expertise, fostering reciprocity in knowledge-generation and sustained readership with shared interests. We have also launched an annual thematic special issue, creating a venue for publications by scholars from diverse geopolitical locations on various timely language issues. Finally, this 20^th anniversary volume will feature invited papers that articulate current perspectives and future directions, available as free- and/or open access contributions, a practice we have recently begun (see Pennycook, 2022) and plan to continue.

Our current editorial team includes co-editors Michelle Gu (Education University of Hong Kong) and Sunny Lau (Bishop’s University, Québec, Canada), and editor-in-chief Saskia Van Viegen (York University, Canada). In 2022 our co-editor Benjamin ‘Benji’ Chang (University of North Carolina, Greensboro), passed away unexpectedly. Lost too soon, he will be remembered and missed for his immense contributions to education activism for racialized and Asian-American communities. For the journal, Chang fostered the work of emerging and senior scholars alike, providing mentorship, feedback, and support and effectively applying his scholarship in material ways through his editorial practices. Chang’s contribution to opening an inclusive space for critical dialogue and engagement among authors from diverse social, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds inspired and affected us all.

In scholarly community, in service, and in collaboration, it is our goal to continue these efforts to cultivate dialogue, mentorship, knowledge generation and knowledge sharing, ensuring that critical scholarship about language, society, and education continues to grow.