Critical applied linguistics in the 2020s

ABSTRACT

Critical applied linguistics remains deeply relevant today, arguably more than ever, but it needs constant renewal. This paper returns to these concerns to assess where this project has got to and where it may be headed. I review first both long-term and short-term political trends, from the rise of neoliberalism to the COVID pandemic. Next, I discuss responses to these conditions – questions of pessimism or hope – and their relevance for applied linguistics. This is followed by a discussion of epistemological changes (or turns) in applied linguistics, and an argument that we need to be both responsive to and skeptical of such shifts. Above all, we need to be adept at looking at them in relation to each other – material and discursive, translingual and raciolinguistic, queer and practice, multilingual and decolonial, for example, – to disrupt their apparent novelty and ensure there is always a critical dimension. Finally I conclude by looking again at a critical applied linguistic agenda for the future, suggesting ten key principles we need to keep in mind.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This paper is a revised version of my plenary address to the AILA Conference in 2021, and the introduction to the revised version of my book (Pennycook, 2021).

2 Indeed, so difficult had it become to maintain an ethical and political stance within post-2020 universities, and to avoid the complicities imposed by my class, gender and racial positions, that I have decided to move aside and leave institutional academic life.

3 Gramsci attributes this phrase to Romain Rolland. He explained his own position - “sono pessimista con l’intelligenza, ma ottimista per la volontà” (I’m a pessimist with my mind, but an optimist of the will) in a letter from prison in December 1929).

4 I am not at all persuaded by the educational approaches (such as Direct Instruction) that Pearson has endorsed but such outcomes need to be separated from the politics of hope that inspire them.

5 A result perhaps of the resentments felt by many academics towards the erosion of their academic liberties, overlooking in the process our complicity in sustaining the daily practices of neoliberal regimes, such as performance reviews and bibliometric accountabilities.

6 The critique of a focus on diversity also sounds at times close to reactionary critiques of ‘identity politics,’ ‘postmodernism’, ‘woke culture’ and so on, thus reinforcing rather than resisting the tide of conservative conformism.

7 These are not intended in dialectic terms (arriving at various syntheses) but as ideas that need constant challenge. We might also read the translinguistic against political economy (as does Block, 2018a) or the multilingual against the raciolinguistic, and so on.