David Block
David Block is Honorary Professor in Sociolinguistics in the Departament d’Humanitats at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. From September 2012 to January 2024 he was ICREA Research Professor in Sociolinguistics, first in the Departament de Lletres at the Universitat de Lleida (2012-2019) and then in the Departament d’Humanitats at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (2019-2024). From 1996 to 2012 he worked at the Institute of Education, University of London (now University College London Institute of Education), where he was Professor of Languages in Education from 2008 to 2012. Over the past four decades, he has published books, articles and chapters on a variety of topics, ranging from second language teaching and learning to his more recent work examining multimodal practices and phenomena of all kinds (including identity, political discourses, social movements, multiculturalism and bi/multilingualism) drawing on scholarship in political economy, history, sociology, anthropology and geography. Since the beginning of the Great Recession of 2007-2008, Block has devoted a great deal of his effort to the critical examination of neoliberalism as the dominant form of global capitalism in the early 21st century and inequality and social class divisions as key collateral effects. In his most recent work, he has focused on distint domains of contemporary society: (1) the infosphere and politics: ‘post-truth’ and related concepts, communication and identity on the social media and the critical analysis of political discourses in increasingly information-toxic societies; (2) the neoliberalisation of higher education: how the internationalization of universities worldwide is part of the broader neoliberalisation of societies, and how English-medium instruction is a specific example of this process; and (3) new ways of framing identity as being in the world in the 21stcentury: examining being in the world through a Marxist historical materialist lens, problematizing notions such as ‘belonging’ and situating the infosphere as the most important site of identity construction today. Block is co-editor of two books: (with Deborah Cameron) Globalization and Language Teaching (Routledge, 2002) and (with Sarah Khan) The Secret Life of English-medium Instruction (Routledge, 2021) and co-author (with John Gray and Marnie Holborow) of Neoliberalism and Applied Linguistics (Routledge, 2012). His single-authored books are The Social Turn in Second Language Acquisition (Edinburgh University Press, 2003); Multilingual Identities in a Global City: London Stories (Palgrave, 2006); Second Language Identities (Continuum, 2007; re-issued in 2014 as a ‘Bloomsbury Classic in Linguistics’); Social Class and Applied Linguistics (Routledge, 2014); Political Economy and Sociolinguistics: Neoliberalism, Inequality and Social Class (Bloomsbury, 2018; shortlisted for the 2019 BAAL Book Prize); Post-Truth and Political Discourse (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); Innovations and Challenges in Identity Research (Routledge, 2022) and Interviews in Applied Linguistics: Autobiographical Reflections on Research Processes. (Routledge, 2024). Block is a member of the Academy of the Social Sciences (UK) and Visiting Professor at University College London Institute of Education. In 2014, he started the Routledge book series Language, Society and Political Economy, which he has co-edited with Will Smith since 2022. To date, eight books have been published with four additional titles in progress.
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Academic capitalism is about how progressively more academic activity is valued according to its capacity to accumulate human, financial and corporate capital. It is on the increase in Higher Education (HE) worldwide and in this article we examine its implantation in Catalan universities. We begin with an exploration of the bigger picture, focussing on the impacts of neoliberalism on HE worldwide, leading to the arrival of the ‘toxic university,’ as part of the rise of academic capitalism. We then provide a critical account of these transformations in European universities. Against this backdrop, we examine the webpages of state-run universities in Catalonia, highlighting their relationships with the business sector. Our key finding is that academic capitalism is alive and well in the construction of a certain worldview within these universities, according to which knowledge is only valid if it is marketable, researchers are entrepreneurs and HE and research are at the service of global capitalism and neoliberal rationalities. We conclude with comments on possible remedies in the current situation, arguing that any measures taken on a local level are not likely to be transformative if nothing is done to change how the global economy functions.________________________________________________________________________
in foreign language teaching practice’ by Claire Kramsch
Academic capitalism is about how progressively more academic activity is valued according to its capacity to accumulate human, financial and corporate capital. It is on the increase in Higher Education (HE) worldwide and in this article we examine its implantation in Catalan universities. We begin with an exploration of the bigger picture, focussing on the impacts of neoliberalism on HE worldwide, leading to the arrival of the ‘toxic university,’ as part of the rise of academic capitalism. We then provide a critical account of these transformations in European universities. Against this backdrop, we examine the webpages of state-run universities in Catalonia, highlighting their relationships with the business sector. Our key finding is that academic capitalism is alive and well in the construction of a certain worldview within these universities, according to which knowledge is only valid if it is marketable, researchers are entrepreneurs and HE and research are at the service of global capitalism and neoliberal rationalities. We conclude with comments on possible remedies in the current situation, arguing that any measures taken on a local level are not likely to be transformative if nothing is done to change how the global economy functions.________________________________________________________________________
in foreign language teaching practice’ by Claire Kramsch