Language, culture and society

Abstract

We write this editorial at a time when inequality has become a major concern for a variety of social actors and institutions in a range of social domains. Far from being new, contemporary public debates about what is often framed as “the widening of the gap between the poor and the rich” seem to us more like an instantiation of larger dynamics of differentiation and unequal distribution of wealth that are deeply rooted in historical processes. But the scale and intensity in which these are perceived today make it (even more) difficult to ignore, and scholarly work engaging with these issues in the social sciences and humanities via greater focus on political economy can attest to this. Indeed, the intensification of this line of work in the language disciplines has shed important light on the daily situated (re)making of such dynamics and processes as well as on the lived experiences that come with them. Yet, heightened attention to these aspects has also paved the way for new theoretical, epistemological and teleological questions to emerge: How do we channel current anxieties to produce research that does not merely aim to document what we think we know is happening but instead to challenge our very assumptions of how language gets entrenched with regimes of power, difference and change? What set of conceptual frameworks and analytical perspectives are there for us to capture the reification of structures of inequality without preventing us from imagining radical forms of hope and alternative futures? These are some of the preoccupations that drive our attention to the intersections of language, culture and society. As a team heavily committed to the idea of setting up a new journal, we have from the start worked with boldness as a key principle guiding our vision for the language disciplines. Fully aware of the controversies around the notion of ‘culture’, we propose to address it as a terrain of struggle, one in which disciplinary knowledge about social structure, practice and meaning is seen as highly contested. In so doing, we draw on anthropological traditions that have called for a closer examination of the very historical conditions under which such disciplinary knowledge has been produced, circulated and taken up across space and time. This sensitivity, we are reminded, requires tracing back the ways in which the kind of conceptual work underpinning our research may have enabled specific historical projects of colonization and thus provided the