Professor Bob Hodge

When I was a PhD student, I read two books in Discourse Analysis, which were to become fundamental to my understanding of the field, namely Social Semiotics and Language as Ideology, both co-authored by Bob Hodge and Gunther Kress. Bob Hodge is Professor in the Institute for Culture and Society at the University of Western Sydney and despite the fact that we are both based in Sydney, we’d never met until a few days ago. Bob had contacted me a few weeks ago to say how much he enjoys Language on the Move and so we finally got to meet up for a lunch conversation.

Meeting someone whose work you have admired since being a PhD student is quite special and I prepared by catching up on Bob’s amazingly diverse work, which, in addition to discourse analysis, includes research in Australian multiculturalism, Chinese Studies and the application of Chaos Theory to areas such as Language Teaching and Management Studies, to name a few.

On his website, Bob describes himself as “a radical transdisciplinarian” and, as someone who also feels that linguistics is never quite enough to understand the research problems I am interested in, one of the first questions I asked Bob was about his trajectory into and out of Linguistics (and, currently, back in, as I’ve learnt).

His way into linguistics was relatively easy to explain, particularly to someone who shares the same obsession: a deep and abiding fascination with human language and the ways in which it shapes who we are while we use it to shape the world. We also discovered that, in both cases, this fascination had been fostered at a young age by a Classical Education.

Bob’s way out of linguistics surprisingly also resonated with me – I say ‘surprisingly’ because Bob’s trajectory out of linguistics has to do with the nature of the discipline and one could expect that our experiences would have been quite different seeing that we entered the discipline about a generation apart. However, at different times and in different countries, Bob and myself entered Linguistics precisely to be repelled by its disciplinarity.

Linguistics, as a discipline, has been fundamentally shaped by the so-called “linguistics wars,” which since the 1960s have pitted generativists against functionalists. A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education offers this view of the discipline:

Linguistics is populated by a deeply factionalized group of scholars who can’t agree on what they’re arguing about and who tend to dismiss their opponents as morons or frauds or both. Such divisions exist, to varying degrees, in all disciplines, but linguists seem uncommonly hostile. The word “brutal” comes up again and again, as do “spiteful,” “ridiculous,” and “childish.”

While “actually existing” Linguistics is not that bad Linguistics is obviously not a great home for free spirits. “It’s the problem that is central to my work,” Bob explained, “and you have to be capable to take on board whatever concepts, frameworks and bodies of knowledge are pertinent to solve the problem.”

“How do you do that in practice?” I asked. “How do you actually manage to stay on top of all the areas in which you’ve been engaged in?” This question must be understood against the background of Bob’s broad area of research expertise as described on his website:

Professor Bob Hodge has many active research interests: in analytic and conceptual toolkits for social and cultural research (critical linguistics, discourse analysis, social semiotics); in major theoretical traditions in humanities and social sciences (Marxism, psychoanalysis, post-colonialism, post-modernism, critical management studies, chaos theory); in radical transdisciplinarity (including science in the mix) and engaged research; and in specific areas of study (globalisation, cyberculture, Australian Studies, Indigenous Studies, Mexico and Latin America, Chinese language and culture, education, popular culture, literature (classical, early modern, contemporary). He has published in all these areas, and has supervised doctoral studies on all of them and more.

As someone who is constantly struggling with the fact that my interests and commitments are much more wide-ranging than I can squeeze into my time, maybe I partly expected a response that would be some sort of ‘how-to’ fix, an instruction on how to practice interdisciplinarity more efficiently. Bob’s response was much more basic and, hence, inspiring:

You have to understand that interdisciplinarity is always a promise. It’s a commitment you make to go where your research problem takes you. You don’t start with interdisciplinarity because you can never know enough. If that’s what you did, you’d never start your research because you never know enough.

I love the idea of interdisciplinarity as promise. It’s the pledge that undergirds all our inquiry.

Bob is currently writing a book that is partly a fresh intervention into the linguistics wars from an insider-outsider perspective. He will talk about this most recent development in his interdisciplinary project himself in the Applied Linguistics @MQ series on August 14. So, mark your diaries and, of course, we’ll also broadcast the seminar on our Ustream Channel to the global Language on the Move community.

Source: Kang 2009, p. 201

Every linguistics undergraduate student is by now familiar with the fact of linguistic imperialism in academic publishing where the pressure to publish in international journals translates into the pressure to publish in English, leaving researchers from non-English-speaking backgrounds at a competitive disadvantage. I have often joked in my introductory sociolinguistics lectures that discovering a cure for cancer and not being able to publish it in English would probably be little different from not discovering a cure for cancer at all. The academic pressure to publish in English is thus old news but I’d never before thought about the fact that there might be more to the story: does the dominance of US- and UK-based journals among the most highly-ranked journals not only constitute pressure to publish in English but also pressure to conduct particular types of research? I.e. is there not only a form effect but also a content effect?

Myungkoo Kang’s article about university reform in South Korea demonstrates exactly that. In the name of globalization and international competitiveness, South Korean academics, just as their colleagues elsewhere, are under pressure to publish in SCI- and SSCI-indexed journals. In South Korean academia, publications in SCI- and SSCI-indexed journals bring financial rewards for faculty, have become indispensable for being awarded tenure and constitute a positive hiring consideration.

In 2007, for example, there were 1,865 journals indexed in the SSCI. 1,585 (79.62%) of these originated in the USA and UK (see table for details). SSCI-indexed “international” journals are thus clearly hugely skewed towards those originating in Anglophone “center” countries. Among Asian countries, 7 SSCI-indexed journals (0.38%) originate in Japan, 5 (0.27%) in China, 4 (0.21%) in India, 3 (0.16%) in South Korea, and one each (0.05%) in Singapore and Taiwan. Even those SSCI-indexed journals published outside the Anglophone “center” countries are overwhelmingly English-language publications. So, the fact that pressure to publish in SSCI-indexed journals translates into pressure to publish in English is obvious.

In order to find out whether it is not only the language of publication that changes with the pressure to publish in SSCI-indexed journals but also the actual research, Kang analyzed articles published by Asian scholars in the top SSCI-indexed journals in the area of Communication. He found that most such articles “framed local phenomena with American mainstream theories” or “appropriated mainstream theories by redefining mainstream theoretical concepts.” By contrast, only a very small number of these articles attempted to formulate research problems from the local context.

The author concludes that South Korea’s policy for improving research competitiveness (as expressed in pressure to publish in SSCI-indexed journals) actually jeopardizes local/national knowledge production and the formulation of local/national research agendas with relevance to the actual needs of local/national societies. The attempt to foster globally top-ranked social sciences researchers in South Korea constitutes simultaneous encouragement of social sciences researchers to neglect issues within their immediate social contexts.

Kang’s paper is part of a special issue of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies devoted to “Neo-liberal Conditions of Knowledge.” All the contributions in that volume demonstrate how academic “internationalization” in effect means the imposition of English-mediated centralized regimes of knowledge. It is not only local/national languages that are being pushed aside and undermined in the process but, more worryingly, locally informed, locally engaged, and critical forms of knowledge production and dissemination.

Kang, M. (2009). ‘State‐guided’ university reform and colonial conditions of knowledge production Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 10 (2), 191-205 DOI: 10.1080/14649370902823355

The whole dreary story is documented in an editorial in issue 20(4) of the journal: Dr Karin Calvo-Goller, the author of The Trial Proceedings of the International Criminal Court. ICTY and ICTR Precedents, found that her book was negatively reviewed. The review in question can be found here. Consequently, she asked the reviews editor, Professor Joseph Weiler, to remove it from the website and when he refused – the whole correspondence is set out in the editorial – she sued him for libel. The libel case will be before a French court later this year.

I know nothing about international law and so can’t comment on the merits of the book nor of the review. However, I’ve seen enough book reviews to say that if the negative things said in that review are “libelous” than that’s the end of book reviewing and book review editing! I’ve seen much more strongly worded negative book reviews; I’ve actually had much more negative reviews published under my editorship; similarly negative things have been said about my own books, and – dare I confess it? – I’ve said less pleasant things about the work of others myself in published reviews.

In his editorial, Professor Weiler includes a beautiful response letter he wrote to Dr Calvo-Goller in response to her initial request to take down the review. It says it all about the issues of academic freedom involved, the way book review editing works, and the damage that Dr Calvo-Goller is doing to her own reputation with this frontal assault on academic freedom.

I have no doubt that the French court will be wise enough to throw out the case and the assault on academic freedom it constitutes. But even so, the damage has been done. I’d hate to find myself in Professor Weiler’s shoes and to have to stand trial for publishing an average negative review. Luckily, discourse analysts and linguists are on the whole less litigiously inclined than jurists!

The editorial ends with an appeal for assistance and includes suggestions on how anyone concerned can help and I’m copying and pasting those suggestions here:

a. You may send an indication of indignation/support by email attachment to the following email address EJIL.academicfreedom@Gmail.com Kindly write, if possible, on a letterhead indicating your affiliation and attach such letters to the email. Such letters may be printed and presented eventually to the Court. Please do not write directly to Dr Calvo-Goller, or otherwise harass or interfere in any way whatsoever with her right to seek remedies available to her under French law.

b. It would be particularly helpful to have letters from other Editors and Book Review Editors of legal and non-legal academic Journals concerned by these events. Kindly pass on this Editorial to any such Editor with whom you are familiar and encourage him or her to communicate their reaction to the same email address. It would be especially helpful to receive such letters from Editors of French academic journals and from French academic authors, scholars and intellectuals.

c. Finally, it will be helpful if you can send us scanned or digital copies of book reviews (make sure to include a precise bibliographical reference) which are as critical or more so than the book review written by Professor Weigend – so as to illustrate that his review is mainstream and unexceptional. You may use the same email address EJIL.academicfreedom@Gmail.co

If anyone reading this ever had their book negatively reviewed, here is your chance to redeem yourself and to turn your humiliation into triumph over adversity! Send in that negative book review and tell the judges that while you were disappointed, hurt, upset, outraged or whatever, never for a second did it occur to you that that negative review constituted libel! It was part of a normal academic dialogue and argument and you either ignored it, responded to it in the “response to review” genre or actually learnt from it and challenged your own thinking.

Good luck to Professor Weiler and wisdom to the court that will be hearing the case!

Joseph H.H. Weiler (2010). Editorial: Book Reviewing and Academic Freedom European Journal of International Law, 20 (4), 967-976 DOI: 10.1093/ejil/chp114