The Geopolitics of Knowledge Production in Applied English Language Studies: Transknowledging and a Two-Eyed Critical Southern Decoloniality
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper mapped out and explored the geopolitics of knowledge production in applied English language studies (AELS). It did so by employing a double judgmental sampling and by investigating four composite factors in volume 42 of the journal Applied Linguistics (AL), which comprised six issues and forty-three articles, as published in 2021. These composite factors were nationalities and institutional affiliations of the editor, the associate editors, the editorial board, and the international advisory board; nationalities and institutional affiliations of publishing or contributing authors; the foci of the published articles; and the theoretical framings and epistemic orientations of the published articles. The paper maintains that these composite factors serve as important axes of epistemic production practices and as critical loci of knowledge circulation for AELS in this journal. AL has occupied the first quartile (Q1) in communication, and in linguistics and language since 1999 as ranked by both Scopus and Resurchify. As such, it is a top-tier journal in the field of AELS or of applied linguistics. Based on its analysis, one of the arguments the paper makes is that individually and collectively these composite factors function, simultaneously, as a gate-keeping mechanism for knowledge production and as a validation, legitimation, and arbitration mechanism for knowledge production in AL. The paper has also established that there is an invisibilization of the Global South authors in these six issues of AL. This factor, the paper contends, is attributable to the geopoliticizing of knowledge production in these AL’s issues. Lastly and importantly, the paper advocates transknowledging and a two-eyed critical Southern decoloniality for AELS, and draws a link between this two-pronged theoretical framing and transepistemic language education.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.053 | 0.072 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.013 | 0.012 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.054 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.022 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.015 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".