Language Assemblages

Alastair Pennycook is Professor Emeritus at the University of Technology Sydney. His notable publications include The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language (1994) (now a Routledge Linguistics Classic), Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows (2007), Language and Mobility (2012) and Posthumanist Applied Linguistics (2018) (all winners of the BAAL Book Prize).

• Preface & Acknowledgements; 1. Why Language Assemblages?; 2. Language, Knowledge, Myths and Being; 3. Structures and Practices; 4. Linguistic, Semiotic and Sociomaterial Assemblages; 5. Other Language Ontologies; 6. Applied Linguistics as Practical Assemblage; References; Index.

'The assemblage envisions languages and texts as, in Pennycook's words, 'constantly under construction', enabling an analysis of 'how they are put together through social processes'. This conceptual framework, which a few years ago occupied an avant-garde niche within applied linguistics, has become indispensable. Pennycook's brilliant and lucid study incorporates assemblage at many levels, from the everyday practice of translanguaging and the contexts it occurs in, to the field of applied linguistics itself, as an assemblage of concepts and methods which, far from being a mere application of linguistic theory, is generating increasingly rich and ambitious theories of its own.' John E. Joseph, Professor of Applied Linguistics, University of Edinburgh