Injusto, Errado, Unfair? Scholars’ Perceptions of Linguistic Injustice in the Latin American Scientific Field

LUCÍA CÉSPEDES

San Andrés Cholula

Congreso; 4S/ESOCITE 2nd Joint Meeting "Reunion, recuperation, reconfiguration Knowledges and technosciences for living together"; 2022

4S/ESOCITE

The claim that multilingual scholars whose first language is not English suffer from discrimination from those agents who act as linguistic gatekeepers has been frequently sustained, but there seems to be two main perspectives in the literature. As synthesized by Soler (2020), “some researchers seem to see English as not only an obstacle for multilingual researchers publishing internationally, but perhaps even as an agent responsible for the linguistic injustices that such scholars endure in the publishing cycle. (…) other researchers seem to emphasise the idea that, while language is an important factor accounting for the success or failure in the publishing process, other non-linguistic variables may be equally, if not more, significant” (p.35).In order to engage in this debate, in this presentation I offer a systematization of perspectives and representations of Argentinian and Brazilian researchers across different disciplines. Analyzing the results of a survey and a series of in-depth interviews, feelings of linguistic (and, for those in the Social Sciences and Humanities, epistemic) injustice emerge as a frequent concern for scholars based in Global South institutions. At the same time, this is not seen as an insurmountable obstacle in pursuing an internationally oriented trajectory: a number of different strategies are deployed in order to gain access to the resources needed to publish successfully. Since both symbolic and material constraints are mentioned by scholars across disciplines, research in this line constitutes a good starting point towards a more explicit discussion in specific linguistic policies for the scientific-academic field.