Resumen de Toward un-WEIRDing academic publishing about language [Applied Linguistics]

Christina Higgins

• In this commentary, I reflect on the shortcomings in representing linguistic knowledge in academic publishing. While Klein’s 1989 article Schreiben oder Lesen, aber nicht beides, oder: Vorschlag zur Wiedereinführung der Keilschrift mittels Hammer und Meißel calls attention to the overproduction of scholarly knowledge in the context of publish or perish ideologies, I invite us to consider how we distribute knowledge within the spaces of academic publishing with regard to global north and global south scholars and contexts. At present, scholarship about language is largely produced by scholars in WEIRD contexts, that is, western, educated, industrial, rich, democratic societies. This leads to limited outcomes in terms of what we can find out about the nature of language by virtue of excluding a majority of the world’s populations and contexts. As we go about questioning the purpose of academic publishing, we also need to consider how to better represent our findings in light of the narrowness of what we have researched.