Asylum seekers

In our previous issues, we have outlined our commitment to strengthen the focus on Society by critically examining the categories on which we build our work as scholars of language […] But so far we have done this without explicitly addressing the very institutional position from which many of us produce knowledge: the University – the big elephant in the room. And it is not always easy to do so. After all, the university is the workplace that structures our knowledge production while at the same time providing the means which ratify the social and intellectual legitimacy of what we do (including having access to editorial positions), even if this is under conditions of increasing precarity and instability. […] The five articles in the present issue offer us, in our view, with avenues for deepening reflection on these matters. Although authors weren’t exactly reacting to a particular call, we read their contributions as speaking to these concerns. We do so with two goals in mind. First, to insist that it is worth keeping an eye on the social relations of inequality that we continue to mystify as knowledge producers who write from within higher education institutions. Second, to sustain venues where we can continue talking about this openly and honestly, in ways that don’t paralyse us but which rather propel us to generate productive forms of transgression and counter-conducts within our universities – not only in the sense envisioned by Foucault (2007) but also in connection with the reactivation of a variety of non-European indigenous systems of knowing (Mbembe, 2003). More specifically, the contributions in this issue help us delve in a critique of the relations of power and inequality that frame and inform our work and that we have shaped. This includes a critique of: (a) our roles as researchers and knowledge producers; (b) the categories we mobilize when doing research; (c) the histories of our own academic disciplines; (d) the learning spaces that we contribute to create as teachers; and (e) our recruitment practices in universities.