David Block

With regard to my current work, I would say that it focuses on four distinct and different aspects of contemporary society:

(1) the infosphere and politics: ‘post-truth’ and related concepts, communication and identity on the social media and the critical analysis of political discourses in increasingly information-toxic societies. 

(2) the neoliberalisation of higher education: how the internationalisation of universities worldwide is part of the broader neoliberalisation of societies, and how English-medium instruction is a specific example of this process.

(3) new ways of framing identity as being in the world in the 21stcentury: examining being in the world through a Marxist historical materialist lens, problematizing notions such as ‘belonging’ and situating the infosphere as the most important site of being and identity construction today.

(4) the roots and routes of intersectionality: via memoirs, biographies and other accounts from African American history and sociology, Black feminism and post/decolonial literature, an examination of the multiple and intersected forms of oppression and exploitation based in class, gender, race and other aspects of being in the world. 

As regards books:

I am co-editor of two books:

• with Deborah Cameron: Globalization and Language Teaching (Routledge, 2002)

• with Sarah Khan: The Secret Life of English-medium Instruction (Routledge, 2021)

I am co-author of one book (with John Gray and Marnie Holborow): 

• Neoliberalism and Applied Linguistics (Routledge, 2012)

I am sole author of eight books:

• The Social Turn in Second Language Acquisition (Edinburgh University Press, 2003)

• Multilingual Identities in a Global City: London Stories (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)

• Second Language Identities (Continuum, 2007; re-issued in 2014 as a ‘Bloomsbury Classic in Linguistics’)

• Social Class and Applied Linguistics (Routledge, 2014)

• Political Economy and Sociolinguistics: Neoliberalism, Inequality and Social Class (Bloomsbury, 2018; shortlisted for the 2019 BAAL Book Prize)

• Post-Truth and Political Discourse (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)

• Innovations and Challenges in Identity Research (Routledge, 2022)

• Interviews in Applied Linguistics: Autobiographical Reflections on Research Processes (Routledge, 2024)  

I am a member of the Academy of the Social Sciences (UK) and Visiting Professor at University College London Institute of Education.

In 2014, I began to edit the Routledge book series Language, Society and Political Economy, with eight titles published to date and two additional titles in progress. See: https://www.routledge.com/Language-Society-and-Political-Economy/book-series/LSPE. 

Since January 2022, I have been co-editing the series with Will Simpson. 

For more information, see the heading 'Book Series'