David Block

ABOUT ME:

I am Honorary Professor in Sociolinguistics in the Departament d’Humanitats at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. I am also a member of the Academy of the Social Sciences (UK). From September 2012 to January 2024, I was ICREA Research Professor in Sociolinguistics, first in the Departament de Lletres at the Universitat de Lleida (2012-2019) and then in the Departament d’Humanitats at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (2019-2024). From 1996 to 2012, I worked at the Institute of Education, University of London (now University College London Institute of Education), where I was Professor of Languages in Education from 2008 to 2012.  Over the past four decades, I have published books, articles and chapters on a variety of topics, ranging from second language teaching and learning to my more recent work examining multimodal practices and phenomena of all kinds (including identity, political discourses, social movements, multiculturalism and bi/multilingualism), drawing on scholarship in political economy, history, sociology, anthropology and geography. Since the beginning of the Great Recession of 2007-2008, I have devoted a great deal of my time and effort to the critical examination of neoliberalism as the dominant form of global capitalism in the early 21st century and inequality and social class divisions as key collateral effects. 

With regard to my current work, I would say that it focuses on three 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.

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)  

At present I am working on a new book for Routledge entitled Online Political Discourse in Polarised Times: Populism, Spectacle and Anything Goes, which will appear in late 2025

In 2014, I started the Routledge book series Language, Society and Political Economy, which I have co-edited with Will Smith since 2022. To date, eight books have been published with three additional titles in progress. See: https://www.routledge.com/Language-Society-and-Political-Economy/book-series/LSPE and information on this wedpage, under the heading 'Book Series'.