Research culture has been defined in multiple ways. At its simplest, research culture is broadly understood as “the way we do research around here” (Hill, 1999, p.1). This ‘way’ is game-like in that it is governed by rules, customs and norms. Yet, this simple understanding masks the volume of those rules, customs and norms, and it also masks the complexity involved in constructing, developing, changing, and critiquing particular research cultures. This is true for the research cultures that exist in Higher Education (HE) because many stakeholders are involved in such cultures (e.g., senior management, institution support staff, faculty members, funding bodies and academic publishers). HE Research cultures are predominantly driven by top-down inter-connected government and institutional policies. These policies set out the rules, customs and norms which are to be followed and they shape the behaviours, values and beliefs that underpin the desired culture. However, the success of these research cultures depends on the ‘buy in’ from many stakeholders. A key group of stakeholders is faculty members. Faculty members are ultimately tasked with attracting research funding, producing research and stimulating the production of new knowledge through mentoring research students and junior colleagues in their respective disciplines/fields of interest.

Faculty are expected to hold the necessary values and beliefs and exhibit behaviours that allow the top-down research culture from HE management to flourish. However, the top-down nature of a research culture and the fact it is a learned, potentially engrained behaviour means it is open to tensions and challenges from faculty (Cheetham, 2007). These tensions arise from the pressure on faculty to bring policies to life in real ‘on the job’ terms which inevitably impact relationships between internal HE management and support staff as well as external funding bodies and academic publishers.

In the case of Applied Linguistics, understanding these tensions is becoming ever more important. At the time of writing, our field faces an unprecedented level of decline in many countries. This decline is best evidenced by the present cull of faculty employment in university departments (e.g., see Weale, 2022), a lack of past investment globally (e.g., see Watermeyer et al., 2021), and in some cases, the complete removal of university language and linguistics degrees in some regions (The British Academy and University Council of Modern Languages (UCML), 2019). The current situation means our research is not only under threat, but it is increasingly difficult to exist within the current HE research culture because our existence is threatened, and our work is devalued. In contexts where our work is valued, we face increasing pressure to justify that value, compete for research funding, publish prolifically, and persuade stakeholders that our work has rigour and economic and social worth.

Although it is true that we see concrete evidence of how our colleagues comply with and/or challenge existing research cultures through work which tackles inequalities in funding and publication demands (e.g., see Habibie, 2022; Habibie & Hyland, 2019) and rigour initiatives such as the ‘Open Science’ movement in Applied Linguistics (Al-Hoorie & Hiver, 2023), and conference-level promotion of Open Applied Linguistics (American Association of Applied Linguistics (AAAL), 2023; British Association of Applied Linguistics (BAAL), 2023), we believe much of how our colleagues currently navigate research cultures and possibly operate in sub-cultures is unknown in many contexts.

This edited volume provides a platform for exploring HE research cultures and how faculty in Applied Linguistics exist within these cultures at the current time.

We invite colleagues to contribute theoretical or empirical chapters.

Key dates

Publication Steps Provisional Dates
Abstracts due 31st July 2023
Notification of acceptance by editors 14th August 2023
Chapters to be submitted for peer review 12th February 2024
Peer review February 2024 – May 2024
Final chapters due for editing 31st July 2024
Manuscript submitted to publisher 14th August 2024

Call information is at:

https://leemccallumnet.files.wordpress.com/2023/05/call-for-chapters_rc-final.pdf

Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics