CRITICS: globalisation

[Robert Phillipson]

Norman Fairclough's proposal for a network in the area of
globalisation of discursive practices is a great one. There is a
clear need for each of us to know more of what is happening on other
professional patches. I have been working for some time in the area
of the export of Anglo-American missionizing English teaching
practices, but more recently on processes of "Europeanization", which
can be seen and investigated at a number of levels (e.g. the spread
of French legal language within European Union bureaucracies;
hierarchisation of official and working languages, and related
hegemonic rationalizations, ...). Tove Skutnabb-Kangas and I have
recently gathered a number of our recent papers in this area into a
set of pre-prints, "Papers in European language policy", which we
could send to anyone interested.
But some of my students are forcing me to think about other
globalization processes, such as the influence of MTV on Danish youth
(for which Norman's work has been inspirational). One of my
colleagues, Bent Preisler, is currently doing a project on incipient
bilingualism in various sub-cultures in Denmark (English for rock
music, computer freaks etc), for which no simple uni-directional
models of understanding are likely to be adequate. So yes please,
keep me posted/e-mailed.
Robert Phillipson