37.2009, Calls: English for Specific Purposes - "Special Issue: Digital Transformation of Specialised Institutional Communication: AI, Multimodality and Linguistic Justice" (Jrnl)
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LINGUIST List: Vol-37-2009. Mon Jun 08 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.
Subject: 37.2009, Calls: English for Specific Purposes - "Special Issue: Digital Transformation of Specialised Institutional Communication: AI, Multimodality and Linguistic Justice" (Jrnl)
Moderator: Steven Moran (linguist at linguistlist.org)
Managing Editor: Valeriia Vyshnevetska
Team: Helen Aristar-Dry, Mara Baccaro, Daniel Swanson
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Editor for this issue: Valeriia Vyshnevetska <valeriia at linguistlist.org>
================================================================
Date: 05-Jun-2026
From: Ran Yi [ran.yi at unsw.edu.au]
Subject: English for Specific Purposes - "Special Issue: Digital Transformation of Specialised Institutional Communication: AI, Multimodality and Linguistic Justice" (Jrnl)
Journal: English for Specific Purposes
Issue: Digital Transformation of Specialised Institutional
Communication: AI, Multimodality and Linguistic Justice
Call Deadline: 30-Sep-2026
We expect special issues to pursue an agenda and to be introduced by
an agenda-setting paper, which could take the form of a guest
editorial. Please include details of the introductory paper. The rapid
expansion of generative AI, automated language technologies,
multimodal communication platforms, and data-driven professional
workflows is fundamentally reshaping specialised communication across
institutional settings. In legal, governmental, medical, corporate,
diplomatic, and educational domains, communication is increasingly
mediated not only by human professionals but also by algorithmic
systems that influence how specialised meanings are produced,
translated, interpreted, evaluated, and circulated. This
transformation has major implications for English for Specific
Purposes (ESP), a field centrally concerned with how language operates
in professional, disciplinary, and institutional contexts.
This special issue proposes to examine the digital transformation of
specialised institutional communication through the intersecting
lenses of AI, multimodality, and linguistic justice. It addresses a
timely gap in ESP scholarship. While the field has produced
influential work on genre, discourse, needs analysis, workplace
communication, professional identity, and digital literacies, less
attention has been paid to how AI-enabled systems reshape discourse
practices in high-stakes specialised environments. Today, specialised
communication is no longer simply a matter of domain knowledge and
rhetorical competence; it is increasingly co-produced through
automated transcription, machine translation, large language models,
speech recognition, predictive text systems, and multimodal
interfaces.
These developments raise important ESP questions. How do AI tools
transform the discourse features of specialised communication? What
happens to stance, hedging, mitigation, modality, evidentiality, and
interpersonal positioning when professional discourse is filtered
through algorithmic systems? How are specialised genres changing as
communication becomes increasingly multimodal and machine-assisted?
How do such technologies affect access, participation, and fairness
for multilingual professionals working in English-dominant
institutional settings? And how should ESP research and pedagogy
respond to these shifts?
The special issue will contribute to the field in three major ways.
First, it extends ESP research from traditional analyses of
specialised texts and practices to the study of AI-mediated
specialised discourse. This includes examining how professional
communication is transformed by machine assistance in settings such as
legal proceedings, policy communication, research environments,
technical documentation, translation and interpreting, healthcare
communication, and international organisational discourse.
Second, it foregrounds multimodality as central to contemporary ESP.
Specialised communication increasingly unfolds across text, speech,
image, screen-based interaction, automated captioning, visual
analytics, and hybrid human-machine interfaces. This requires richer
analytical frameworks capable of addressing not only linguistic form
but also multimodal meaning-making in professional environments.
Third, the special issue introduces linguistic justice as an important
normative and analytical dimension for ESP research. In specialised
communication, apparently minor discourse features, such as hesitation
markers, mitigation, discourse markers, reformulations, or culturally
shaped interactional routines, can have major consequences for
credibility, expertise, authority, and access. AI systems may
standardise, flatten, or misread such features, especially in
multilingual and intercultural contexts. For ESP, this raises pressing
questions about whose language practices are recognised as legitimate,
how professional meaning is preserved or distorted, and how equitable
participation can be ensured in increasingly technologised
communicative settings.
This topic will be of clear interest to readers of English for
Specific Purposes because it directly engages with the journal’s
longstanding concerns: specialised discourse, professional
communication, genre analysis, workplace communication, disciplinary
literacy, digital communication, and pedagogy. It also offers a
forward-looking research agenda at a moment when AI is rapidly
transforming the communicative ecology of specialised domains.
We expect to receive submissions in areas including, but not limited
to:
- AI-mediated specialised communication in legal, medical, business,
diplomatic, technical, and educational settings
- multimodal analysis of institutional and professional discourse
- corpus-based studies of specialised genres in digitally mediated
environments
- machine translation, speech recognition, and LLMs in professional
communication
- specialised discourse and linguistic justice in multilingual
workplaces
- genre transformation under AI and platformisation
- ESP pedagogy for AI-rich professional environments
- needs analysis for emerging digital and multimodal professional
literacies
- human–AI co-production of specialised texts
- ethical, epistemic, and interactional issues in automated
professional communication
We welcome a range of article types, including original empirical
research, corpus-based studies, discourse and genre analyses,
workplace case studies, pedagogical interventions, methodological
papers, and state-of-the-art reviews.
Proposed Timeline:
Call for papers circulated by 1 June 2026
Initial invited contributor abstracts confirmed by 31 July 2026
Submission deadline by 30 September 2026
Desk screening completed by 30 October 2026
First round peer review reports returned by 30 December 2026
First decision notifications issued by 30 January 2027
Revised manuscripts submitted by 30 March 2027
Second round review (if required) completed by 30 April 2027
Final acceptance decisions issued by 31 May 2027
Guest editorial completed by 30 June 2027
Special issue submitted to production by 30 July 2027
Online publication of special issue by 30 August 2027
Guest Editors:
Ran Yi, Ph.D., Associate Professor, College of International Studies,
National University of Defense Technology, Nanjing, China.
Wei Zhang, Ph.D., Associate Professor, College of International
Studies, National University of Defense Technology, Nanjing, China.
Carlos Hidalgo-Ternero Ph.D., Assistant Professor, University of
Málaga, Málaga, Spain.
Haohan Meng, MA, PhD Candidate (Final Stage), College of International
Studies, National University of Defense Technology, Nanjing, China.
Special issue information:
Removed a guest editor from this special issue. Changes made in 'SI
guest editor information' and 'Guest editors'.
Manuscript submission information:
Manuscripts should be submitted online at
https://www.editorialmanager.com/espj/default.asp
Please select “VSI: AI, Multimodality & Justice" when submitting your
manuscript to this special issue and indicate the actual article type
in the cover letter.
Deadline for manuscript submission: 30 September 2026
Keywords:
AI-mediated specialised communication
multimodality
linguistic justice
institutional discourse
professional communication
ESP
Online announcement:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/special-issue/334010/digital-transformation-of-specialised-institutional-communication-ai-multimodality-and-linguistic-justice
Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics
Computational Linguistics
Discourse Analysis
Forensic Linguistics
Translation
Subject Language(s): Arabic (ara)
Chinese (zho)
English (eng)
French (fra)
Spanish (spa)
Language Family(ies): English based
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