I am ICREA Research Professor in Sociolinguistics in the Departament d'Humanitats at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. There I am a member of the Grup de Recerca en Espais Interculturals, Llengües i Identitats (GREILI). I am also Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences (UK); Visiting Professor at University College London, Institute of Education; and editor of the Routledge book series Language, Society and Political Economy. I joined ICREA in September 2012 after 16 years at the University College London Institute of Education, where I was Professor of Languages in Education. Prior to that, I worked in Barcelona for 18 years as an English teacher in centres such as ESADE, and as a Lecturer in Applied Linguistics at the Universitat de Barcelona and the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. I completed my PhD in Applied Linguistics at the University Lancaster (UK) in 1995.  

Research interests

Over the past ten years I have focused primarily on the dominant form of capitalism in the early 21^st century (AKA neoliberalism) and the inequality and class warfare it has wrought. My most recent work examines four different aspects of contemporary society: (1) ‘post-truth’ and related concepts and the critical analysis of discourses in the hyper-mediatised, toxic-informational environment in which we live; (2) the internationalization and Englishization of higher education worldwide as part of the broader neoliberalization of societies; (3) new ways of framing discussions of the construct ‘identity’ in the early 21^stcentury (e.g. incorporating historical materialism and Marxist humanism); and (4) the roots and routes of intersectionality, via memoirs, biographies and other accounts of African American history and sociology and, in particular, Black feminism. I am co-editor, with Deborah Cameron, of Globalization and Language Teaching (Routledge, 2002) and with Sarah Khan, of The Secret Life of English-medium Instruction (Routledge, 2021). I am co-author, with John Gray and Marnie Holborow, of Neoliberalism and Applied Linguistics (Routledge, 2012). I am sole author of The Social Turn in Second Language Acquisition (Edinburgh University Press, 2003); Multilingual Identities in a Global City: London Stories (Palgrave, 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) and Post-Truth and Political Discourse (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). I am currently writing a book entitled Innovations and Challenges in Identity Research (Routledge, 2021).