I am ICREA Research Professor in Sociolinguistics in the Departament d'Humanitats, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, where I am a member of the Grup de Recerca en Espais Interculturals, Llengües i Identitats (GREILI). I am also in the Grup de Recerca en Aprenentatge i Ensenyament de Llengües (GR@EL; Facultat de Traducció). I am 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 University College London Institute of Education, where I was Professor of Languages in Education. Prior to that, I worked in Barcelona for 18 years, teaching English in centres such as ESADE, and teaching Applied Linguistics at the Universitat de Barcelona and the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. I completed my PhD at the University Lancaster (UK) in 1995.  

Research interests

In recent 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 from a sociolinguistic perspective. 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.