No descuide sus pertenencias: linguistic community and franchised knowledge

Abstract

The enthronement of English as a compulsory language in the fields of university research (as this unintended abstract empirically shows) has important consequences on the way it is carried out as well as on the professional lives of teachers and researchers. The idea of franchised knowledge starts from an image that has become habitual: those shopping centers in any corner of the globalized world where the visitor invariably meets the same shops offering the same products, the franchises. That image is projected on contemporary research centers in this article. Thanks to the supposed mediation of a lingua franca, the generation and dissemination of knowledge thus produces a form of neocolonialism assimilable to the franchisee. Along with the fabrication of ideas, the circulation of language runs in one direction, from one language to all the others. Supported on a system of awards and punishments for the professional researcher, this epistemic servitude already shows its consequences: control of the scientific agenda by an Anglo-American intellectual metropolis, mastery of editing by English-language publishing groups and loss of influence of publications in other languages, drainage of talents and a dent in creativity in research centers on the provincial periphery. Ultimately, knowledge as a franchise builds a form of dependency that calls into question our personal and professional attitude as well as the strength of our social ties.