Inequality and Class in Language Policy and Planning

Abstract

In recent years, critical language policy and planning (LPP) researchers have increasingly turned to political economy as a source discipline, and neoliberalism has come to be a baseline concept. Nevertheless, political economy in LPP research is often underdeveloped; neoliberalism remains ill-defined and under-theorised; and inequality and class are virtually erased from analysis. This chapter elaborates on the value of these concepts for LPP research. It begins with a brief discussion of LPP and then discusses political economy as a field of inquiry, neoliberalism as a master frame for a growing body of LPP research, and finally, inequality and class as key constructs for understanding the effects of neoliberalism on contemporary societies. This theoretical background is followed by a section examining how inequality and class have emerged as constructs in recent LPP research, and the chapter closes with considerations about further research.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 11 citations exist upstream.