Is the dominance complete?: the (im)possibility of projecting diverse sociocultural voices in L2 English publishing

With the established status of English as the default language of international publication, there is a need for investigating the sociopolitics of its dominance in this domain, specifically including the sociocultural concerns surrounding academic writing and publishing in English by speakers of other languages. This study examined academic’s opinions and attitudes about the necessity and possibility of projecting non-Anglophone English writers’ diverse sociocultural voices in relation to their ‘historically defined identities’ and ‘ideologically constructed subjectivities’ in their writing for publication. The participants were eight faculty members at a major university in Hong Kong. We collected data through semi-structured interviews and used ‘abductive thematic analysis’ as our analytical procedure. The six themes of the findings reveal that the participants predominantly see very limited space for their diverse sociocultural voices in academic writing despite their vague desire for it. The findings also depict minor variations in their positions as well as some contrasting ideas about the possibility of such projection. We discuss this possibility and its implications for including authors’ social identities and diverse local ideologies in their academic writing in English as an additional language for international publishing.