This article examines how multilingual scholars who work outside English‐speaking countries negotiate the demand to publish in English alongside their broader academic and publishing interests. Based on our ethnographic study of the academic writing and publishing practices of 16 psychology scholars in Hungary, Slovakia, and Spain, we characterize the range of communities for whom the scholars are writing, drawing on notions of discourse community, community of practice, and speech community. We discuss the differential value attached to publications for different communities and how such value is sustained through the rewards systems in which scholars work. We offer brief profiles of three scholars from the study to illustrate how they negotiate academic and professional interests. We explain implications of the findings to TESOL, particularly for curriculum and pedagogy in English for academic purposes.

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Fictive kin, defined as family-type relationships, based not on blood or marriage but rather on religious rituals or close friendship ties, constitutes a type of social capital that many immigrant groups bring with them and that facilitates their incorporation into the host society. We describe three types of fictive kin systems in different immigrant populations and argue that their functions are similar across various ethnic groups and types of fictive kin relationships. Fictive kin systems expand the network of individuals who provide social and economic capital for one another and thereby constitute a resource to immigrants as they confront problems of settlement and incorporation. While anthropologists have long noted systems of fictive kin in premodern and modernizing societies, sociologists have paid little attention to fictive kin networks. We argue, however, that systems of fictive kin constitute an important part of the social networks that draw immigrants to a particular locale and provide them with the material and social support that enables them to become incorporated into a new and often hostile society. Data are derived from interviews with informants from various immigrant groups in Houston, Texas, and from a Yoruba community in Brooklyn, New York.

Scholars around the world are under increasing pressure to publish their research in the medium of English. However, little empirical research has explored how the global premium of English influences the academic text production of scholars working outside of English-speaking countries. This article draws on a longitudinal text-oriented ethnographic study of psychology scholars in Hungary, Slovakia, Spain, and Portugal to follow the trajectories of texts from local research and writing contexts to English-medium publications. Our findings indicate that a significant number of mediators, “literacy brokers,” who are involved in the production of such texts, influence the texts in different and important ways. We illustrate in broad terms the nature and extent of literacy brokering in English-medium publications and characterize and exemplify brokers’ different orientations. We explore what kind of brokering is evident in the production of a specific group of English-medium publications—articles written and published in English-medium international journals—by focusing on three text histories. We conclude by discussing what a focus on brokering can tell us about practices surrounding academic knowledge production.

Multilingual scholars located outside of Anglophone contexts face growing pressure to publish in English. Evidence from a longitudinal "text-ethnographic" study exploring how 50 psychology and education scholars in southern and central Europe are responding to such pressure indicates that individual linguistic and rhetorical competence alone are usually insufficient for securing publication in English-medium journals. Rather, scholars' accounts demonstrate that participation in academic research networks functions as a key resource for publishing. This article examines the importance of networks and tracks how scholars gain access to and participate in them. We present 'network histories' that map out the network participation of four scholars, foregrounding several core dimensions: local and transnational, formal and informal, strong and weak, durable and temporary. Our findings suggest that strong, local, durable networks are crucial to enabling scholars' participation in transnational networks, which support their publishing in both English and local languages. Findings contribute directly to our understandings about academic publishing in a global context and to broader debates about the efficacy of initiatives for increasing research collaboration such as those sponsored by the EU Framework Programmes. We conclude by briefly considering implications for supporting multilingual scholars' publication and programmes aimed at increasing collaboration.