Linguists on the move in the global landscape?

Abstract

This paper focuses on the sociolinguistic effects of tightening job markets in applied linguistics, and situates the discussion within the time-space compression of late modernist capitalist enterprises using frameworks in the sociolinguistics of mobility, political economy and raciolinguistics. The paper focuses on single-utterance speech acts of reservation conspicuously invoked to frame the discourse of dissent on the part of committee members in high-stakes interview encounters. Focusing on locally-sourced data collected in a publicly-funded, U.S. university, the paper examines how macro-contexts of skill oversaturation in the job market serve to frame enactments of stance in these high-stakes interactional microcosms while pointing to novel epistemological trending in complexity, conviviality and cosmopolitan encounter.