A fundamental and rarely debated assumption guiding most scientific research is that researchers, like all human beings, do not enjoy immediate and unencumbered access to objective reality. Their perspectives into and approach to investigating specific aspects of reality are always mediated via theories, concepts, research instruments, and ultimately language. There is hence no Archimedean viewpoint from which we can perceive or construe objective truth. However, recognition of this assumption does not necessarily make judgemental relativism – the view that all scientific and lay accounts are equally valid – the only possible stance on offer. Although our means to understand the world are inherently fallible and conditioned by the knowledge that is available at certain times in history, as researchers we must assume that objective reality, both natural and social, exists independently of the mind of the observer (Bhaskar, Reference Bhaskar1979). Otherwise, science, the very possibility of scientific progress, and the capacity for scientific discovery to improve the quality of both human and non-human life, would be impossible. Scholars thus remain steadfastly invested in pursuing the improvement of theories, concepts, and methodologies, and they do so through collective, critical, and conceptually grounded adjudication between stronger and weaker, better and worse theories. To this end, they must develop, work with, and critically reflect upon their own and their discipline’s philosophical assumptions about what is (ontology), how it can be known (epistemology), and why we do research (normativity).

This edited collection is for academics and novice researchers in the field of applied linguistics (AL) who are curious about how explicit engagement with epistemological, ontological, and normative assumptions through Critical Realism (CR), as a particular philosophy of science, can be fruitfully employed for the identification of research problems, the definition and delineation of entities and processes that are to be investigated, the methodological design, the analysis of data, and the explanations that are to be generated. Throughout these stages, researchers in AL, as in any other social scientific field, rely on specific, often implicit philosophical assumptions, rooted in, for instance, empiricism, positivism, interpretivism, social constructionism, postmodernism, and post-structuralism. Even in the natural sciences, as Staley (Reference Staley2014, p. xii) states, ‘there is no escaping philosophy. The question for the scientist is not whether to engage in philosophy, but only whether to do it well or badly.’ Similarly, Corson (Reference Corson1997), who perhaps was the first to see the relevance of CR to AL research, argued that

Binding the various perspectives offered in this edited volume is the shared understanding that engagement with the philosophy of science is essential for responsible, robust, and serious AL research for the benefit of society and the common good. As a particular philosophical perspective on scientific practice, CR can help research in AL transcend the conceptual and methodological constraints imposed by the two currently predominant perspectives in the field: positivism, which is associated with approaches to quantitative research, for instance, and experiments revolving around the acquisition of language; and interpretivism, which is associated with approaches to qualitative research that focus, for example, on situated discursive practices, multilingual identities, and language ideologies (see Bouchard, Reference Bouchard2021, and Sealey and Carter, Reference Sealey and Carter2004, for discussions). From a CR perspective, these two dominant strands in AL have greatly contributed to our understanding of both specific issues and broader areas of concern, although they do not necessarily speak to or understand each other very well. A more constructive dialogue between these two strands would, in part, require an ‘adequate metatheorical perspective’ (Bhaskar et al., Reference Bhaskar, Danermark and Price2018, p. 13), including critical reflection on both objects of study and, again, the fundamental assumptions about what constitutes good research practice. As a result of limited engagement with the philosophy of science, communities of researchers instead tend to defend their commitment to entrenched beliefs about good research practice, thus prioritising the reproduction rather than the sophistication and transformation of existing scholarly discourse and activities. Drawing on Kuhn’s theory of paradigms and scientific progress, Staley (Reference Staley2014, p. 60) describes this unfortunate situation in the following way:

In this book, we do not present CR as the ‘new game in town’ aiming for epistemic dominance by driving out other ways of conducting research in AL. As a matter of fact, CR remains pluralistic in relation to research methods, and the nine chapter contributions to this volume reflect this openness. According to Danemark and colleagues (Reference Danemark, Ekström and Karlsson2019, p. 19), CR ‘does not claim to develop a new method for social science. On the contrary, it questions any ambition to develop a specific method for all research. There is no such thing as the method of critical realism. However, critical realism offers guidelines for social science research and the evaluation of already established methods.’ From a CR perspective, decisions regarding the research design and the choice of specific research instruments and methods (e.g., corpus analysis, correlation and regression analysis, questionnaires, interviews) can and must be justified through the formulation of clear ontological statements about the structure, properties, and causal powers of the objects and phenomena under scrutiny. In other words, ontological considerations are given priority in CR research, and methodological decisions are deemed suitable or unsuitable based on clear accounts of the ontology of things studied.

Although not adding new AL research methods, CR (and the philosophy of science more generally) can therefore assist in clarifying, unpacking, dismantling, and removing conceptual obstacles, ideologies, and confusions that impede understanding and progress in our field. As a ‘philosophical underlabourer’ to social scientific research (Bhaskar, Reference Bhaskar1979), CR aims to identify the implicit ontological, epistemological, and normative commitments of scientific practice, and make them explicit. This helps eliminate inconsistencies between what scientists do and the implicit assumptions that underpin their work. For example, Bhaskar (Reference Bhaskar1979) argues that experimental researchers (e.g., scholars who aim for causal explanations based on statistically significant relationships between variables) often implicitly commit to depth realism, meaning that they acknowledge the existence of generative mechanisms beyond observable events. However, because of a shared assumption among these scholars that going beyond the level of the empirical (more on this later) is ‘less scientific’, they instead tend to endorse a positivist, empiricist stance by prioritising statistical methods of measurement in their works, notably by over-emphasising the importance of p values, as determined through null hypothesis significance testing (Custance, Reference Custance2025). This epistemological stance is grounded in three core philosophical assumptions: (1) empirical evidence is all we have at our disposal; (2) good scientific work is achieved through statistical analysis of the empirical evidence at hand; and (3) meaningful interpretation is determined through significance testing. Also unacknowledged here is general acceptance of the Humean covering law model of causality, a hallmark of empiricist scientific research. According to Elder-Vass (Reference Elder-Vass2010, p. 41), the covering law model holds that

Although experimental researchers, given their common acceptance of depth realism, might be fully aware that correlations – patterns of frequent or regular co-occurrence between variables – do not necessarily prove that cause–effect relations exist, their works tend to be structured by statistically justified causal claims, at the cost of the kind of ontological theorising necessary to causal explanation.

Although CR scholars do see some value in quantitative data analysis, and while some are not entirely dismissive of the possibility for scientific work to lead to prediction, they are more explicitly interested in providing causal explanations which go beyond the Humean model. Social scientists aligned with CR are critical of deterministic accounts of causal relations, notably the deductive–nomological model which adopts an explicitly linear view of causality, and places a great deal of importance on science’s (said) potential to predict future events. They also reject the idea that constant conjunctions constitute evidence of causality. Consequently, they do not grant the same explanatory status to statistical analysis, as experimental researchers tend to do (Porpora, Reference Porpora2024). Instead, CR scholars ‘advocate provisional causal explanations which consider how a phenomenon follows from previous phenomena, and the mechanisms which motivate causal processes as well as human behaviour and action’ (Bouchard, Reference Bouchard2021, pp. 201–202, emphasis original).

Applied linguists who adhere to interpretivism and social constructivism, in turn, tend to over-emphasize the discursive mediation of knowledge and social reality. Some even claim that people ‘construct’ social reality through discourse. Interpretivist AL research is also prominently developed through more radical claims which posit, for example, that discourses and/or narratives are the real causal agents (thus the prime analytical elements), somewhat leaving people and/or materiality aside (see Chapter 6 ‘Empiricism in Interpretivist Sociolinguistics’ for further discussion). Despite their marked interest in somewhat free-floating, author-less discourses (Sealey and Carter, Reference Sealey and Carter2004), interpretivist scholars paradoxically tend to embrace a different form of empiricism by trying to ‘show’ or even ‘prove’ that empirically accessible texts not only capture discourses and/or narratives but also provide evidence of their causal efficacy.

On the other hand, CR holds the more reasonable assumptions that social phenomena are construed (rather than ‘constructed’), and that language and discourse are involved in this process, rather than social reality being ‘constructed’ through discourse. Scholars of CR also attempt to formulate causal accounts by acknowledging (a) the emergent and stratified structure of social reality, (b) the differences between the world and what people say about it, (c) the differences between spoken/written texts and discourses, and (d) the relationship between discourse and materiality. They are also particularly interested in studying how people’s discourses and non-discursive activities can be constrained and/or enabled by broader forces, including materiality, as they attempt to fulfil their goals in a complex, layered, contingent, and unequal social world.

In sum, although both positivism and interpretivism differ at the surface level, they both overemphasise the importance of empirical data. From a CR perspective, this complicates the production of explanatory accounts, because other consequential factors which might not be observed, recorded, or measured are left unaccounted for. To be clear: CR highly values empirical research, although it is anti-empiricist in that it demands intensive conceptual work before, during, and after the collection and analysis of empirical data. Roy Bhaskar (Reference Bhaskar1979), the author who first formulated the principles of CR, proposed an explicitly stratified (or depth) ontology differentiating between the real (properties and powers of social and natural entities), the actual (the activation of those properties and powers), and the empirical (the traces of those cause–effect relationships that are observable and sometimes measurable). Real powers (e.g., the ability of a healthy human being to think) might be dormant or inactive, although when activated, they become causally effective. This activation can leave empirical traces, although it does not have to. According to CR, we therefore always have to start from a conceptualisation of the properties and powers of things (i.e., their ontology) at the level of the real – in light of what is empirically available to us – in order to arrive at causal explanations. For example, although evidence of thought processes unfolding in the mind of a person can be gathered through brain scans or through analysis of statements or behaviours by that person, the thought processes themselves – as consequential causal forces – must be apprehended largely through conceptual rather than empirical means. Moreover, CR’s distinction between the empirical, the actual, and the real allows researchers to (a) avoid the faulty assumption that empirical data encapsulates reality in its entirety, or that empirical evidence is the only thing they can comment on and (b) distinguish between experiences, events, and their causes (Elder-Vass, Reference Elder-Vass, Lawson, Latsis and Martins2006). It also allows scholars to consider causality not as a matter of constant conjunctions or ‘fixed laws’, but rather as mechanisms located at the level of the real, thus as understood through conceptual means. As Porpora (Reference Porpora2015, p. 20) explains, ‘conceptual questions are questions that take reason or logic to answer. Although reference to empirical cases is always necessary too, resolving conceptual questions does not require the collection of yet more data. Required instead is the analysis of ideas. Conceptual questions concern the meaning of what we are talking about.’

For the contributors to this edited volume on CR in AL, the above claims are not mere philosophical wanderings diverting attention from the ‘real task’ of improving language-related practices on the ground (e.g., language learning, language teaching, fostering multilingualism and greater inclusivity). Indeed, CR is invested in what makes practice ‘good’ and/or ‘effective’, although it does so by providing conceptually robust causal claims grounded in a clear ontology of things. Together, contributors to this edited volume share the conviction that using CR as a philosophical underlabourer, and anchoring AL research in a robust philosophy of science that facilitates the critical analysis of basic premises, can contribute to the strengthening of explanatory accounts, and, by extension, to the field’s potential to improve social practice in which language plays a central role.

Just as AL is a far-reaching branch of the social science with many different areas of scholarly interests, CR is a broad philosophical tent. Contributors to this volume demonstrate this by adopting slightly different perspectives towards the study of language as a social phenomenon and might even understand the relevance of CR to their works in slightly different ways. Nevertheless, all of them adhere to the fundamental principles of CR – ontological realism, epistemological relativism, and judgemental rationality – which are summarised in the following section.

I.1 Fundamental Principles of Critical Realism

Ontological realism is defined by Porpora (Reference Porpora2015, p. 67) as ‘the acceptance of a single, ontologically objective reality, common to us all and independent of human thought’. This intransitive (i.e., mind-independent) domain is understood to be different from the transitive domain (i.e., everything that is generated through human minds, for instance, research and theoretical knowledge). By making this distinction, critical realists acknowledge that our theories and understandings are always approximations of reality, contingent on existing knowledge at specific moments in history, and subjected to potential revisions. Similar to social constructivism, CR thus commits to epistemic relativism – the idea that our knowledge is always partial and fallible, thus never absolute – although without succumbing to judgmental relativism – the idea that all knowledge is equally valid. To the contrary, because the intransitive dimension is independent from our knowledge, misconceptions do occur and can potentially be corrected. Adjudication between better and worse theories, and between values, as discussed in Sayer (Reference Sayer2011), is hence not only possible, but also necessary, and explains why, for example, scientific progress is possible. Critical realists refer to this process of adjudication as judgemental rationality.

Critical realists view reality as structured into distinct although interconnected layers, each containing ontologically different types of components. The natural world, for instance, has properties and powers that are different from the social world. The latter necessarily emerges from, is embedded in, although cannot be reduced to, the former. Stated differently, we cannot have society without the natural world existing as a pre-condition, although this does not mean that studying society can be done simply by studying the natural world. As an emergent entity, society itself is ‘jam-packed with emergent properties’, and can also influence nature by exercising ‘downward causation on its constituent parts and elemental bases’ (Layder, Reference Layder2006, p. 70). The environmental crisis can, according to this view, be explained as resulting in large part from the emergent powers of social processes (e.g., international trade, overpopulation, landfills, deforestation), although not entirely determined by them. More importantly, the complex causal interaction between the current environmental crisis and social processes can only be explained if we hold nature and society analytically separate. Without denying the ontological links between natural and social phenomena, this CR view looks at climate change explicitly from an emergentist perspective capable of accounting for ‘how social relations combine with natural ones that are not of [people’s] making’ (Malm, Reference Malm2018, p. 72).

The same need for analytical distinctions between different ontological layers in CR-grounded research also applies to the study of phenomena at the micro-level. For example, a language learner is an embodied human being. There is a biological substratum, from which a mind emerges that allows cognitive and emotional processes, which in turn enable reflexive and social engagement (e.g., language learning activities). Given the principle of emergence, however, the latter cannot be reduced to the biological substratum. Reflexive and social engagement are also necessarily related to materiality (e.g., the existence of vocal cords, the ability to perceive others and move through space), to specific social structures (e.g., school systems, the economy), and to cultural and/or ideational resources (e.g., beliefs in the need to learn English, textbooks), each with specific constraining and enabling effects upon people’s language-learning activities.

Social phenomena like language learning thus emerge from causal interactions between other complex layers of reality. While strongly emphasising human agency, critical realists do not regard human agents’ involvement with the world as detached or free-floating (Bouchard and Glasgow, Reference Bouchard, Glasgow, Bouchard and Glasgow2019; Sealey and Carter, Reference Sealey and Carter2004). Instead, human agency is structurally and culturally pre-conditioned, albeit not determined. As Carter and New (Reference Carter and New2004, p. 3) explain, ‘people choose what they do, but they make their choices from a structurally and culturally generated range of options – which they do not choose’. In language education, for example, teachers and learners have the means to generate and engage in situated pedagogical activities; although their choices and actions remain profoundly structured and cultured through the influence of, for instance, language policies, curricula, assessment structures, and textbooks.

The structure–culture–agency interaction is commonly conceptualised within a CR meta-theory through Archer’s (Reference Archer1995) morphogenetic cycle:

This cycle explains the structure–culture–agency causal interaction as unfolding diachronically rather than synchronically. Accordingly, antecedent and enduring structural and cultural forces predate agentive involvement, constraining and enabling people’s potentials to act in the world. In turn, agentive involvement in context and over time contributes to the reproduction (morphostasis) and/or transformation of structure and culture (morphogenesis). This morphogenetic cycle suggests that the potential for structural/cultural conditioning exists prior to agentive involvement and social interaction. Similarly, people’s powers to act in the world exist in potentia (Archer, Reference Archer2000). It is when people engage in a variety of social interactions and practices that their agentive powers are activated, and subsequently, that structures and/or culture are reproduced or transformed. Society is, however, more than an agglomeration of individuals interacting, as perspectives such as methodological individualism and radical forms of symbolic interactionism would suggest. As an emergent entity, society and all the social structures it encompasses possess properties and powers that reach beyond those of the individuals who populate society. For example, the banking system allows people to save, invest, and/or spend money, actions which no individual human agent would be able to accomplish without the banking system already being in place.

By holding different entities like agency, structure, and culture analytically distinct, CR-oriented research attempts to avoid three types of analytical conflations that constrain the possibility for robust explanatory accounts: upward conflation where structure and culture are reduced to people’s views and interpretations (as, for instance, in some versions of social constructivist and symbolic interactionist research); downward conflation where people’s discourses and actions are seen as determined by cultural and structural forces, and where agency is either bracketed or obliterated (as in some versions of structuralist research); and central conflation (fusing agency, structure, and culture into one all-encompassing social entity, as in Giddens’s (Reference Giddens1979) structuration theory).

This is particularly important when we are dealing with underlying structures that impede people’s well-being, for instance systemic racism, sexism, classism, and linguisticism. Racism, for instance, does not exist exclusively in people’s minds (upward conflation) but is also, and quite importantly, rooted in a long-lasting system of oppression and exploitation. Likewise, racism as a structured set of ideas does not determine what people think (downward conflation), nor can it be explained as a problematic practice produced by an undifferentiated amalgam constituted by people, culture, and structure (central conflation). Racism is, instead, an emergent (thus ontologically stratified) social phenomenon existing within and across multiple layers of the social realm, with variegated effects and empirical manifestations in context. To arrive at robust causal accounts of racism in the real world, analysts must therefore be able to distinguish, for example, between race ideas and racism, the cultural and structural forces which undermine, maintain, and/or amplify racism, racist discourses, and racist acts (Carter, Reference Carter2000). Moreover, unjust and oppressive social structures can operate through mechanisms that contradict what is evident at the empirical level. An institution might, for instance, officially embrace an anti-racist policy, while causally efficacious structures, ideas, and interpersonal relations continue to operate at the level of the actual, contradicting official policies and norms (Martinez et al., Reference Martinez Dy, Martin and Marlow2014). Similarly, ‘one can think many different things about systemic sexism or racism, and still be subjected to their oppressive forces, and without these systems being challenged in any significant sense’ (Bouchard, Reference Bouchard2021, p. 66). To explain these contradictions, paradoxes, and difficulties, and bring more nuanced insight into social inequality and its remedies, the adoption of CR’s emergentist and ontological stratified viewpoint, in this sense, becomes necessary.

We have so far described several of the philosophical principles guiding CR-informed research beginning with ontological realism, epistemic relativism, and judgemental rationality, principles which presuppose one another, and which provide the conceptual grounds from which to contemplate the possibility for science to exist and scientific progress to be possible. As we outlined, CR is also based on a stratified ontology that distinguishes between different layers of reality with their own distinct components, properties, and powers, all existing at the level of the real. They can be activated at the level of the actual and can (although they do not have to) leave traces at the empirical level. Unlike positivist and interpretivist AL research, CR-grounded AL research thus necessitates intense and reflexive ontological theorising before, during, and after the collection and analysis of data.

There are many more concepts that are essential to this particular philosophy of science, and not all critical realists are in agreement regarding what they are and how they should be deployed in research. In addition, scholars adhering to CR principles do not necessarily follow an identical research design, and the contributions to this edited volume are testimony to this diversity. Nevertheless, the following five analytical steps developed by Danemark and colleagues (Reference Danemark, Ekström and Karlsson2019) are widely agreed upon by CR scholars:

1. 1. Description (answering the question What is my data? preferably through both quantitative and qualitative means)

2. 2. Analytical resolution (answering the questions What are the different ontological levels, variables, and components, and what are their properties and powers?)

3. 3. Abduction/theoretical redescription (answering the questions What theories and concepts can help me explain what is going on in my data? How can I determine which theories/concepts are better than others?)

4. 4. Retroduction (answering the questions How are the variables and phenomena in my study structured, and what mechanisms are related to these structures? Why are these structures like this and not otherwise?)

5. 5. Retrodiction and recontextualisation (answering the question How does all of this work help me explain my data? Does any of this have cross-contextual relevance?)

Although listed as the fourth step above, retroduction often takes place at all stages of the research process, with Chapters 4 (‘Realist Evaluation of ESP Curriculum Implementation’) and 7 (‘Counter-Voices of Resilience, through a Critical Realist Lens’) providing more explicit examples of this. Retroduction involves first observing some empirical regularity or salient phenomenon in the data, and then working back inferentially (i.e., through conceptualisation) to identify potential causal factors or configurations which might explain the empirical evidence deemed as salient (Danemark et al., Reference Danemark, Ekström and Karlsson2019).

Although not necessarily relevant to all CR-guided studies, some studies are more explicitly critical by asking: Based on my explanation of the data, how can the relationship between people, social structures, and cultural forces be improved to facilitate human emancipation and flourishing? Chapters 1 (‘Critical Realism: A Personal Journey and Application’), 6 (‘Empiricism in Interpretivist Sociolinguistics’), 7 (‘Counter-Voices of Resilience, through a Critical Realist Lens’) and 8 (Critical Realist Reflections on Race Pedagogy in a University English for Liberal Arts Course in Japan: A Domain Theory Perspective’) are perhaps more explicit in their pursuit of emancipatory aims.

I.2 The Chapters

The chapters in this edited volume offer both conceptual and empirically grounded analyses of a variety of emergent, language-related social phenomena including racist and misogynist discourse, Othering and anthropocentrism as well as language teaching and learning-related topics including assessment and academic writing, language-in-education policy, and curriculum implementation.

The opening chapter by David Block offers unique insight into how AL and sociolinguistics can benefit from active and self-reflexive engagement with CR as a philosophy of science. It highlights the central importance of self-reflection, which in Block’s case led to a decades-long transition from post-structuralism to Marxist political economy and CR. The chapter examines how language and semiosis – key constructs in the author’s extensive research – relate to Bhaskar’s notion of the real, the actual, and the empirical. Providing empirical grounds for this conceptual discussion, the author critically unpacks an excerpt from a podcast by the American far-right social media figure, Nick Fuentes, recorded the day after the 2024 presidential elections in the United States. Block frames Fuentes’s racist and misogynist discourse as a communicative event emerging from the causal interaction between deeper-level patriarchal structures.

Chapter 2 by Karin Zotzmann and Richard Sheldrake explores self-efficacy beliefs in relation to academic writing and assessment genres among international postgraduate students studying in the UK. As Porpora (Reference Porpora, López and Potter2001) argues, critical realists can (and do) use analytical statistics, although they must acknowledge the explanatory limitations of correlational research. Aligned with this view, Zotzmann and Sheldrake’s contribution follows from a quantitative investigation into students’ self-efficacy beliefs and understandings of academic writing and assessment genres (Zotzmann and Sheldrake, Reference Zotzmann and Sheldrake2021), which found associations between students’ familiarity with assessment genres, their confidence in academic writing, and their course grades. The authors’ CR-grounded analysis of interviews with a smaller group of international postgraduate students offers valuable insights into the complex interaction between various structural and contextual factors that impacted the transition from one pre-structured context to a decidedly different higher education system. It also highlighted the differences between students, including their varied ability to seek support, which in turn impacted both their self-efficacy beliefs and performance.

In Chapter 3, Magdalena Avila Pardo and Jérémie Bouchard focus on the structure–culture–agency interplay in the English language-learning context of Cancun, Mexico, through CR-grounded linguistic ethnography (Sealey, Reference Sealey2007). Of specific interest are three Mexican students’ reflexive deliberations and strategies to position themselves in relation to the English language, its symbolic and economic value in Cancun, and to broader structural and cultural forces, in the fulfilment of their goals as language learners, workers, and members of their respective communities. Analysis of the findings reveals the powerful influence of (a) social class distribution as an underlying mechanism partly based on ethnic differentiation and (b) language-learner reflexivity in the adoption of diverse approaches to English language learning. The analysis of various reflexive engagements in this chapter shows how agentive processes can lead to different degrees of investment and successes, including resistance to and acceptance of the necessity for English in Cancun’s social and economic contexts. Analysis also reveals English as (a) the language of the dominant yet somewhat contested North American culture and (b) a vital means through which the fulfilment of personal and communal projects in Cancun often becomes possible.

Alaa Turkustani and Karin Zotzmann, the authors of Chapter 4, demonstrate the potential of realist evaluation methodology (Pawson and Tilley, Reference Pawson and Tilley1997) to uncover the complexity of implementing a preparatory year English for Specific Purposes (ESP) programme at a Saudi university. The authors explain how realist evaluation unfolds through retroductive reasoning which, as discussed earlier, involves the redescription of causal components of an event into theoretically significant terms for a closer approximation of reality. Accordingly, the authors unpack the interaction between underlying generative mechanisms, for instance the institutional hierarchy between ESP tutors and academics teaching medicine-specific topics, and specific approaches to curriculum implementation by ESP teachers.

In Chapter 5, Julia Molinari explores the relationship between knowledge, truth, and specific theories and practices related to English academic writing in higher education, identifying some as potentially harmful as they subject writers to dominant practices while limiting their ability to question the exclusionary nature of some long-standing academic writing conventions. The author highlights CR’s transformative potential that does not only subject unfair social practices to immanent critique but also attempts to identify practices that can arguably reduce inequity and injustice. Under scrutiny in this chapter, and with particular relevance to the issue of truth in academic writing, is the causal relationship between language and material reality (as noticeable for example in how textual staging foregrounds, backgrounds, or relegates objective reality), and how this relationship informs academic writing practices in higher education.

In Chapter 6, Jérémie Bouchard asserts CR’s anti-empiricist stance by offering an immanent critique of empiricism within interpretivist sociolinguistics. The author argues that the tendency of sociolinguists to explain broader social mechanisms and phenomena including linguistic inequalities and other forms of social injustices by drawing directly from empirical evidence found in texts, is a form of epistemic fallacy. The term describes the fallacious assumption that our limited capacity as humans to understand complex reality forces us to focus exclusively on the level of the empirical. In other words, statements about reality (ontology) are collapsed into statements about what we can know (epistemology). Of specific critical interest in this chapter are recent works in raciolinguistics, a strand of interpretivist sociolinguistics which critically unpacks the said co-naturalisation of language and race. Although revealing valuable insight into the colonialist heritage of academic research on language and society, thus bringing a much-needed archaeology of sociolinguistic knowledge, works in raciolinguistics are critiqued by the author as (a) reducing discourses to their producers, (b) failing to account for the necessary relationship between discourse and non-discursive phenomena, (c) providing reductive views of conceptual abstractions in sociolinguistics, and (d) denying the importance of universalism as crucial to the broader project of social emancipation.

Chapter 7 by Wendy Sims-Schouten is more explicitly focused on the properties and powers of discourse. It draws on CR ontology and discourse analysis, and places specific emphasis on retroductive processes and non-linear causality to analyse how the concept of resilience can be and has been applied to Black, Asian, and minority ethnic families and communities in ways that are biased, stigmatising and pathologising. The author argues that CR provides insight into oppression, inequality, and uneven practices through the search for causal configurations that may create phenomena that influence particular outcomes and practices over time. Sims-Schouten argues that current definitions of resilience need to be redefined and reconceptualised, particularly in settings dominated by White middle-class voices that define what ‘positive emotions’, ‘successful traits’, and ‘coping mechanisms’ entail. Under critical scrutiny in this chapter is evidence showing that, through racism and flawed perceptions and interpretations of resilience and ‘Othering’, members from ethnic minority communities are defined as in need of resilience support, whilst at the same time their experience of structural racism (e.g., in relation to mental health support, social/health care practices, and school exclusions) is being erased. In response, the author recommends reframing resilience by (a) taking account of multifaceted and interactive effects of personal, material, institutional, and political factors on behaviour, well-being, and resilience and (b) acknowledging the problematic White middle-class ways in which certain behaviours are interpreted as flawed ‘by default’.

Drawing parallels between Derek Layder’s (Reference Layder1997, Reference Layder2018) Domain Theory and CR, Chapter 8 by Gregory Paul Glasgow lists key challenges emerging from language pedagogy in an English for Liberal Arts course in Japan aimed at revealing race-related structural inequalities, exclusionary ideologies, and racialisation. Anti-racist educators who employ Critical Race Pedagogy are identified by Glasgow as increasingly rejecting so-called colourblind and universalist views of racial harmony. Although the author notes a valuable emphasis in this strand of critical social research and pedagogy on racial inequality as systemic and enduring, he argues that other important aspects of racism as objective reality and lived experience might be overlooked in the process, notably how underlying causal mechanisms related to global raciality are interpreted at the local level. The author’s use of Domain Theory affords a rich account of the complex and layered interplay between system and lifeworld phenomena in relation to global and transnational racial dynamics, leading to an alternative approach to conceptualising, designing, and delivering language pedagogy aimed at raising awareness of the global sociology of race ideas and racialisation.

The final chapter by Alison Sealey and Robert Carter looks at anthropocentric tendencies in academic discourse. The authors explore the rapidly developing fields of ecolinguistics and biosemiotics, both of which, as they argue, displace the human species from the central place it has held in the social sciences, including AL, for far too long. The authors build upon their extensive realist work on language (Carter and Sealey, Reference Carter and Sealey2000; Carter and Sealey, Reference Carter, Sealey, Carter and New2004; Carter and Sealey, Reference Carter and Sealey2015; Sealey, Reference Sealey2007; Sealey, Reference Sealey2019; Sealey and Carter, Reference Sealey and Carter2004) to provide a far-reaching conceptual discussion on the relationship between language and reality, assemblages, and semiosis, and in the process, offering valuable insight into new materialism, a recent although not unproblematic conceptual development in AL.