Introduction

A recurring theme of scholarly work in English for Research Publication Purposes [ERPP] has been the potentially causal relationship between the global dominance of English for ‘international’ publication and the suppression of alternative knowledges. The titles of presentations in the recent PRISEAL conference on international publication reflect support for this view in phrases such as ‘English as the international language of science’ (emphasis in the original), ‘ … domain loss and the erosion of specialized discourse in non-Anglophone cultures’, ‘English-monolinguist research policies in Spain’, and so on (PRISEAL, 2015, n.p.). The perceived disadvantages experienced by researchers in non-mainstream contexts have been richly analysed (Lillis & Curry, 2010; Clavero, 2010) and contentiously debated (Flowerdew, 2008; Casanave, 2008; Hyland, 2016a). Meanwhile, quantitative studies such as those by Mertkan, Arsan, Cavlan and Aliusta (2016) in educational management have drawn some resonant conclusions about today's academy: ‘[T]he complexity of knowledge-production … is marked by disproportionate influence of an exceptionally small set of core inner-circle Anglophone and non-innercircle Anglophone settings’ (p. 13; see also Lillis & Curry, 2015).

In parallel to these findings, among Asian scholars too is a belief that ‘an obsession with theoretical knowledge from the West reproduces Euro-American intellectual dominance in the global-local knowledge hierarchies’ (Qi, 2015, p. 195). Nguyen, Elliott, Terlouw and Pilot (2009, p. 109) draw specific attention to Asian contexts ‘where rapid reforms in education may run the risk of “false universalism”’ involving the relatively uncritical adoption of various Western approaches. This is seen to open the way for ‘mental colonialism to continue and neocolonialism to triumph’ (p. 112). From a European perspective, Bennett (2014) also argues that this process ‘ultimately represents the colonisation of one culture by another — in this case, the “imposition of new ‘mental structures’ through English”’ (pp. 45-6, citing Phillipson; see also Bennett, 2015). And for me too, despite the obvious diversity of contextual outcomes, the strong form of this argument remains convincing (see Cadman, 2014).