Interview with JLP editor-in-chief Michał Krzyżanowski

We ask the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Language and Politics Michał Krzyżanowski about the history and development of the journal, what his role entails, and his hopes for this blog website in tandem with JLP.

We all know how complex and dynamic the reality is out there. Very often, singular approaches and disciplines are acutely insufficient to explain many of the processes that we’re looking at. We have therefore been trying to embody this broad and applied interest in the journal too.

What is the Journal of Language and Politics all about? Where did it come from and how did it develop?

The Journal of Language and Politics is probably quite special and unusual because it sits between a number of disciplines, fields and areas of research. I think it should therefore be seen as very broad in its scope, which probably isn’t that frequent in academic journals where usually a lot of focus and specialty is key.

JLP started in the early 2000s as an idea between two scholars, Ruth Wodak from, at that time, University of Vienna and Paul Chilton who at that time was at the UEA in Norwich, and they were also the first editors of the journal. Formally, the journal started publishing from 2002 onwards. It operated initially at two issues per year, so it was relatively limited but already then very focused and targeted. It had a few interesting special issues – for example on issues of identity politics and alike – which, however, quite instantly drew attention and made the journal well-regarded and popular.

I joined the journal in 2008, originally as its Associate Editor. At that time, the core editorial team was just the two founding editors and myself, though certain easiness of work was facilitated by the fact that Ruth and I worked at Lancaster University at the time, and Paul joined soon after and thus we were all located in one institution. Towards the end of 00s, the journal was already moving from two to three issues, so it was still relatively limited, but in the following years, already with my involvement, it started gaining a lot of popularity in languages, communication sciences and beyond. That’s why in subsequent years it grew to eventually reach the current level of six issues per year.

I then took over as the Editor-in-Chief as of 2014, so I have been doing this for over a decade now. The founding editors remained active in the journal for quite some time still, especially Ruth Wodak who until 2024 was a co-editor, and it’s only last year that she decided to move to the more honorary role. She still remains in constant contact and advises us in her role as founding editor and member of our honorary board.

I think probably the growing popularity of the journal over the years, and the ongoing extension of its scope which we worked on, they have also brought about a development of the approach to how we work in JLP. We now have a wider editorial team at the core of which, in addition to myself as editor-in-chief, there are four co-editors with different tasks and remits (Samuel Bennett, Bernhard Forchtner, Michelle Lazar and Aurelien Mondon), an associate editor (Katy Brown) and a book review editor (Franco Zappettini). Of course, there also the two founding editors on whom we can always count if new need advice and that is much appreciated. We have recently also revised the scope of our editorial roles in order to make sure things run as smoothly as only possible, especially in terms of editorial process, decisions and pre-production.

As far as I know, JLP has been the largest publication of our publisher, the John Benjamins Publishing Company who have always been extremely supportive of the journal and its growth and for which we are indeed very grateful. JB used to be known as mainly a linguistics publisher but together with the growth of such outlets as especially the JLP it has also extended its focus on language & communication more widely. We are really happy we could be part of that adventure.

What kinds of articles are published in the journal?

With the changing scope of the journal, which has been extended in recent years, we welcome very different types of papers from a variety of disciplines. Originally, the journal was much more linguistics-oriented, looking into the field of sociopolitical research. It has now become more explicitly a journal which combines the various areas of language and politics in an interdisciplinary way. What this means for the papers we publish is that we are especially interested in articles that make the contribution to that wider area, irrespective of colleagues’ disciplinary origins.

We are quite rigorous about the theoretical, empirical and analytical contribution. I think that’s quite important for the papers that are submitted and for those that are eventually published. We always say that one of the main requirements for papers in the journal is a connection between theory and analysis, so we’re particularly prone to publishing analytical, empirical papers. Of course, we also welcome theoretical contributions, but that happens much more rarely, though perhaps more frequently within the special issues that we publish. However, probably our main requirement is a clear contribution to this kind of complex understanding of language and politics more widely, both in quite a broad manner and then backing up claims with systematic, robust empirical analysis.

Why might people want to submit their work to JLP?

I think they might submit their work to the Journal of Language and Politics because of their feeling of not fitting in other and more traditional journals. The main aspects of our journal’s orientation - towards applicability and relevance – are central here, as is the fact that we want to see papers which are critical in nature. I think this is what makes the journal quite distinctive and widely read across different disciplines. We usually are not compartmentalised within particular disciplines, as much as our origins are still within linguistics. Through extending the journal’s scope, as well as the core editorial team and wider editorial board, we not only get contributions from various disciplines but are read widely across them. That’s probably what I’d say is the key reason.

We know that of course the landscape, in a sense, the field and areas in which we operate have been changing quite a lot in recent years and there has been a fair amount of cross-fertilisation, of interdisciplinary dialogue which we very much want to embrace. I think we have always seen ourselves as particularly relevant in boundary-crossing and in offering space to approaches, theories and methods which cut across various disciplines. That is why, for example, the journal has been publishing papers contributing to, for example, critical discourse studies but we are not only a CDS journal and embrace many approaches that cut across and contribute to a number of disciplines. This includes, but is not limited to, CADS (corpus-assisted discourse studies), discourse theory, papers in applied linguistics, pragmatics and sociolinguistics but of course also papers in many areas of communication and media or of social and political research across which the interest in communication and language has been growing very exponentially.

How does your own research relate to the themes of the journal?

It relates very closely in fact. I'm probably someone whose work is exactly like the journal: I come from linguistics but have worked across many social sciences and humanities disciplines, including political research, before landing in communication and media studies. My work has always been at the intersection of many areas and has been strongly problem-oriented, and that is why my intention has always been to extend the scope of the journal, to make it a home for many interdisciplinary debates which elsewhere might not be able to take shape as broadly and critically as they do in the Journal of Language and Politics.

I work myself on the wider language and society connection - in public, strategic, political and other forms of communication. I am hence personally interested in real language and communication and in real politics, so to speak, and we all know how complex and dynamic the reality is out there. Very often, singular approaches and disciplines are acutely insufficient to explain many of the processes that we’re looking at. We have therefore been trying to embody this broad and applied interest in the journal too. Myself and other members of the core editorial team very much share this interest and concern, despite coming from and working in different disciplines. We share the conviction that our work should reflect the complexity of the current state of affairs in language and public communication more widely. That is what we want to see in the papers we publish too, and we want the journal to be a home for that kind of research as well.

What does your role in the journal involve?

Being editor-in-chief means that I'm overall responsible for the journal and its strategic direction. While my colleagues as co-, associate and book review editors have more specific remits and tasks, my job is to make sure that we coordinate our work well and that we complement one another. It means making sure that work is progressing as it should and to keep things running smoothly. My job is to probably make sure that everything is in order.

Apart from the executive editorial role, though, I’m also on the team of editors who deal with general submissions, and I collaborate closely with co-editors who are dealing with special issues or articles after acceptance, so production issues and so forth. The size of the journal and the number of papers we receive means we actually had to create a more specialised set of remits and tasks. My job is to coordinate them and the work with different editors, staying in ongoing dialogue with them. That’s how we work to make sure that we maintain the intellectual direction, openness and breadth of the journal, and making sure we provide space for dialogue and debate.

What’s your favourite part about being editor-in-chief?

Well, I’d certainly say that telling people their papers have been accepted. That is certainly one of the best parts of this work. But I also very much like our discussions with the authors and among the editors - and the fact that we can thus shape the journal in, especially, the intellectual terms, as scholars, while responding to and embracing current trends and debates.

I must admit that my work over many years in the journal was relatively lonesome and I had to deal with many tasks on my own working only with the two (now) founding editors. This has changed very significantly. At the moment, what I’m really enjoying is the collaboration with the excellent co-, associate and book review editors because I like that JLP has become so much more based on teamwork, dialogue while, as said, remaining responsive to contemporary dynamics of language, communication, society and politics. That’s what I’d say at the moment.

Finally, how does this blog complement the journal? And why did you decide to develop it?

Here at JLP, we thought that we really needed a space for a bit more of a meta-discourse about the journal and the papers and Special Issues that are published. We of course publish a lot of interesting papers and special issues which are up-to-date and in response to what’s happening in wider society, but we thought that we needed some more of our own communication about them to be able to highlight and explain what sort of research we publish, why and how, and to give a bit of a voice to our authors, and to special issue editors.

Our contributors publish in the academic format, but we thought that asking them a bit more about the background, about their motivations, reasons for their research and where they want to go moving forward is something we very much need, especially for younger scholars and early career researchers. This is, however, not something you can see – or read - in journal papers. So we very much wanted to have this additional space where all this very vital meta-information can be shared, and where the journal’s relevance, academically and socially, can be emphasised even further. I think this enables us to continue shaping the journal as a broad, interdisciplinary space for ongoing intellectual discussion and debate about language and politics.