WP338 Rhetorics of reinventing

In applied and sociolinguistics at present, there are quite frequent calls to reinvent or rethink a particular tradition, paradigm or indeed the field itself.  Sometimes this looks like a branding ploy, but at other times it is very weighty, and with AI, geopolitical upheaval and environmental collapse, it is not surprising if there is an upsurge in discussions of ‘re-xxx-ing’ applied, or educational, or sociolinguistics.  So how does one figure out what to take very seriously and what to treat more lightly?  Indeed, if you yourself are convinced that basic procedures or ideas in a particular line of scholarship need to change, how do you formulate the case in a way that is not easily dismissed?  To characterise the kind of scholarly writing that can really make a difference, I focus on Deborah Cameron’s ground-breaking 1990 paper ‘Demythologising sociolinguistics: Why language does not reflect society’.  I draw out eleven features, and then supplement them with two that are especially relevant to contemporary interdisciplinarities and one that reflects my own experience of being told I was talking nonsense.