If I’m going to be in contact with my colleagues in Asia or South Africa, who encounter the same kinds of asymmetries that I observe in Latin America, I have to use English.
My name is Pablo Kreimer. I’m a sociologist, researcher at Argentina’s National Council for Scientific Research, director of the Science, Technology and Society Center at Maimónides University in Buenos Aires, and professor of sociology at the National University of Quilmes. I work a lot on the relationship between hegemonic science and non-hegemonic science. And in fact, there are relationships of—there are asymmetries between hegemonic research, conducted in the most prominent labs in the U.S., Germany, England, and France, and the elites in less developed countries like Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, in Latin America, North Africa, South Africa.
We have to recognize that we are in a globalized scientific system, whether it’s because of the journals where we publish—which are global journals—or because research themes cross regions and national contexts, and because increasingly research funding is also transnational. In Europe that’s very clear, but it’s also true for the U.S., with various private foundations and public institutions like the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which fund research all over the world. So that’s the first observation: we’re in a global system. And it’s a globalized system that has established itself as English became the dominant language. And this is especially true in the so-called “hard” sciences—physics, biology, chemistry. There’s no debate there—it’s English.
In the social sciences, it’s more complicated. Because there are concepts that are very nuanced in the original language, and they’re hard to translate. So we see that national languages continue to be important in the social sciences. But there’s a trend to walk on two legs, so to speak, and support both the national language—French, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic—and English. And we see that the “leaders” in each discipline tend to publish in both: French/English, Spanish/English, Arabic/English. Because the reality is that audiences can only access this knowledge by going through English. There’s a French sociologist named Michel Callon who said that there’s an “obligatory passage point,” and in fact, English has become that obligatory passage point.
Even in the social sciences, there are sub-communities. Economists, no doubt, publish in English, because that’s the language of their peers. In other disciplines like sociology, anthropology, and history, I think we’re moving forward with both strategies—because there are two different audiences. Two different kinds of dialogue partners. Sociologists, anthropologists, or historians who publish in Spanish are read by a wide community in Latin America and also in Spain.
It’s worth saying that publishing in English broadens your audience and helps you find patterns you may not have noticed. That happened to me about 20 years ago—I was living in France, and I was invited to give lectures in Algiers. They asked me to talk about Latin America, which is my field. I explained the state of science and scientific development in Latin America. I finished my talk and someone stood up and said: “Are you making fun of us?” I said, “No, of course not. Why do you say that?” They replied: “Because you say you’re talking about Latin America, but you’re actually describing exactly the situation of science in North African countries—Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco—it’s the same.”
And if I hadn’t had the ability to communicate—in that case in French, but if it had been Egypt, I would have had to speak English—we wouldn’t have discovered those similarities, those very comparable situations. Broadening our horizons makes our research richer. So I think we need both strategies. Saying “I only publish in Spanish”—or in French, for French-speaking countries—is very conservative. It narrows the scope of dialogue and enrichment. But at the same time, it’s important not to abandon your mother tongue and to continue producing knowledge in that language. I think that’s the right strategy.
