Can we escape the textocalypse? Academic publishing as community building [Language on the Move]

Rapid developments in digital technologies have fundamentally changed writing practices leading to an explosion in the number of textual products. The result is a "textocalypse"- a deep crisis in knowledge production and dissemination. Instead of pushing back, academics fuel these degenerations because their careers have become subject to the capitalist imperative to produce and consume - measured in the form of research outputs and citation metrics. Against this background, this commentary argues for a reframing of academic publishing as community building and introduces Language on the Move, an alternative sociolinguistics portal that is both a publication platform and a research community. Motivated by a feminist ethics of care, we decenter the textual product and recenter the lived experience of researchers, particularly those writing from the margins.