Existing scholarship in applied linguistics and writing studies has shown how multilingual students mobilize linguistic, technological, and semiotic resources, make strategic investments in literacy activities, and draw on various forms of capital in academic contexts. Building on this work, this study conceptualizes academic writing as an economic activity embedded in the neoliberal knowledge economy of higher education, and highlights how these dimensions interact through a dynamic and relational lens that accounts for the entanglement of neoliberal subjectivity, symbolic capital, labor, investment, resources, and norms in students’ academic literacies. Drawing on a qualitative case study of sixteen Chinese international students at a Canadian university, it examines how participants mobilize and negotiate capital, engage with the commodification of writing resources, and make investment decisions in their academic writing practices. Findings reveal how academic writing functions as a site of value production, capital circulation, and labor shaped by institutional evaluation regimes. While participants varied in their use of institutional, technological, and commercial writing supports, their accounts reflected cost–benefit reasoning alongside moments of ambivalence and pragmatic resistance. Synthesizing these findings, the study proposes a model of the economy of academic literacies that theorizes academic writing as an interconnected system of students, institutions, resources, capital, and commodified literacies. By foregrounding academic writing as an economic activity rather than solely a social or identity-based practice, this study offers a relational framework for examining how multilingual international students navigate and negotiate the conditions shaping academic literacies in contemporary higher education.
Zhaozhe Wang (Wed,) studied this question.