Drawing on the ethico-political framework of hospitality, this paper investigates the communicative practices of three administrative support staff as they attempt to manage the twin challenges of working in adherence to state and institutional language policies while communicating ethically in an internationalising workplace. Academic administrative staff rarely feature in studies on internationalisation yet are crucial to understanding the complex day-to-day realities of contemporary university life. Empirically, this study reports on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, including observations, interviews, and email records. The data demonstrate language work being carried out on an ethical basis, before the consideration of any particular languages, beyond the participants’ political obligations, and in excess of institutional support. The current national and institutional responses to the multilingual realities of Swedish university life, I argue, are failing to do justice to and facilitate the ethically grounded, bottom-up language policy-making as practised by this study’s participants. This paper thus promises to open up debate on hospitality within language policy and planning for internationalising Higher Education, and, in its re-evaluation of the ethical and political dimensions of hospitality, it emphasises the framework’s critical potential within sociolinguistic research, more generally.

In this chapter we examine the value held by national languages, here Swedish, in the scholarly career trajectories in non-Anglophone countries. To this end, we analyse the language policies of Swedish higher education institutions and the narrated perceptions of two international recruits. Adopting Pierre Bourdieu’s distinction between scientific and academic capital, we argue that Swedish language skills constitute a vital asset in processes of accruing power in Sweden’s scientific world. Hence, as we maintain, English is not all that matters, despite internationalization being high on the agenda. 

This thesis engages ethnographically with actors whose practices constitute contemporary Swedish universities and who pose and respond to everyday questions of ethics and multilingualism. In contradistinction to the discursively monolingual horizon of contemporary academia, the thesis thinks questions of language differently, contributing to the growing body of knowledge on socially and linguistically diverse practice in internationalising university life. By analysing the discursive practices of university students, administrators, teachers, and researchers, it aims to illuminate potential new ways of engaging, learning, and knowing that might be more justifiably described as ethical and multilingual. With participants who fulfil the key missions of an academic institution in the faculties of the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities, the thesis provides a full and nuanced sense of university life in Sweden, relevant to those working in, or in relation to higher education institutions across the globe. The thesis is based on three studies which all focus on participant representations and interactions to reveal the different ways in which the dominant discourse relating to language, multilingualism, and ‘internationalisation’ is being reproduced, responded to, and transcended. Study I engages with research and teaching staff to explore the extent to which their practices and representations relate to the ideologically double monolingual language policy, debate, and scholarship in Sweden. Revealed through various language ideological processes, participant representations were found to reproduce a dual monoglossic logic and linguistic order, favouring a Swedish and English linguistic repertoire to the extent that other multilingual research and social practices were rendered invisible and problematic. Studies II and III move beyond study I’s foregrounding of participants’ representations to instead focus on participants’ engagement in everyday ‘ethical events’, a notion inspired by the work of philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. They are here defined as interactions involving that which is not known, normative, or ordinarily visible, but for which all involved are called upon to take responsibility. Such events allow for the analysis of interactions in which interlocutors voice and respond to social, linguistic, and epistemic difference. Study II uses a Derridean notion of hospitality to illuminate ethical events in which administrators’ responses to multilingual interlocutors point towards the challenges and potential for ethical becoming and improved sociality in an internationalising university. Study III engages with international students compelled to perform in order to question and sometimes transcend the norms seen and felt to govern classroom engagement, learning, and knowing. The thesis summary locates the studies within the changing political discourse of higher education in Sweden and beyond. It also provides a framework for the three studies that works to show that questions of ethics and multilingualism are particularly pertinent for critical engagement with contemporary university life. Overall, the questions posed in this thesis highlight the multilingualism yet to be convincingly responded to in the sectoral, national, and institutional policy, planning, and debate on internationalisation and language in higher education. The thesis’ focus on ethical events emphasises both the exhaustion and the potentiality of spaces in which actors struggle to foster improved sociality, mutual responsibility, and more truly international academic practice.

This chapter investigates the ways in which various discursive processes within and about Swedish Higher Education (HE) are rendering some value-laden linguistic practices and processes invisible. Previous studies in the field of Language Policy and Planning (LPP) have focused on the ‘internationalisation’ of HE with a pre-occupation for opposing linguistic systems, for example, Swedish and English. However, this study reveals how such dualistic thinking can (re)produce essentialising and highly ideologized monolingual and monocultural categories, over-simplifying what is understood by the ‘international’ and ‘national’ in contemporary HE. Drawing on data from an interview-based study carried out in a sciences department at a major Swedish university, this chapter demonstrates the potential in taking a multilingual approach when seeking to better understand the affordances and constraints of internationalisation. 

In this chapter we examine the value held by national languages, here Swedish, in the scholarly career trajectories in non-Anglophone countries. To this end, we analyse the language policies of Swedish higher education institutions and the narrated perceptions of two international recruits. Adopting Pierre Bourdieu’s distinction between scientific and academic capital, we argue that Swedish language skills constitute a vital asset in processes of accruing power in Sweden’s scientific world. Hence, as we maintain, English is not all that matters, despite internationalization being high on the agenda. 

This linguistic ethnography aims to emphasise questions of ethics and multilingualism that arise as students and teachers work at engaging, learning, and knowing across social and linguistic difference in Swedish university life. Conceptualised as ‘Spaces of Otherwise’, that is – spaces of ‘curiosity and risk, potentiality and exhaustion’ (Povinelli, 2012: 454), the paper engages in markedly diverse social sciences classrooms in which teachers and international postgraduate students struggle to foster improved sociality, mutual responsibility, and academic practice. Faced with discursive obstacles relating to late liberalism i.e., the neoliberal governance of the (higher education) market and the multicultural governance of difference (see Povinelli, 2012), the students are shown to put into question and transcend the erasure of difference through acts of linguistic citizenship (Stroud, 2001, 2015, 2018). The paper is developed through an ethnographic consideration of ‘ethical events’, defined as interactions involving that which is not known, normative, or ordinarily visible, but for which all involved are called upon to take responsibility. The ethnographic fieldwork combined audio-recorded observations, interviews, photos, and fieldnotes, and was conducted over four months and across sites in and around the university. Its analysis reveals how late liberal norms circulating in and around the academy were disrupted and transcended with interdiscursive performances in classroom genres that developed over time and worked to shape new and unpredictable social relations. The study concludes by arguing that for the democratic and ethical ideals of internationalisation to be more easily realised, the burden of responsibility for overcoming and revealing the limits of late liberal values should not fall only on the shoulders of international staff and students. Instead, those involved in sectoral, national, and institutional language policy and planning should respond more seriously to the generative values of solidarity, collaboration, and dialogue across difference so forcefully demonstrated by the students and teachers of this study.