The move towards EMI in higher education has been connected to university internationalisation, which reflects neoliberal trends. Research has underscored the need to consider socio-economic factors, materialities and ideologies surrounding EMI. Our study taps into this line of inquiry by focusing on how Swedish universities promote EMI programmes in business and economics in four videos. We take a novel approach to examine discursively constructed ideologies surrounding EMI by conducting a critical multimodal analysis of the videos. The analysis reveals how the use and representations of English – combined with different symbols, artefacts and concepts – are used to position these EMI programmes as both global and local. References to international rankings and multinational business partnerships position them on the global education market. At the same time, the programmes are locally situated in the academic tradition and entrepreneurial context of Sweden. Images of nature, the fika, or Scandinavian design present them in a way similar to tourist destinations. Tokens of economic and cultural eliteness create an extra layer of distinction, contributing to the added ‘elite’ value of EMI, where English is both taken for granted and serves a gate-keeping function. Findings provide insight into how EMI is promoted to international students.

The chapter explores students’ reported experiences of international peer collaboration during the preparation of their graded assignments as part of their English-medium university programme. Peer collaboration in the form of group work is a common learner activity in Nordic universities, especially in the context of programmes in business studies. Compared to other social sciences, business studies are particularly likely to offer English-medium programmes already at the bachelor level. The chapter thus investigates undergraduate students’ perspectives on group work as part of developing disciplinary literacy, with a focus on language quality, students’ agency, and problem-solving strategies. The findings highlight students’ uncertainties regarding acceptable (language) standards for the written assignment, which is an outcome of their group work. It also shows that the students’ aim to reach consensus in groups with diverse linguacultural backgrounds is in sharp contrast with who has access to powerful roles in the group work. Students with advanced English language proficiency tend to occupy more powerful positions and act as language regulators for written assignments. The chapter thus opens up for discussions on accommodating different perspectives within group work in EME business studies settings.

This chapter surveys language in the multilingual university at the levels of institutional policies, language practices in higher education and professional activities, and related beliefs about language use. The distinct political and historical contexts that shape language use in universities are taken into account by drawing on studies from various geo-linguistic contexts. Among the languages used, English plays a prominent role as the major language for research communication and increasingly as a viable language choice for teaching and learning in non-anglophone countries. Yet, language is not a neutral medium for accessing knowledge but entangled in questions of social justice.

This study investigates how academic writing practices at university are represented and introduced through instructional models in Swedish and English teaching materials. The scaffolding power of such models is often assumed without scrutinizing how these models can provide entrance points to writing practices for students dealing with specific writing tasks. Grounded in an interest in learning, the study analyses selected models in frequently-used teaching materials for academic writing in Sweden. Findings are: the same model is used to present writing as a matter of language or as academic work; the introduction of the models positions students as responders to assignment tasks in the Swedish materials or as actors on the global research market in the English materials. How writing can become relevant for learning by connecting students’ prior knowledge – gained from writing in different contexts and in different languages – with engaging in current writing tasks remains tacit.

In this chapter, the interviewee engages in a dialogue with the book editors regarding the inclusion of other languages and knowledges in top-tier English-medium journals. The discussion is grounded in specific initiatives and collective conversations within editorial teams of sociolinguistically and linguistic anthropologically orientated journals. It addresses calls in the social sciences and humanities to create more equitable futures by identifying and challenging the capitalist and colonial aspects of academic publishing. The chapter considers the roles of editors, editorial board members, and reviewers and the need to rethink existing structures of editorial work that make it difficult to disrupt institutional logics that perpetuate publishing inequalities. It also argues against an insular focus on language debates, highlighting the importance of addressing broader issues like neoliberal rationalities tied to “internationalization” and “research excellence”. More generally, the chapter advocates an approach to knowledge production that integrates publication concerns with the wider politics of readership, encouraging comprehensive questioning of theoretical and epistemological models in scholarly work and their implications for academic disciplines and society as a whole.

This volume investigates the interconnections of language, scholarly publishing, and the knowledge economy in contemporary academia across different European settings. The chapters included revolve around aspects that are related to the knowledge economy cycle, from the individual and systemic conditions that enable knowledge production, to the currently existing channels and frameworks that give shape to and condition its circulation, uptake, and consumption. All the chapters combined provide a coherent and holistic overview of the affordances and limitations that different social actors experience when participating in such cycles, including the different modes of access to resources across geographic contexts and disciplinary traditions. An important contribution of the volume is the multi-layered angle that it incorporates into analysing issues of scholarly publishing in today's academia, placing language as a social practice at the heart of the structuring processes that condition the creation, dissemination, and consumption of knowledge in contemporary societies. Given the centrality of English in these processes, a particular focus on this language runs through the whole volume, but the tensions and intersections with other languages are usefully explored by all authors, with calls for greater sensitivity towards and real acknowledgement of linguistic diversity in the present-day knowledge economy cycle.

Becoming expert academic writers requires students to develop understanding, awareness and skills with regards to discipline-specific discourses. To develop such knowledge, talk around drafts is essential. Various studies traced how students develop knowledge about and of academic writing, but few explored how such knowledge is invoked and developed in interaction. The study therefore investigates the dynamics of introducing and using academic writing knowledge when tackling writing issues in interaction. The interaction is situated in a facilitated writing group – an important yet under-researched arena for talk around text. The data consist of video-recordings of group meetings with six postgraduate students who use English as an additional language, collected over 8 weeks at a Swedish university. To investigate how knowledge was introduced and used in the group, the study takes a socio-cultural perspective and applies the Vygotskian notion of cultural tools combined with discourse analytic approaches. The analysis shows how students draw on complex techniques to negotiate academic writing knowledge. Their interactional text work oscillates between abstract norms and concrete texts. Concepts of academic writing (e.g. research aim) are partly unpacked frontstage in the group, and partly backstage in individual notes. The results call for extending genre-pedagogic approaches of learning by discovery.

The article examines transnational students’ experiences of participation in European higher education by applying the notion of voice that encompasses the capacity to communicate and to be heard (Hymes 1996. Ethnography, linguistics, narrative inequality: Toward an understanding of voice. London: Taylor & Francis). Relating voice to access and participation, the article moves forward debates around incorporating students’ multilingual knowledge resources in diverse writing practices in academia. It takes into account structural and ideological conditions as well as the creative potential of translanguaging in students’ knowledge production. The instrumental case study explores the lived experiences of three multilingual students with highly diverse linguistic and educational backgrounds, who are enrolled in humanities master’s programmes at a Swedish university. It investigates the students’ perceptions of how they can make use of their linguistic and educational repertoires. The data derive from interviews around texts and audio-recorded writing diaries. The results demonstrate how translanguaging is mainly connected to writing for personal use and limited or regulated in assignment writing. They reveal multiple and contrasting ideological views on language use and knowledge, and highlight possibilities and obstacles for appropriating and recontextualising knowledge across languages, educational contexts and disciplines. The article thus connects translanguaging to questions of participation and access more broadly.