Semi peripheral scholars negotiating internationalizing institutional strategies with translingual tactics in academic discourse

1 Introduction

The inequalities in academic communication, especially scholarly publishing, have been discussed in terms of scholars in the center and periphery, a binary which also relates to English-dominant and multilingual, in applied linguistics research (see Canagarajah 2002; Flowerdew 2002; Lillis and Curry 2010). They have largely been discussed from the perspective of dominant English language conventions and ways in which multilingual and periphery scholars meet those norms, albeit with variations deriving from their local languages and cultures. Their research has also been somewhat text- or product-oriented, as researchers have been concerned about the implications for language norms. This article envisions taking this inquiry to the broader ecology of writing for these scholars. It situates their academic communication in their research and writing practices, in relation to their cultural influences and policy expectations. Furthermore, it applies the translingual orientation, which has featured more in writing pedagogies, to the broader concerns of academic literacy. It demonstrates how a translingual orientation enables local scholars to negotiate academic communication in more resourceful and dynamic ways. For this purpose, the article also employs de Certeau’s notions of tactics and strategies to demonstrate the negotiations that take place as scholars draw from their ecological resources to engage with dominant institutional expectations.

This article deals with the communication of one type of scholars who do not belong to the binary of center and periphery. They are European scholars with a heterogenous background who experience challenges when deviating from the norms of English and mainstream publishing conventions. Their location must, therefore, be seen in its own complexity. Lave and Wegner (2011) make this clear in mentioning that there are communities with “no single center” as there is no neatly defined “periphery”. Furthermore, they argue against treating periphery only as deficient. They observe that “as a place in which one moves towards more-intensive participation, peripherality is an empowering position” (2011: 36). Furthermore, progressive approaches in the literature of the topic see the periphery as belonging to the South or the Global South, formulating its dialectics within the North/South geopolitical binary.

I label my research participants “semi-peripheral” because they do not fall easily within the center/periphery or North/South framework that has been used in past scholarship on the inequities in academic communication (Canagarajah 1996; Flowerdew 2002; Lillis and Curry 2010). By studying the translingual practices of European semi-peripheral scholars, I wish to explore how translingual orientation can explain the resistant practices of less privileged scholars outside of the Southern Hemisphere as well. The data are part of an ongoing study and are made up of selected interviews, observations and analysis of texts from three scholars working in a German university. However, the focus of this article lies on interviews with a chosen scholar, perusal of his publication drafts, and policy documents on the publishing expectations in that university. For anonymity purposes, I am only allowed to quote from his interviews to illustrate his negotiation practices in his academic literacy.

In this article, I will address the question of how institutional strategies can be negotiated by scholars’ translingual tactics within the German academic context. Through the analysis, using grounded theory and based on empirical findings from coding, the results help identify a list of tactics adopted by this scholar. The goal of this study is to deconstruct the northern construction of knowledge (Kloß 2017) to accommodate semi-peripheral scholars into the academic discourse. This article mainly contributes to what has lately been established and generalized as resources of translingual individuals in scholarly communication (Dengel & Bogner 2005; Canagarajah 2013 a, Canagarajah 1996; Mondada 2004). By resources, I refer to the semiotic resources, dispositions, values, and funds of knowledge scholars bring with them for critical communication. Since languages embody different representational systems and values (Gumperz 1996), the communicative acts resulting from one communicative repertoire are, again, very specific, and they might differ from other representational systems. The interaction between such languages and knowledge systems needs to be perceived from models that favor negotiation.

Constructive approaches of de-northernizing the scholarly discourse have been employed by many applied linguists and sociolinguists by leaving the structuralist legacy behind and developing new concepts. They prioritize the “assemblage of meaning-making” (Canagarajah 2018) rather than cognitive performance; the locally emergent rather than globally imposed conventions (Blommaert 2014; Pennycook 2010); the context rather than the bounded text (Lillis 2008); co-constructing rather than the preconstructed norms (Canagarajah 2013b); becoming rather than being (Khubchandani 2013); and the reflection interconnected with action as in embedded linguistics (Berthoud&Gajo 2020). In line with such developments in linguistics, I define translingualism as a form of practice that both transcends individual named languages, and also transcends language itself (Canagarajah 2018). That is, translingualism demonstrates how meanings emerge through an assemblage of resources, including diverse semiotic resources and ecological factors, as people negotiate them for meaning. I will use translingual practice (Canagarajah 2013a) as my theoretical framework.

In the following section, I will introduce certain key theoretical constructs. The third section will focus on outlining the methods and data for this case study. The fourth and the fifth section discuss the results of the case study and the implications for negotiating academic publishing. The article concludes by interpreting the findings and their implications.

It is important to mention that I am myself a semi-peripheral scholar who embodies heterogeneous scholarly and writing practices. Being a ‘cultural insider’ as researcher of this case study opened new forms of data during the interview. Furthermore, it is important for this article to not only talk about translingual practice as providing alternatives for publishing and doing research, but also to do so through the writing process of this very paper. In this paper, I have attempted to merge my voice and interests with dominant conventions. I have also tried to combine a mixture of theory and data, instead of writing a solely data-driven article. Such publishing experiences teach me that readers have to co-construct meaning when dealing with translingual practice by international authors.

I must also comment briefly on my preconceptions on the social and linguistic aspects of doing science and research. My understanding of knowledge involves multiple languages and thinking systems interacting with one another, and through these interactions producing new knowledge. However, I took being multilingual and practicing translingualism for granted when, the fact is, it is not common sense in many circles. The more institutionalized the context, the more static it becomes and the harder it gets to apply the dynamics of Canagarajah’s (2013a) translingual practice. I also realized throughout this study that the bubble a researcher lives and studies in influences their scholarly approaches. Stepping out of my own acquired values and opening spaces for negotiation is a sine qua non for analyzing data through grounded theory and writing in transnational contexts.

2 Theoretical Concepts

In this section, I outline the key theoretical constructs that frame this article. First, I introduce the notion of language ideologies, as they make up the strategies of institutions to control knowledge production and communication. Woolard and Schieffelin define language ideologies “as a mediating link between social structures and forms of talk”, and “not only linguistic forms but social institutions such as the nation-state, schooling, gender, dispute settlement, and law hinge on the ideologization of language use” (1994: 55–56). For these reasons, Bourdieu speaks of language as an instrument of power and an institutional or political tool. He does not reduce language to a medium of communication but treats it as embodying identity, culture and institutional practices (Bourdieu 1991). From this perspective, Bourdieu emphasizes language as discourse: “What circulates on the linguistic market is not ‘language’ as such, but rather discourses that are stylistically marked both in their production and in their reception” (1991: 39).

The policies of institutional language seem to be like the childhood attic room of an already grown-up adult. That is, they are reductive and don’t correspond to the complex practices we adopt for communication. Ehlich treats these as “naive reductions” of the Chomskyan and Saussurean Paradigm in which language is reduced either to signs or to generated automatisms (2006: 59). These models still play an important role in the current understanding of language and its analytical tools, as they strongly separate language from discourse. Another strong language ideology occurs from the rise of 17^th century European nationalism and the French Revolution, which is the ideology of one state, one nation, one language. It offers the rationale for puristic language ideologies to flourish, a fact that influences the way the English of multilingual scholars is judged. English is treated as owned by purported native speakers and used accordingly. Through a very clear and distinct categorisation of eight principles of language nationalism and its formation of collective identity Stukenbrock shows within the national German context the influence of these concepts and how strongly they are implemented into a nation’s mind (Stukenbrock 2005). However, these issues do relate to a certain context of knowledge production. Because context, as described by Berthoud&Gajo “links the cognitive and sociocultural dimensions of knowledge and discourse” (2020:38). Woolard and Schieffelin continue, “There is more agreement that codified, superposed standard languages are tied not only to writing and its associated hegemonic institutions, but to specific European forms of these institutions” (1994: 64).

Such language ideologies offer the basis for the policies with which journals operate in many contexts. Journal editors still strongly impose, through rigid requirements, certain textual and language standards which are influenced by Western practices in science and literature. The basic assumption is that all authors would adopt the native speaker norms of English. Any deviation is treated as bad editing rather than voice. Discourse conventions also assume the structure of writing in English-dominant communities without concession to writing practices elsewhere. Canagarajah observes that as “bilingual/bicultural scholars are influenced by their indigenous communicative conventions, their writing will display peculiarities that are usually treated by Western scholars as ample evidence of their discursive/academic incompetence” (1996: 436). Knowledge is also judged in terms of citations from the intellectual centers in the north. Knowing “the latest” implies reading publications in English, a fact which is also mostly expected from non-native English speakers. German scholar Kloß points to the unfairness that “it seems less commonly expected that Anglophone scholars know non-English publications” (2017: 11).

These language and literacy ideologies influence the strategies of publishing and academic institutions as they control knowledge construction and dissemination. Rooted in military theory, strategies are defined by Michel de Certeau as describing the power tools in a military conflict which should lead to winning the war. In contrast to strategies, he defines tactics as the tools of response to renegotiate those strategies (de Certeau 1984). I treat these strategies as tools of power which belong to dominant institutions. They are imposed on scholars’ activities and domains and treated as objectives the scholars are required to fulfill. Tactics, as opposed to the static institutional strategies which mostly remain rigid and uniform, are dynamic. The initial context of war from which de Certeau extracts his strategies and tactics might seem odd at first sight, as nobody is engaged in military issues as a scholar. However, the metaphor of conflict is suitable for how marginalized scholars negotiate dominant ideologies to represent their knowledge. The part I am interested in for my study, and the way in which I use these terms, are as skill descriptors. The strategies define the practices of the institutional power, and the tactics define the skills of the scholars in interacting with the strategies.

Some ethnographic studies on academic publishing have made use of these theoretical instruments. Their interpretations, however, differ. Lillis and Curry use the same terms as metaphors and the difference relies on the fact that they mostly use the terms to describe “the interplay between factors at a number of scale levels” (2014: 6). Tactics are, in their case, parts of strategies. The study in this article draws a clear line between the implementation of strategies as characteristic only for institutions and tactics as features of the scholars’ efforts. In my study, strategies belong to the powerful, whereas the tactics belong to the powerless.

A key ideology forming the strategies of higher education institutions in Europe is internationalization. As Jane Knight points out, “internationalization is a term that means different things to different people” (2008: 6). Some of them understand the term as activities such as mobility programs for their own students and lecturers or the founding of double-degree programs and online networks for scholars outside their border. Some see internationalization as exporting education to other countries through franchises, expanding their services to students of other countries by setting up satellite campuses there. Others see it as a matter of the curricula, integrating intercultural and multilingual concepts in the teaching concepts. And very many see it as a brain-gain process, improving rankings through buying elite students and scholars (Knight 2008).

It is important to distinguish between the terms international and global in this context. As Marginson states, globalization “refers to the formation of world systems” whereas internationalization “presupposes nations as the essential unit” (1999:19). He continues by describing globalization as including finance, communication, IT and migration parts which also transcend the nation. Internationalization, on the other hand, promotes the interests of particular nations among other nations (Marginson 1999). According to Mathews and Sidhu, the USA, the UK and Australia, followed by Canada and New Zealand, stand at the top as providers of international education (Matthews and Sidhu 2005: 55). Internationalization can also become a cover for promoting the interests of particular nations. Canagarajah is rather ironic when he points out that the same countries mentioned above label their academic journals as “international” despite excluding knowledge and scholars from other academic contexts (Canagarajah 1996: 440–441). Furthermore, globalization or internationalization has also become an excuse to promoting English as the vehicle for such purposes, including in education and scholarship. Therefore, the institutional strategy of internationalization can mask quite exclusive interests.

3 Research design

This collected data sheds light upon European semi-peripheral scholars’ experience as expertsin their practice of academic skills and as active social agents of their academic discourse. I chose to observe and interview three STEM scholars. The interviews were conducted at a German university, where they were working at that point. Two of them occupy leading positions in the department of their research areas. I conducted one-hour-long interviews that were semi-structured and in-depth with each of them. The interviews were conducted in English and German. Through the interview the participants and I spoke mostly English. One interview was in German. All three can fluently speak English, German and other European languages. I also maintained journal notes on my observations of my meetings and their writing. After observations and interviews, I transcribed the data using EXMARaLDA, coded it using MAXQDA. Then I utilized Charmaz’s guidelines in grounded theory to code the data and analyze them.

To discuss the views and practices in greater depth, I focus here on a single scholar among my participants. To maintain anonymity, the informant of the study reported in this article will be referred to as Robin Laurenzio. He is a senior scholar and comes from an academic context in Eastern Europe. Currently, he is a professor at a German university.

To understand the analysis of this data, some important matters must be mentioned and clearly explained. In my experience, when working with grounded theory new opportunities opened both while collecting data as well as during the analysis. These opportunities should be considered as pivotal for the whole research method, as this is what grounded theory is all about. Grounded theory challenges traditional methods of data analysis and while I had my plan well prepared with very well-structured interviews and questions, things changed during the interviews, new facts arose, my position as a researcher became clearer and new horizons of scientific work were disclosed. Thus, the result of this analysis is a product of these factors, which I was glad to observe and see it develop during this study. Also, for this reason this case study is intended to be interpretive as opposed to purely descriptive. Furthermore, it is particularistic because it focuses on a particular phenomenon (Merriam 1998: 29, 38–40), namely, how scholars negotiate the institutional policies and expectations. The interest of a case study lies in “process rather than outcomes, in context rather than a specific variable, in discovery rather than confirmation” (Laws and McLeod 2006: 4). The “how“ and the “why” are the main interests of this paper in its single case study. Cronbach goes more into detail by calling a case study of this kind “interpretation in context” (1975:123) because the variables can only be interpreted in this very context. Therefore, I focus on a specific example with the main goal being to unveil the interaction of the informant’s tactics with strategies deriving from and applying in and on the same context. As far as validity is concerned, a single study case was selected precisely to “understand the site in particular depth and not to discover what was generally true of the many” (Laws and McLeod 2006: 16).

Throughout the study and interviews, I wrote down key phrases and keywords to inform my coding system. Going through the main codes and sub-codes after the focused coding (see appendix A), I identified four main themes from the interview. I coded these themes as language as a thinking system, publishing and writing experience, literacy biography and teaching. These themes allowed me to interpret the communicative practice of my informant in his total academic and intellectual context. Each of these themes has a series of sub-codes which I generated through MAXmaps to group the codes and categorize the concepts by identifying certain relationships. During this step I identified certain codes that belonged to one theme which proved to have thematic resemblances with other codes belonging to another theme. For instance, the code “multilingual background” belonging to the theme “literacy biography” resembled the code “coming across ‘foreign situation’ in language” belonging to the theme “teaching”.The same applies for the code “publishing in English” belonging to the theme “publishing and writing experience” and “all sub-meaning of the word ‘function’” belonging to the theme“language as a thinking system” (see appendix B and C).

Eventually, the categories emerging from this process as well as the relationships I found between them, were used as my foundation for interpretations. Since the aim of this study is to highlight the tactics of translingual agents in response to the institutional strategies, and since these strategies also have specific contexts, I start with the examples of policy documents on institutional strategies.

4 Institutional strategies

I describe the institutional strategies from different contexts that impinge upon the academic communication of the local scientists. Policies of the universities where they are working, funding organizations, and the guidelines of the journals themselves place constraints on the communication of the scholars. Though my focus is on the scholars, I provide brief examples of institutional strategies for context. To begin with, the German Research Funding (GRF), one important actor in financing research in Germany, deals with some contradictions in its own internationalization strategy. Under the title “Science and research as open system without borders,” the GRF offers the guidelines of its internationalization strategies. These are formulated as follows:

...ist die Forschung unter bestimmten Gesichtspunkten auf internationale Zusammenarbeit angewiesen...Gegenstände der Forschung, die nur durch internationale Kooperation zugänglich werden (fast alle Forschungsobjekte der Geo- und Meeresforschung; lokale Sprachen, Kulturen und gesellschaftliche Entwicklungen, regionale und globale Entwicklungen, internationale Vergleichsstudien etc.); [...the research relies on certain points for international cooperation...subjects of research which are only accessible through international cooperation (almost all research subjects in geological and marine research, local languages, cultures and social development, regional and global development, international comparative studies, etc.)]. (DFG 2012: 11)

...Ein zentrales Ziel aller Akteure des Wissenschaftssystems in Deutschland ist es, exzellente Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler für den Standort Deutschland zu gewinnen und zu halten. Die DFG trägt dazu bei, indem sie ihre Fördermöglichkeiten im weltweiten Vergleich höchst attraktiv gestaltet. [One central goal of all participants in the German science system is to attract and retain excellent scientists for Germany. The DFG contributes to this by offering very attractive funding on a global level.] (DFG 2012: 29)

As we can see, the internationalization strategies of this institution focus on elite knowledge production and the policy of brain gain. The goals and perspectives of such internationalized strategies remain vague and general, formulated without further content regarding the details of applying such goals. The intent seems to be more ideological rather than practical. They pressure local scholars to be internationally competitive in terms of center academic norms.

Policies like these influence some institutional policies on the internationalization of research publishing in local universities. I summarize these ideological strategies in four statements below with an example of how and where they are articulated:

1. Science is monolingual. The institutions officially promote and operate in one language as they assume that scientific enterprises are conducted better through a lingua franca such as English. Therefore, they also value more the journals published in English and encourage local scholars to publish in them. Though this requirement is not mentioned explicitly in official documents, it is conveyed in conversations and interactions indirectly. In one of my interviews Robin mentioned this subtle pressure: “Sending some of our real, decent work to a German journal is essentially scientific suicide. Nobody who matters you know, will read it. It just has too small an audience and then the university enforces this type of behavior which is not always useful.” Therefore, he feels pressured to send his articles to English journals.

2. It is important to adopt the norms of the ‘native speaker’ to achieve publication in high-impact factor journals. This expectation is conveyed to local scholars and institutions by publishing houses. Take the German publisher Mouton de Gruyter as an example. It states under ‘special attention’ in its style sheet: “If you are not a native speaker of English, please have your contribution carefully checked by a native speaker” (Style sheet, Mouton: 3)^[2]. My informant stated that he felt pressured to adopt native speaker norms since only journals in English would be relevant for achieving financial support. The journal Nature also confirms this by publishing on its website “English is the international language of science, for better or for worse.” (Elnathan 2021).

3. The higher the number of publications in high-impact journals, the greater the mark of success. Many universities link the financial support of scholars solely to the number of publications, so the focus is on the quantity of publications. My informant told me: “I mean the university enforces this behavior in saying ‘We will give you money, if you publish in journals with high impact factor’.”

Local scholars observe:

For better or worse, “publish or perish” has become a driving ethos in academic research. Search committees, tenure committees, and administrators evaluate researchers on both quantity and quality of papers they publish. However, proliferation of journals has led to numerous possible publication outlets, even in relatively narrow subdisciplines, so those evaluating researchers often rely on metrics of journal quality as a proxy for quality of research (Neiles et al. 2015: 312)

1. Standards of publishing are not negotiable.During the review and editing process, Western-oriented values of academic writing subtly suppress local academic cultures and impose a uniform style through the journal’s expectation. Taking these norms for granted local universities and scholars assume that they should meet these standards so that they can be respected internationally. They are not encouraged to consider how scientific writing can be diverse and reflect the identities and values of the scientists who write them. Robin accounts for this pressure as follows: “I have been forced by internal policy in the field in the university to basically go by impact factor.”

5 Translingual Tactics

Though the above ideologies are dominant in local universities, scholars negotiate them in their academic literacy in diverse ways. I present Robin’s strategies from the drafts I read and interview comments he offered. From the data, I have identified three categories of Robin’s academic practice, which constituted his negotiation tactics. I list them with relevant examples to illustrate them.

6 Discussion

This case study shows the reflective practice of a semi-peripheral scholar in dealing with academic discourse. It is an example of negotiating institutional strategies with his own translingual tactics. He renegotiates the standards imposed by the journals and institutions, adapting them to his own way of knowledge production.

The general research question addressed in this article is: how can institutional discourse strategies of internationalizing academic practices be negotiated and reconstructed through translingual tactics in heterogeneous academic contexts? The contribution this article offers is at the level of process description, and not the published products. This article suggests a way of answering this in terms of the “how” as a process-oriented concept. Concluding from the data, the first tactic of the translingual agent deals with his contextual knowledge. This derives from the resources of his intercultural background and leads to his intercultural competence and context-related knowledge. The second tactic continues this process by moving to his translingual transfer. Robin draws from his language repertoires to influence his academic communication and practice. These are connected eventually to the third tactic, reflective and dynamic output of knowledge or the Humboldtian tactic. All these tactics answer and are triggered by certain institutional strategies. The first tactic is a response to the standardization of academic writing and, through this, of science. The second challenges the characteristics and consequences of legitimizing only one lingua franca in academia. The third tactic renegotiates the current scientific discourse which favors specialization and is exclusionary towards more holistic peripheral thinking systems. The strategy-tactic pairing I describe above for analytical purposes is actually more dynamic in the way it applies to the writing and other communicative activity of local scholars. The tactics might overlap and influence each other rather than remaining separate.

Robin’s case study offers us the possibility to see not only the enrichment of academia through peripheral and semi-peripheral scholars who apply such tactics but also the dynamics of the knowledge production. I see value in this study as we need the perspectives of semi-peripheral scholars in their own words. These scholars draw creatively from their languages and cultures, using their heterogenous identity as an advantage, to succeed in their publishing and scholarship. Hence, the inteview is generating value to other scholars who might find inspiration in Robins tactics and might reflect on their own scholarly practice. The more diverse the semi-peripheral scholars’ tactics, the more successful the negotiation between their tactics and the institutional strategies becomes. It is misleading to take standardization as the norm, or to leave “northern” language ideologies intact, since this mainly promotes one thinking system and excludes its diversity, which would lead to a stifling uniformity of knowledge production. The dominant institutional ideology of internationalization impoverishes by holding on to monolithic norms.

Robin’s process of scholarly communication reminds me of a quote I found in Upper Bavaria on the way to one of Germany’s highest mountain peaks, formulated by the forest society as part of a project. It says: “A robust mixed mountain forest mainly consists of spruce, fir and beech. Its respective typical root systems support the soil and exploit different soil depths. Therefore, mixed mountain forest can best protect our slopes from erosions and landslides” [author’s translation]^[3]. The diversity in nature as well as the diversity in culture have, at a certain point, one and the same goal: to preserve and protect their own enrichment, which depends only on the maintenance of their heterogeneous characteristics. Damaging these would not only jeopardize their assets, natural as well as cultural, but also make such jeopardy irreversible. Languages as well as forests depend on the diversity of their species to confer further development, according to similarities between nature and culture theorized by many (Pretty et al. 2009; Posey 1999; Berkes 2008; Bridgewater et al. 2007). As suggested by Pretty et al., “nature and culture converge on many levels that span values, beliefs, norms, livelihoods, knowledge and languages” (2009: 102). Therefore, I, as a sociolinguist, see it as our high priority to support and enrich mixed cultural backgrounds and hybrid forms of academic communication, as Robin’s, otherwise we will risk “developing a monoculture of knowledge and science” (Berthoud&Gajo 2020: 1). Like the mixed mountain forest which can best protect the slopes from erosions and landslides, hybridization would also protect science from cultural, linguistic and academic erosion.

7 Limitations of the study

The tactics and strategies described above are the product of the context in which the actual research was carried out and analyzed. Therefore, they may not suit other contexts of knowledge production and may differ markedly from the tactics of other scholars working in other academic contexts which probably operate against other types of institutional strategies.

Moreover, this case study does not claim to offer any general theories as an outcome since this was not the original intention. As McGrath states, “the research process is to be regarded not as a set of problems to be ‘solved,’ but rather as a set of dilemmas to be ‘lived with;’ and the series of interlocking choices is to be regarded not as attempts to find the ‘right’ choices but as efforts to keep from becoming impaled on one or another horn of one or more of these dilemmas.” (1981: 179)