Ethical events in the internationalising university: engaging, learning and knowing in spaces of otherwise

1 Introduction

A major challenge in contemporary university life is the construction of classroom spaces in which the potentiality of the increasingly diverse students therein might be realised. The potentiality of internationalising university classrooms in Europe is said to include the improvement of university education, job prospects and respect for diversity, pluralism and multilingualism (see Fabricius et al. 2017: 579–580). However, owing to the ontological and epistemological horizon of “late liberalism” on which the policy and planning of the European sector, nation and institution is given, the challenge of engaging, learning and knowing across difference is tangible, both “ethically” and politically. Responding to this challenge is a task for a sociolinguistics of potentiality.

Late liberalism, as described by Elizabeth A. Povinelli in Economies of Abandonment (2011), simultaneously refers to the multicultural governance of difference and the neo-liberal governance of the market which developed around the 1970s in Europe and Anglo-America. It is a governance concerned with a specific form of social organisation and a specific distribution of life and goods (Povinelli 2012), with which higher-education institutions and those who constitute them are increasingly caught up.

The discourses of so-called “internationalisation” are generating increasing numbers of internationalisation-related journals, conferences, edited volumes, policies and university departments. These discourses are no doubt fuelled by increasing student mobility across the globe – growing from 250,000 in 1965, to 3.7 million in 2005, and to five million in 2020 (de Wit and Merkx 2022). Yet the discourses of internationalisation have become so deeply entangled with those of late liberalism that increasing diversity has been said to represent little more to our higher-education institutions than increased symbolic and economic capital gained by hosting increasing numbers of international staff and students (e.g. Ahmed 2012; Shear and Hyatt 2015; Urciuoli 2018, 2019; Van der Wende 2001). As such, responsibility and consideration for unexpected languaging practices, knowledge and experiences in the university classroom, should perhaps not be counted on due to their falling beyond the scope and regimentation of such interest-driven discourses.

A potential burden is most heavily pressed upon teachers and students coming from the ‘South’ to the ‘North’ (Quijano 2000). Late liberal structures of governance serve to keep alive, or at least leave unquestioned the racialised structures historically embedded in Western ontologies and epistemologies. Here, the ‘South’ refers to those bodies, social groups, (linguistically mediated) knowledges and geographical locations that have systematically suffered injustice, invisibilisation and destruction caused by capitalism and colonialism (e.g. Grosfoguel 2012; Santos 2018; Stroud 2020). This study looks at Swedish university classroom practices within which certain speakers – certain Southern international staff and students – face the potential challenge of having their knowledge, experiences and bodies thematised and ranked according to racial logics that have been ingrained in Western ontology and epistemology since the enlightenment (Grosfoguel 2012; Stroud and Kerfoot 2021).

The challenge of overcoming this marginalising potentiality in this way is a subterranean crisis of language itself. If we are to engage seriously with the bodies, knowledges and experiences of others, there is an imperative to reconceptualise language “in ways that can promote a diversity of voice and contribute to a mutuality and reciprocity across difference” (Stroud 2015: 20, emphasis in original). Only in this way might we become open to understanding how our universities’ increasingly diverse students and student bodies (both collective and individual bodies) work to voice their (international) experiences and knowledge in response to the increasingly powerful and invisibilising discourses of late liberalism (cf. Povinelli 2019). Only in this way might we come to see how university classroom spaces are spaces of both exhaustion and “ethical” potentiality, or as what Elizabeth Povinelli describes as “spaces of otherwise” (2011: 6).

2 Engaging with questions of ethics

Ethics is here proposed to be of singular importance, and yet must be thought differently, as per the need to reconceptualise language in response to the bodies and discourses of internationalising university life. Engaging with the work of thinker Emmanuel Levinas, this study aims to think an ethics that arises not from “an experience of values, but an access to exterior Being, and the exterior being par excellence is the Other” (Levinas 1978: 183). For Levinas, “the Other” referred to here is not another person that we might categorise as being different from prevailing norms but is rather a person or representation that is beyond comprehension, impossible to ignore, and for which we are called to take responsibility (see further Kulick 2022: 206ff^[1]). The Other is unique in its alterity to the extent that any decision we make in how we respond to the Other cannot be wholly subjectivistic, voluntaristic or structurally determined. Crucial to emphasise here is that Levinasian ethics is not a normative ethics but that which determines our subjectivity (see Critchley 2009 on post-deconstructive subjectivity); Levinasian ethics relates to our face-to-face relations with others, whereby we are chosen or elected by them to bear responsibility prior to our freedom to act agentively (Levinas 1969: 43).

Furthermore, Levinasian ethics is always situated – emerging from the ethical event of embodied interaction in which one faces the risk of being categorised according to social norms and judged in relation to the way we respond to the moral and political demands of late liberal markets. Just as Povinelli et al. (2014) propose the “quasi-event” to consider the exhaustion and potential one faces when responding to late liberal markets, the “ethical event” will here be utilised as a way to consider how the study participants respond to the social, linguistic and absolute difference of others in the internationalising university – also part of the late liberal market. In keeping with Povinelli’s quasi-event and in response to Derrida’s engagement with Levinasian ethics, this is to politicise Levinasian ethics. While Derrida claimed to be “ready to submit to everything Levinas says” (Derrida 1986: 74), he also sought to go further and call forth the political as “the art of response to the singular demand of the Other” (Critchley 2009: 276). In response, this paper will consider “the art” (or lack of it) in the responses the study participants make to the engaging, learning and knowing of others in the university classroom. Such analyses of ethical events, I suggest, will allow for insight into the political acts needed to support the potentiality for ethical becoming in internationalising academia, while demonstrating a radically ethical sociolinguistics of potentiality.

The political potentiality to be found in this sociolinguistic approach can be further clarified through the notion of “Linguistic Citizenship”. Linguistic Citizenship emphasises the ways in which semiotic practices and representations of semiosis can work to challenge many of the ideas we have about language and multilingualism, while contributing towards a transformative understanding of citizenship (Stroud 2015; see also Stroud 2001, 2018; Stroud and Kerfoot 2021). It concerns itself with situated linguistic and semiotic practices, as well as representations of speakers, firmly located within spaces of socio-political struggle in which typically marginalised agencies and voices might endure and determine a new set of relations and values. In alignment with this notion, this study looks to questions of students’ multilingualism – their diverse accents, registers, discourses and bodies (Oostendorp 2022), and the ways in which such resources can be drawn upon to maintain ethical becoming in sectoral, national and institutional frameworks for transformative purposes. To this end, the concepts of performance, genre and interdiscursivity will be used as tools in the analysis of what the study participants do with and around language, so that they reorient the diverse classroom space and those within it towards more mutuality and reciprocity across social and linguistic difference.

3 Genre, performance and interdiscursivity in the international classroom

That international staff and students will bring and face diverse ways of engaging, learning and knowing is a fact that is perhaps most easily recognised in the classroom context. And it is in the ritualised greetings that take place in the classroom genre of the introduction round that one faces such inevitable difference. The introduction round generally takes place at the beginning of a course, but it may also be repeated in later sessions if a new teacher and/or student enters the group later in the course. In introduction rounds, all are equal in that all are expected to present themselves and give voice to who they are, as well as the history, knowledge and experience they embody, and/or what they expect to gain from the course. However, any pretensions of equality that the genre may make must contend with the potential of students being ranked and classified by others according to the regimenting discourses of late liberalism.

The introduction round as a genre, however, does not simply classify and organise students and staff as social, cultural and political objects. In alignment with the understanding of genre as developed most rigorously in the fields of linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics, genres also function as flexible and negotiable orienting frameworks for the organisation of ways of producing and interpreting discourse (see Bauman 1999; Briggs and Bauman 1992; Hanks 1987). Moreover, relevant to the introduction round genre as a form of greeting, ethnographic studies have pointed to the ways in which greetings are connected to, or are part of the construction of, the ongoing and ensuing activities (Duranti 1997). So, on the one hand, the introduction round might be framed in a way that seeks to draw attention to a participant’s sociolinguistic categories, liable to them being evaluated according to historically and institutionally specific norms. Yet, on the other hand, as a framing genre, the introduction round can be simultaneously used and understood to construct social relations anew, such that interlocutors might perform and respond to each other’s unique ways of engaging, learning and knowing, ready to engage in knowledge construction across social and linguistic difference. In this way, the introduction round neatly captures the potential for exhaustion and ethical potentiality found in all classroom interaction.

Crucial for responding to others as Other and potential ethical becoming is the fact that the introduction round genre calls on its participants to perform, thereby providing an opportunity to respond to any (meta)communicative processes regulating the classroom space (see Bauman 1975, 1986; Bauman and Briggs 1990). Performance involves a performer and an audience who will evaluate the performance given and, in an introduction round, students and teachers must perform and be evaluated for who and what they are. It is this evaluative dynamic that brings the risk of one’s unicity being evaded and categorised on account of one’s performance falling too far beyond the relevant regimenting discourses. At the same time, one’s unicity may be artfully performed, seen, heard and responded to. A positively evaluated reflexive performance, I will here argue, holds the potential to free individuals from the discursive horizon of late liberalism and to bring that horizon into question.

The ethnographic approach taken for this study, analysing practice beyond the bounded speech event, also lends itself to considerations of interdiscursivity. Developed within the field of linguistic anthropology (see Bauman 2005; Silverstein 2005), interdiscursivity sensitises the analyst to discursive practices as they are manipulated across time and space in the semiotics of everyday living. It is a lens that allows for a consideration of the social logics that mark continuities and discontinuities across encounters (Agha 2005), not necessarily bounded by national or institutional boundaries. Interdiscursivity will thus allow for a more responsive engagement with contemporary speaking practices in spaces peopled by staff and students with biographically distinct discursive histories that may come to shape present and future discursive practices. Finally, crucial to the present study, interdiscursivity across genres will also be considered as a potential form of generic innovation conducive to disruptions of hegemonic order (Briggs and Bauman 1992).

4 Setting, participants and research tools

This study investigates a Social Sciences course focused on global social processes and practices. The chosen department, recognised for its diversity among both students and staff, presented an opportunity to explore interactions across social and linguistic difference. My interest in this faculty was further fuelled by current critiques suggesting that the Social Sciences are becoming increasingly aligned with global neoliberal norms (Heilbron et al. 2018). As such, this department would provide an opportunity to analyse interactions amongst diverse, critically minded and socially engaged scholars, with a consideration of the extent to which their interactions are governed by, free of, and/or resistant to late liberal discourses. Given the intricate interplay of diverse backgrounds and academic critiques within this setting, a reflexive stance was crucial.

Reflexivity has been foundational in guiding my research, analysis and writing processes. Rooted in “ethics”, I approached and responded to my participants’ interactions with a sense of Levinasian responsibility. This meant striving not to let pre-established social categories shape my approach, but instead focussing on their individual semiotic engagements within the university milieu. Although international students emerged as a focal point in the diverse group I studied, they were not my predetermined focus. Being an international researcher from the UK, I also recognise that my presence could have influenced the dynamics within the classrooms. Continuously cognisant of this potentiality, I endeavoured to remain open to the rich heterogeneity of possible meanings present in my engagements, analysis and writing.

The research participants comprised 23 students and five teachers, all anonymised for this study. Six of the 23 student participants were born and educated mostly in Sweden, and 17 were born and educated mostly outside of Sweden, eight of whom were born and educated mostly outside of Europe. 15 were female and eight were male. Each of the four teachers who feature in the data, two females and two males, were born and educated outside of Sweden; two of the teachers were born and mostly educated outside of Europe, one from Africa and another from North America.

In the course of the four-month ethnographic engagement, a particular student, Frank (pseudonym), emerged as a central figure for the study. Writing on Foucault’s The Government of Self and Others (2010), Povinelli (2012: 455) explores Foucault’s claim that new knowledge “depends on a certain sort of person who is either ethically otherwise and seeks to persevere in being so, or who seeks to be ethically otherwise and acts on and perseveres in this desire”. With the discursive power of the fantasy of the individual will (Povinelli 2011), on one level this study focuses on the will and ethical becoming called for by Frank as someone who, with a background in performing music, has the capacity to artfully act out his desires. Nevertheless, more broadly it addresses the institutionally framed social relations in which Frank and the other study participants were collectively involved.

Consistent with trends in UK-based linguistic ethnography, this research emphasises the collective experiences and language practices of students and teachers as they navigate the institutional dynamics of the university (Rampton et al. 2022). It is with the power of institutional framings that participants’ words can be heard as strange, experienced as uncomfortable, and apparently driven with the desire to construct, or resist constructing classroom spaces otherwise.

To capture the multifaceted experiences within the university, a diverse set of data collection tools was employed. As the semester went on, the fieldnotes diary got filled up (135 pages), the digital audio and photo collections increased (131 and 231 files respectively), as did the number of audio-recorded and transcribed narrative and ethnographic interviews (29 in total). Of the 15 total individuals interviewed, some were interviewed multiple times, and this group included both students and teachers. The interviews and informal conversations were held in various spaces chosen in negotiation with the participants (e.g. classrooms, corridors, offices, buses, underground trains, cafés, parks and badminton courts). This allowed the participants greater freedom to reflect on and develop their own experiences in, around and outside of the institutional spaces in focus.

5 Analysis

Let us consider the first class of the semester, Autumn 2019. After outlining the course in relation to the master’s degree programme, the teacher began an introduction round, taking his own turn first, in which he described his previous work environments, research experiences and his current research interests. In Extract 1, the teacher positively evaluates his previous experience in another markedly diverse university setting.

5.1 Standing up and standing out for internationalising university life

In the above introduction round, all students in the group gave what might be considered a standard response as called for by the genre. Given names and previous educational experiences were stated and put into relation to the course units and overarching themes of the course. Later in that same first week, however, Frank stood up and stood out to develop the greeting beyond the formal constraints of the introduction round. For Frank, seen at the front and centre of the classroom space in Figure 1 above, it seemed clear that there was more to establishing and developing relations with classmates than could be found in the introduction round genre.

Figure 1:

Frank (highlighted in green) performs a greeting.

In contrast to the more spatially and discursively static greetings as part of the already experienced introduction round genre, Frank here took the floor moving from a seat in the middle of the class, to stand, gesture and perform a greeting with a select group of fellow early-seated arrivals at the front of class, in full view of all the others. Read as a performance that employed a certain register, i.e. talking to build solidarity, Frank’s actions and body here worked to construct the classroom space according to certain values, which his classmates, given their positioning as audience and fellow performers, might evaluate and respond to. He performed himself in what Povinelli would call his “carnality” (2012),^[2] as the manifestation of discourses distinct from those of late liberalism, as a student who stands when all should be seated. One value performed here was one of dialogue across difference, with yet unknown classmates who, ethically speaking, would always remain unknown according to their absolute Otherness. The audience and fellow performers could consider if they would respond across difference, in collaboration and solidarity with Frank, or instead keep their heads down and get the work done once the teacher had arrived.

The norms of engaging, learning and knowing were there to be negotiated, in a way that was responsive to both Frank and the teacher above’s call for international and collaborative work across difference in this classroom space. To respond to the teacher above, to realise the potential of a collaborative international classroom, and to allow for its ethical becoming, an initial communicative act of generosity was required (Levinas 1969: 14); Frank obliged, as a carnal agent distinct from the corporeality shaped by the dominant discourse of the classroom.

6 Discussion and concluding remarks

This study’s conceptualisation of ethical becoming, generated in ethical events of interaction, suggested that the participants’ international and multilingual learning endured when responsibility was taken for others and the different ways of engaging, learning, and knowing inevitable in an internationalising classroom. A focus on ethical events allowed for an analytic sensitivity to the continuities and discontinuities in the students and teachers’ movement beyond the normative boundaries of late liberal university spaces. Crucially, international engagement, learning and knowing across difference was not shown to be an inevitable consequence of increased mobility, classroom diversity or a prior interest in global social issues, as hoped for by the teacher in Extract 1. Nevertheless, despite the late liberal governance of markets and difference, values of group solidarity, collaboration and dialogue were ultimately seen to endure amongst the students and teachers. This endurance was shown to be dependent upon a utopian surplus found in the students’ and teachers’ desire for mutuality and reciprocity of engagement across difference, in artful acts that can be usefully characterised as radically ethical acts of linguistic citizenship (cf. Stroud 2015: 20, 2018). To be made visible, the spaces demanded hard-won and intersubjective responsibility towards the ongoing and enduring acts of certain discursively marginalised students. Ethical becoming in the space was seen to endure via the dialogic means of genre interdiscursivity and dialogic performance, and were finally and most fully responded to in Frank’s introduction round performance encouraged by a new classroom teacher, Ada. It was only through the teacher’s response to Frank’s unicity and linguistic citizenship that the diversity of voice in the classroom space was seen to be grounded and nurtured, thereby rendering it a space of otherwise.

In the introduction rounds (Extracts 1, 4, 5, 6), greetings (Figure 1, Extract 3), and Facebook postings (Extract 3) engaged with here, difference was not necessarily accepted. Difference was always recognised, but it was not always responded to. At times, it appeared to be gently ridiculed (Extract 4). In fact, it took until the last few weeks of the semester for signs of group solidarity, collaboration and dialogue across difference to emerge in the institutional spaces. So long in construction, there is the danger that dominant world views were suppressing alternative voices, discourse and knowledge, thereby inflicting epistemic harm on those marginalised in the group (Kerfoot and Bello-Nonjengele 2023). In response, this study’s findings suggest that efforts to engage teaching staff who embody epistemological and experiential difference in the European Social Sciences would be beneficial for student engaging, learning and knowing in the internationalising university classroom.

Although the task of disrupting the orders of late liberalism was largely carried out by the students of this study, freedom from these orders was only gained upon the arrival of a “Southern” scholar concerned to give voice and take responsibility in response to the repertoires of all in the group. In the hope of a more immediate and consistent response to the potentiality and risk involved with internationalisation, the complexity of internationalising university life needs to be made more visible, and effort made to initiate more South/North engagements with Southern researchers and teachers who possess greater desire for equality in North/South relations and the overcoming of the late liberal governance of difference (e.g. Bock and Stroud 2021; Heugh 2021; Makoni et al. 2022).

Yet, notwithstanding the exhaustion of international students like Frank, hope can be taken from the creative interdiscursive performances analysed here, whereby certain discursive interrelations arguably came to shape social relations and the orientation of those coming to the classroom. From one introduction round to another, across time and institutional spaces, interdiscursive developments came to inform the ways in which students and teachers would relate to one another and to other ways of engaging (see esp. Dunn 2006; Salö and Hanell 2014; Silverstein 2005). From the first day of the course in Extract 1 to the final few weeks of the course in Extract 6, the response to late liberal values was developed in interdiscursive performances through the artful use of irony, humour and multilingual resources.

If late liberalism governs “Northern” universities, emphasising a knowable future, competition and marketisation, the democratic and ethical ideals of internationalisation will always face a seemingly impossible task of gaining visibility and getting realised. The continuity of solidarity, collaboration and dialogue will always depend on a (re)framing and (re)orientation of our approach to internationalising university life, which is a task that today appears to fall on the shoulders of the (international) students and teachers on the ground. Frank, his classmates and teachers did reveal that such repetitions may be momentarily joyful; nevertheless, to take responsibility and keep acting out one’s desire for the potentiality of internationalising university life has also been shown to be an exhausting burden that need not fall only on the shoulders of international staff and students from the global South.