8 - The ‘Internationalised’ Academic: Negotiating Boundaries between the Local, the Regional and the ‘International’ at the University

Summary

Introduction

With mobility in the workplace ubiquitous nowadays, the negotiation of boundaries in professional contexts has become a focus area for sociolinguistic research. When individuals move abroad, as many exchange students do during young adulthood, they are placed beyond a local comfort zone, and experience what Cushner (2007: 29) characterises as ‘physical and psychological transitions that engage the cognitive, affective, and behavioural domains’. The interesting question that arises, then, is whether and to what extent this type of experience can become part of a later identity as a professional. Much of the work on boundary crossing and boundary negotiation in the present volume concerns the analysis of everyday interactions in the workplace; in this chapter, however, I analyse a reflective interview, and show how linguistic details as well as themes in some of the stories that are told can afford insights into the boundary crossing and boundary setting that are the focus of this volume.

The analytical case in point in this chapter is an interview with a university teacher and researcher whose history (at an English-speaking high school as an exchange student) was perceived to be part of what made him an experienced and competent English-medium instructor at the university. One is not after all born an internationally oriented academic; one becomes one, and in the current global and economic climate ‘cosmopolitanism’ is often celebrated as a desirable norm, a trope which is found in many public discourses (Otsuji and Pennycook 2010). With that backdrop, the present chapter arises from a wider study with an interest in a sociolinguistic view of personal and professional biographies and how they contribute to professional development and performance as ‘an international academic’. The intention of the data analysis presented here is to show how the internationalised university as professional context is negotiated by one speaker in boundary defining and boundary crossing. We take the theoretical stance expressed in Auer (1998: 1) that ‘code-switching has and creates communicative and social meaning, and is in need of an interpretation by co-participants as well as analysts’.