Adopting an ecological approach to better understand EMI satellite campuses in Asia and the Middle East, I investigate the ways in which English monolingual biases and an emergent interest and pride in local languages within several countries that have hosted such joint venture foreign campuses have been negotiated.
In a neoliberal era marked by a global expansion of higher education, many Western based universities aggressively opened EMI satellite campuses in Asia and the Middle East. Inspired by profit and the need to chase the foreign tuition dollar, such expansionary efforts have met with different degrees of success. However, as world economic growth starts to recede and nationalist sentiments rise, we have witnessed a curtailing, and in some cases withdrawal, of these transnational endeavours. Adopting an ecological approach (Han, De Costa & Cui, 2019) to better understand this educational phenomenon, I investigate how English monolingual biases and an emergent interest and pride in local languages within several countries that have hosted joint venture foreign campuses have been negotiated. Specifically, I explore the ways in which different social actors – students, faculty and administrators – engage in complex identity work that often results in individuals being sorted and sieved according to the various levels of capital that they possess. These actors’ strategic policy and pedagogical decisions will also be unpacked against mounting internal pressures by governments to raise the standards of local universities in the face of stiff global university ranking competition.
