This presentation will explore the ethical challenges faced by administrative support staff in negotiating their communicative practices at an internationalising Swedish university. The study presented promises to contribute towards debate surrounding language planning for internationalising Higher Education in Sweden and beyond.
This presentation will explore the ethical challenges faced by administrative support staff in negotiating their communicative practices at an internationalising Swedish university. Academic administrative staff rarely feature in studies on internationalisation yet are crucial to understanding the complex day-to-day realities of contemporary university life. Empirically, this study reports on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, including observations, interviews, and email records. It investigates the communicative practices of three administrative support staff as they attempt to manage the twin challenges of adhering to state and institutional policies while communicating ethically in an internationalising workplace. Drawing on an ethico-political framework of hospitality, it asks how, to what extent, and when it is deemed responsible to go beyond the 'principal' language of the state, institution, and majority of university employees in order to welcome one's interlocutors. The findings suggest that if language policy is to become responsive to the multilingual realities of contemporary (Swedish) university life, language planners need to factor in the ethical challenges here identified through questions of linguistic hospitality. Within and across the interactions discussed here, such challenges are shown to be already under negotiation 'on-the-ground'. As such, this study promises to contribute towards debate surrounding language planning for internationalising Higher Education.
Key words: ethics, language policy, internationalisation, hospitality, multilingualism, Swedish university life.
