The Languages of Internationalisation

Some years ago, I took part in a workshop where participants were invited to use graphic fiction to explore research questions.

Our task was to create a collage that could fit inside a simple snow globe, a bounded but meaningful world of its own that might help us ask better research questions of our chosen subject matter. We sat round a table filled with magazine cuttings, glue sticks, and Sharpies – fifteen academics from right across campus all frozen by the alien prospect of using pictures, not words, to communicate our thoughts. 

What if, I mused to myself, you could see words? What if every time someone spoke, their words would hang in the air, in different ways and some longer than others, depending on what was said and how? What if, when someone spoke cuttingly, their words really did cut through the air, leaving little lacerations as they went? Or if, when someone told you not to forget to buy milk, those words trotted along beside you through the supermarket until the goods were safely in your basket?

I care about these questions because I am a Professor of Modern Languages and I have been trained to think about what makes us linguistically and culturally different – and therefore interesting and challenging – to one another. Different dialects, different registers, semantic shifts and grammatical irregularities: when these are added together, they give us not just different languages, but different cultural values and traditions, different ways of seeing the world and our own place within it. But if we are alive to this in our everyday interactions, then only metaphorically. You might ‘see what I mean’, but it never actually ‘hits you between the eyes.’

I have followed these academic thoughts about language and comparative literature within a wider university landscape that has had a very pragmatic rationale for looking beyond the national frame. As domestic funding falls and universities seek to grow their operations, international students are called in to make up the deficit. Some of my workshop colleagues in fact created the snow globe dystopian version of this: venerable institutions trumpeting high moral values on the one hand, growing civic unrest over inequalities of opportunity on the other, and a visual s-storm when you shook the globe.

This was too quick for me. We were sticking words and images onto backgrounds, and I wanted my words to hold their space long enough to question such socio-political path dependency, however correct the overall trajectory may be within our current political climate.

From my perspective, much of the problem with internationalisation as a strategic initiative within contemporary Higher Education stems from the short-cut that is repeatedly taken between ‘being international’ and ‘being Anglophone’. I wanted a snow globe that helped the words spoken by a global community be seen in all their difference, before the message they are designed to communicate takes over. Here, then, several years later, is my research question: If you can catch the words different people speak as they form, engage properly with the look and the feel of them, can you open up a space for different messages to be heard?

The city of Galway is home to speakers of over 60 different languages in addition to Irish and English, and the University is one of the driving forces behind this linguistic diversity. Yet we cannot see it. To interact with us, students suppress the other languages in their background. Both the academic structures and to a degree even the physical buildings necessarily place you in a position of disadvantage if you are not entirely sure of your word order, speak with a halting diction, or struggle to navigate your way through virtual and physical infrastructures that are configured for the experience of those born into the ‘right’ register, dialect, language.

The beauty of a snow globe is that it changes. In the traditional toy, the snow falling creates a magical scene of transformation. If I can bring about one change for the College of Arts, Social Sciences & Celtic Studies under my tenure as Executive Dean, then it is this: that we will become better at seeing the many different languages around us and that anyone who shares this space for a time, whether student or staff member and whether from Ireland or abroad, literally sees themselves changed as a result. Being at NUI Galway means you learn to see something about the rest of the world that you couldn’t see before. It doesn’t mean you become fluent in forty tongues, but it does mean you question your own.

In terms of university planning, this transformative experience doesn’t happen by virtue of a deus ex machina, that hand of God that sometimes reaches down and helps everything fall into place in a literary text. Rather, in opting to be part of a truly international university, we place ourselves consciously in a world we know will change and we inhabit a space that has been purposely designed to foster those international exchanges needed to ensure such change happens for the better. This understanding of internationalisation is not an add-on: it is at the very core of who we say we are, and we must plan accordingly as a university community. 

The languages of internationalisation, then, have both practical and utopian manifestations. We might design creative solutions to signage and space that imagine more than two languages filling our environs, or curricula that flex to explore what happens when key concepts from other cultures drive research agendas. But we might also stand right back and dream. 

In my snow globe for NUI Galway, I place miniature words from sixty different languages and I place people who reach out to touch these words, carry them on their heads and in their arms for a while, and then let them go with generosity. With each shake of the globe, our people embrace different words, and, with that, different worlds: being in this University is to know this will happen and being of this University is to take that knowledge out to the wider world.