Reflections of (Dis)location: What is “Intercultural Communication” in Transnational Higher Education English-Medium Instruction?

Abstract

Debates around the impact of English-medium instruction (EMI) as part of transnational higher education (TNHE) typically focus on macro-level impacts on host country languages, cultures, and economies. Adopting the methodology of institutional ethnographies, this reflective study narrates how I came to find problematic such totalizing narratives of TNHE. The object of my reflections is an undergraduate English elective course, Communicating in the Global Marketplace, first taught on the main campus in Pittsburgh, USA, of a TNHE institution, which I then participated in “(dis)locating” (Edwards and Usher, 1997) to a branch campus in Qatar. The study illustrates how emic perspectives on course design and delivery open up TNHE as a process of meaning-making. Analysis of course artefacts (course descriptions, reading lists, and assignments) from offerings on both campuses point to opportunities educators in the process of TNHE have to question language ideologies in EMI, consider “imagined communities” (Norton and Pavlenko, 2019) when marketing courses for prospective students, and frame both transnational “encounters” (Vora, 2014) and our understanding of what is “intercultural” in transnational EMI.