EMI as a performative technology of acceleration in higher education contexts: academics and administrators’ perspectives

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that reading English Medium Instruction (EMI) as a performative technology of acceleration in the highly competitive conditions of today’s global higher education (HE) contexts is one way to gain insights into present-day realities of EMI orientations, experiences, and practices. In so doing, it examines the interplay of EMI, HE, and Tomlinson's [2007. The Culture of Speed: The Coming of Immediacy. London: Sage] three cultural narratives of speed. A Saudi HE institution, Sroor University (SU; a pseudonym), is used as a case example study to explore how the cultural narratives of speed have been experienced by language teachers, administrators, and engineering faculty members. The findings of this interview-led study show that a sense of urgency, active control, and an overwhelming tendency to direct all its educational efforts towards the needs of industry is prevalent in the operations of the university. It was also found that the culture of speed has brought about excitement, pleasure, pains, and risk to the academics in their everyday EMI practices. It concludes that reading these complex constellations of experiences through temporal perspectives allows us to capture not only the effects of the culture of speed but also how unequal power relations are played out among social actors within and across individual contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• EMI
• culture
• speed
• higher education
• technology
• capitalism
• performative

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Osman Z. Barnawi

Osman Z. Barnawi is an associate professor at the Royal Commission Colleges and Institutes, Yanbu, Saudi Arabia. His research interests include the intersection(s) of language and political economy, social and education policy studies, the cultural politics of education, multilingual and multicultural studies, second language writing, and transnational education. His works appear in journals such as Language and Education, Critical Studies in Education, and Australian Review of Applied Linguistics. He is the founding editor of Global South Perspectives on TESOL (Book Series: Routledge-Taylor and Francis Group). His recent books are TESOL and the cult of speed in the age of neoliberal mobility (Routledge, 2020), Neoliberalism and English Language Education Policies in the Arabian (Routledge, 2018), and Writing Centers in the Higher Education Landscape of the Arabian Gulf (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).