Language, hospitality, and internationalisation: exploring university life with the ethical and political acts of university administrators

ABSTRACT

Drawing on the ethico-political framework of hospitality, this paper investigates the communicative practices of three administrative support staff as they attempt to manage the twin challenges of working in adherence to state and institutional language policies while communicating ethically in an internationalising workplace. 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. The data demonstrate language work being carried out on an ethical basis, before the consideration of any particular languages, beyond the participants’ political obligations, and in excess of institutional support. The current national and institutional responses to the multilingual realities of Swedish university life, I argue, are failing to do justice to and facilitate the ethically grounded, bottom-up language policy-making as practised by this study’s participants. This paper thus promises to open up debate on hospitality within language policy and planning for internationalising Higher Education, and, in its re-evaluation of the ethical and political dimensions of hospitality, it emphasises the framework’s critical potential within sociolinguistic research, more generally.

KEYWORDS:

• Hospitality
• ethics
• language policy
• internationalisation
• multilingualism
• higher education

Introduction

Rapid internationalisation has had substantial consequences for language policy, practice, and planning in Swedish universities. They are not the monoglossic spaces they used to be. For administrative staff, as with their teaching and research colleagues, workplace communicative practices are today more multilingual and involve more interaction with interlocutors not (yet) proficient in Swedish. ‘On the ground’, such a change raises challenges of ethico-political hospitality (Derrida, 1999, 2002; Levinas, 1969). Ethically, one must somehow respond to increasing social and linguistic differences, while politically such ethical responses must necessarily emanate from, and thus also respond to the specific circumstances under which the sociolinguistic change is taking place. As I will explore in this study, administrative support staff are in a unique position of having to communicate with, and support interlocutors in increasingly heterogeneous social and linguistic spaces, without there being policy that gives explicit recognition of or support to this challenge.

Verksamhetsstöd, translated here as ‘administrative support staff’, deal with tasks such as internal/external communications, human resources and finances, and work to support their research and teaching-oriented colleagues in crucial administrative matters. When communicating smoothly, verksamhetsstöd ultimately facilitates the accumulation of institutional scientific, academic and economic capital within the global academic market in which universities now operate. Yet, before the accumulation of such capital can begin, these administrators must respond to their colleagues who come to them seeking support in order to be able to start engaging in and conducting their work. When there is no mutual (first) language however, questions of linguistic hospitality arise. Given one’s circumstances and the (non)available linguistic resources, how is one to best communicate with, welcome and support one’s colleagues? While relevant to all in contemporary academia, such a question is perhaps most pertinent and most fruitfully explored with those for whom there appears to be little recognition of, and no support in relation to the linguistic challenges faced when communicating with increasing numbers of ‘international’ interlocutors.

While administrative staff play a key role in supporting the realisation of institutional desires to internationalise, it is primarily the positions of the teaching and research staff that are addressed in institutional and nationally sanctioned¹ language policies. As can be seen in the discussion surrounding the widely implemented ‘parallel language policies’ common in Scandinavian higher education institutions (e.g. see Holmen, 2017; Hult & Källkvist, 2016; Jämsvi, 2019; Kuteeva, 2014), it is the ability to find a balance between the use of Swedish and English in teaching and research that has been of primary concern. As such, while the linguistic heterogeneity ushered into university life has been translated (into English) and made functional for the purposes of teaching and research, the same cannot be said for matters of administration (Gregersen, 2014). Accordingly, the question of how one might go about the more everyday but still essential interpersonal working tasks, such as those carried out by administrative staff, is left largely un-addressed in the policy, debate and scholarship (see however, Karlsson & Karlsson, 2020; Liddicoat, 2016; Siiner, 2016). It has seemingly been presumed by language policy makers that administrators would formulate their own practicable working policies.

Under certain circumstances, institutional language policies are found to legitimise administrative staff who respond to international interlocutors in languages other than Swedish, notably in English and, to a lesser extent, Sweden’s so-called five minority languages: Finnish, Meänkieli, Romani, Sami and Yiddish. However, at the university in focus here, for example, this legitimacy extends only to language use in important documents which outline important management decisions and changes, as well as in the texts given to prospective staff and students. Moreover, at the national level, the Swedish Language Act (SFS, 2009, p. 600) calls for administration work in the public sector (within which universities are the biggest employers) to be carried out solely in Swedish, i.e. the official language of administration in Sweden. Accordingly, when faced with interlocutors not (yet) proficient in Swedish, especially in more mundane interactions, there is no legal pressure, institutional obligation or concrete professional support for administrative support staff to meet the linguistic needs and/or desires² of these interlocutors.

Questions concerning linguistic heterogeneity in internationalising universities are not new, however, especially in relation to more ‘macro’-concerns (e.g. Kaplan & Baldauf, 1997). Yet the response to linguistic change in the language policy, debate and scholarship still struggles to get beyond a focus on certain unitary and bounded notions of what is linguistically ‘national’ and ‘international’, e.g. Swedish and English respectively (e.g. Källkvist & Hult, 2020; see also Salö, 2016). Further, on account of a seeming preoccupation with the increasing dominance of English as the international language of Swedish HEIs and its ties to market-driven thinking (see Holmen, 2017), less attention has been paid to the practices of those ‘on-the-ground’ and to the position of, and practices involving, actors who may have other concerns (see Fabricius et al., 2017, p. 590). As I contend here, an ethnographic focus on the ethico-political challenges of administrative support staff, will serve to provide insights into the language-related challenges that need responding to in contemporary university life, for administrative support staff, and others.

To address such concerns, this study will respond to the following research questions:

1. How do the administrative staff in an internationalising Swedish university negotiate language use in encounters across difference?

2. To what extent and in what ways are the language practices and perceptions of these administrative staff responsive to and/or in excess of the directives and support given in national and institutional language policy and planning?

In the following sections, I outline the study’s ethico-political framework of hospitality and provide examples of how the notion of hospitality has been taken up in other language-related studies. Following a subsequent description of the methodological approach taken, I analyse the ethnographic interviews with three key participants, within which we focused on email records, telephone calls and regularly disseminated departmental texts. In the final discussion section, the language-related challenges encountered by the administrative support staff will be engaged with, foregrounding the ways in which they collectively navigate the ethical responsibilities and political realities of Swedish university life. The affordances of working within a framework of hospitality will also be set out, highlighting the ethico-political issues pertinent to the study’s participants made visible within such a framework. As I argue in my concluding remarks, it is the study’s participants’ desire to respond and provide hospitality to their interlocutors that makes the ethico-political lens pertinent in the all too often politically centred debates surrounding issues of language policy and planning in contemporary (Swedish) universities.

An ethical and political hospitality

The ‘ethics’ of this study’s framework of hospitality is an ethics that can be distinguished from any moral system, civic responsibility, or social-political order that might work to organise human behaviour. Consistent with the broader work of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, it is an ethics that seeks to break with the tradition of Western metaphysics, with a view to allowing for new ways of thinking about our being in the world and our responsibilities within it. Such is the radicality of this ‘ethics’ that the construction of any system relating to social action and civil duty is described as being derived from a pre-ontological experience of one’s ethical responsibility towards the other (Levinas, 1986, p. 29). As conceived in the work of Levinas, ethics comes first.

Levinasian ethics draws attention to the primordial significance of one’s intersubjective encounter with ‘the other’ as an ‘irreducible structure upon which all the other structures rest’ (1969, p. 79). The other, on account of their absolute singularity, always and already disrupts our experience and calls into question the freedom, spontaneity, and cognitive enterprise of the ego, which seeks to reduce all otherness to itself (see Critchley, 2014, p. 5ff). ‘The other’ thereby takes on a particular significance, pointing towards the ‘challenging’ experience involved in our encounter with the other, who, as they present themselves, will necessarily exceed the idea of the other in me (Levinas, 1969, p. 50). For Levinas, fundamental to such experience, indeed to all experience, is the question of how one might welcome, respond to, and coexist with the other while leaving their otherness intact.

In specific reference to the language of the other, Derrida (Derrida & Dufourmantelle, 2000, p. 15) follows the logic of Levinas and asks: ‘must we ask the foreigner to understand us, to speak our language, in all senses of this term, in all its possible extensions, before being able and so as to be able to welcome him into our country?’. To leave the foreignness of the other intact, should we employ the language of the other? In the context of this paper, do the administrative support staff in diversifying (Swedish) academia need to strive to use the language(s) in which their interlocutors feel most at home? Such a position would be one of absolute, unconditional or hyperbolical hospitality (Derrida & Dufourmantelle, 2000, p. 135). One might reasonably suppose an unconditional linguistic-hospitality impossible for even the most linguistically gifted, especially when considering the great extent of the linguistic diversity amongst staff in contemporary and internationalising (Swedish) universities.

Derrida (1988, p. 153) qualifies the unconditionality of the ethics of hospitality, describing how

it is not simply present elsewhere, outside of all context; rather it intervenes in the determination of a context from its very opening, and from an injunction, a law, a responsibility that transcends this or that determination of a given context […] What remains is to articulate this unconditionality with the determinate conditions of this or that context.

In other words, if an unconditional ethics in hospitality is impossible, then this is because one is also compelled to go beyond the intersubjective experience of ethics, to respond to the given socio-political conditions of the context in question, i.e. to practice an ethico-political hospitality. Such a passage from ethics to politics would necessarily entail moving from responsibility towards the other to a questioning of the given context and its conditions. Indeed, if put in a host position whereby one must welcome others, one will be compelled to question the conditions that make this relation impossible. Concomitantly, it is through the recognition of the impossibility of an unconditional relation between host and guest, that the host will start to feel their own host-position questioned and to feel oneself as ‘other’, or somehow ‘foreign’ like the other.

Always and already political yet rooted in the event of an ethical encounter with the other, an experience-based study of hospitality thus brings with it the critical potential to call into question any given moral, social, or political system that places demands upon its subjects. The ethico-political framework of hospitality will thereby allow for an interrogation of language policy and planning in contemporary (Swedish) higher education in the light of what is going on ‘on-the-ground’. More specifically, with subjects who are, legally speaking, only called upon to uphold the administrative language of the state in their everyday support of departmental colleagues (see above), this framework will allow for an exploration of how they might ‘responsibly’ go beyond the bureaucratic possibilities made available to them in policy, which they will inevitably be called upon to do.

While issues of hospitality relating to language in university life have not previously been taken up, the value of engaging with the notion of hospitality has been demonstrated in other language-related studies. It is to such studies that I now turn.

Language and hospitality

The notion of hospitality has been employed across an increasing number of disciplinary boundaries in recent years, within and beyond works of social and critical theory (see Molz & Gibson, 2007 for an overview). However, it has received relatively little attention in language-related studies. Yet, when socially concerned language-related studies have employed the notion, it has offered new ways forward for engaging ethnographically with issues of migration (Vigouroux, 2019), heritage language classrooms (Karrebæk & Ghandchi, 2017) and sexual diversity (Deumert & Mabandla, 2017). While there are crossovers, each of these studies is theoretically distinct in regard to its engagement with the ethical and political dimensions of the framework of hospitality. As such, I will now discuss these papers with a view to drawing out the potentialities, as well as the complexities of a specifically ‘ethico-political’ framework of hospitality for language-related studies such as this one.

In their ethnographic study on responses to sexual diversity in rural South Africa, Deumert and Mabandla (2017) employ a framework of hospitality to explore how the study’s participants navigate the always present risk of stigmatisation that one’s recognised position as sexually ‘other’ poses. The authors demonstrate how their participants’ difference, inherent in their sexual orientations, is at risk of becoming a stigma if not negotiated in relation to the norms of the host community. This risk of stigmatisation brings the authors to question the notion of unconditional hospitality. They argue that accepting the other, without condition and without asking anything of them, ignores the phenomenon of curiosity, suppressing a natural desire to know the other. Indeed, as will be explored below, in the case of Swedish academia, being expected to go beyond one’s first language in taking up an unconditional position that asks nothing of the other, can serve to alienate those who may not feel that there are the necessary linguistic resources available to do so.

In employing the notion of hospitality as a political experience and not simply an ethical imperative to unconditionally open up to the other, Deumert and Mabandla (2017) stress an important point already made by others in social and critical theory (e.g. Kelly, 2011). Indeed, as Derrida (2000, p. 135) is keen to stress himself, since ethical and political acts of hospitality can always corrupt each other, we are forced to negotiate between the two. An ethico-political hospitality then would navigate between the Levinasian sense of unconditional ethical-responsibility towards the other on the one hand, and a pragmatic and conditional responsibility which would be at once historical, legal, political and quotidian on the other (Derrida, 2001, p. xi).

Karrebæk and Ghandchi (2017) provide interactional examples of the affordances, challenges and impossibility of providing unconditional hospitality when responding to students’ perceived needs within heritage language classrooms. In inviting students’ friends into the community-based classroom, the teacher in the study practices an unconditional hospitality towards all who enter the classroom – anyone is welcome, and no explicit (linguistic) demands are placed upon them. However, only in those instances in which the guest comes to speak the target language of the classroom and incidentally contribute to the students’ language learning can the unconditional approach be said to have been made functional. The inevitable arrival of ‘difficult’ or ‘critical’ classroom guests, who come to disrupt the learning aims of the class, exemplify how the perversion of an unconditional hospitality is inescapable in everyday interaction (Derrida & Dufourmantelle, 2000, p. 135ff.). While unconditional hospitality serves to respond to the desires of the students to have their friends present, as well as to the teacher’s desire to reinforce the value of heritage language learning beyond purely linguistic interests, certain contextual factors disrupt this. The teacher had neither the time, nor the linguistic resources with which to cater for the needs of the heritage language learners’ friends. It is with this scarcity of resources that ethical events of interaction open up to political questions.

Within an explicitly stated political framework of hospitality, Vigouroux’s (2019) study engages with Sub-Saharan African migrants as they come to negotiate their guest- and host-hood in south-south migrations. The study emphasises the participants’ interactions that unsettle and (re)shape the state-imposed categories of migrants and locals to which scholars and policy makers predominantly subscribe. The paper demonstrates how subjects ‘on-the-ground’ ethically respond to the absolute singularity of others, while aware of the contextual constraints, in such a way that allows them to avoid getting caught up in the vicissitudes of circulating language ideologies and the related state categories. Vigouroux’s emphasis on the negotiation of ideological dichotomies, made visible through a framework of hospitality, precludes the validity of any assumptions one may make in relation to who it is that might hold and/or take up host or guest positions. Taking note from this study, then, who it is that is most ‘at home’ in Swedish academia cannot be taken for granted.

Methodology

In order to respond to this study’s research questions, repeated visits were made to the department’s on and off-line spaces over an 18-month period, from January 2018 to June 2019. This large humanities department was made up of over 100 staff members, 11% of whom were administrative support staff. During this time, observational, interview and recorded interactional data were collected through and around engagement with 3 key participants: Charley, Alex and Niki.

The key participants were chosen on account of their positions within the department – how much institutional power they held, how much time they had spent in the department, as well as their relations with each other. Participant positions are made clear in each relevant subsection in the analysis below. I also include data from engagements with a member of the research/teaching staff, Luka, who was mentioned in early discussions by a key participant, Niki. Other colleagues of the key participants are also mentioned: another administrative staff member discussed in ethnographic interviews: Kim, by Alex; and an academic staff member who features in email interactions discussed in ethnographic interviews: Yona, in correspondence with Alex and Niki.

The names of all participants mentioned are gender neutral pseudonyms and details given about them are loose with a view to maintaining their anonymity. Amongst the participants, 2 are female and 1 is male, which reflects the female-dominant gender balance of the department (of both academic and administrative staff).

All of the key participants were born in Sweden and Swedish was their most regularly spoken language. Alex also habitually spoke 2 other non-European languages at home. All administrative staff were accustomed to speaking and working with English and agreed to participate in the study with the understanding that formal and informal interviews would be carried out almost entirely with English.

The department offers teaching, and produces research in both Swedish and English However, on account of there being very few speakers not (yet) proficient in Swedish, one’s ‘linguistic sense of placement’ in this department (see Salö, 2015) is such that for all participants engaged with here, Swedish was said to be the most habitually used language in departmental interactions, whether in the kitchen, eating area, corridors, or online. Only a handful – 4% of all research/teaching staff, might be described as potentially benefiting from being addressed in languages other than Swedish and up until 2012 there had not been any speaker not proficient in Swedish working at the department. This department can thus be described as a department in transition, new to the need to respond to the ‘on-the-ground’ realities of an internationalising university.

The data consist of around 20 hours of formal semi-structured interviews that were audio-recorded and transcribed, as well as emails records generously provided to me by the participants. Many more hours of informal interviews, as well as personal observations, were also audio-recorded. Both narrative and ethnographic interviews were conducted. Through narrative interviews, insights into participants’ contrasting histories, positions and duties allowed for a greater sensitivity as to how workplace communicative practices play out differently for each participant (Tusting et al., 2019, p. 58). In the ethnographic interviews we discussed written texts (e.g. emails and newsletters), spoken texts (e.g. phone calls/staff meetings/individual meetings amongst colleagues), and observations/reflections collected in my fieldnotes.

I myself arrived in Sweden, to a Swedish university as a researcher, less than year before starting this research, with almost no Swedish, and facing no explicit requirements to have learnt Swedish by this (or any) time. Perhaps unsurprisingly, my own Swedish was not (yet) proficient enough for me to conduct this research in Swedish (only). So, while ethically concerned with the potential discomfort my English-medium request for participation entailed, I proceeded to explore what felt like an unexplored and un-addressed tension more broadly felt in internationalising (Swedish) academia. I thereby relied on the ethical hospitality of my participants, to accept me in my singularity, as well as the political conditions which encourage administrative support staff to engage with increasing numbers of interlocutors not (yet) proficient in Swedish. While my approach was questionable, our contemporary political reality that made it possible is itself put into question here.

An ethnographic approach was crucial for this study as it allowed for the researcher-researched relationship to be negotiated over time. The slow and unfolding engagement made possible with longitudinal ethnographic study allowed me to work towards addressing the unequal power balance resulting from my request to begin the mutual engagement in data construction through my own first language. Although participation in the study was optional and involved a detailed information sheet and consent form, consistent with national ethical guidelines, this linguistic matter, of particular relevance to this study, made a considered ethical approach all the more important. As became clear to me, a fruitful researcher-researched relation involves much more than a one-off decision about language use. Indeed, it was never far from the surface of conversation for the duration of the project. One change that resulted from such conversation was that written exchanges with Niki came to be conducted in both Swedish and English on account of what we understood to make most most sense in relation to the professional demands we were both facing at the time. Remaining open to such changes, for me at least, generated a greater sense of insider-ness, solidarity and empathy (see Martin-Jones et al., 2016, p. 192). Such negotiations also provided me with greater sensitivity toward the challenges faced by my participants and their interlocutors, thus informing the data analysis that I will now present.

Parallel languages for public texts: rooted in an ethical event?

Walking into this department as a professional stranger and collecting texts that are distributed amongst all departmental employees, e.g. newsletters, meeting PowerPoints, and general information in emails and on posters, one will quickly get the sense that working beyond Swedish is taken seriously by the staff working to produce them. Such texts maintain the political responsibility given to staff working in administration, who, as the Language Act states, must cultivate the use of Swedish (Prop., 2008/09:153, 2008, pp. 29–30). At the same time, the texts are in excess of the administrators’ legal responsibilities in that they also feature a foreign language, in this case English. In relation to such texts, I begin my account of the participant engagement by asking to whom and to what the authors of such texts are responding.

I first spoke with Charley. Charley had been in a senior administrative position at the department for over ten years and was the designer of posters seen in the corridors and newsletters distributed online. We discussed where the sense of responsibility came from in relation to the use of both Swedish and English in such texts.

Excerpt 1.

Researcher: Has the role of management changed for you, in your work, from the beginning, up until now? This could be kind of managerial directives, what they're saying you should and shouldn't do, or quality procedures, or conventions?

Charley: No. I think it’s more corridor talk. It’s more of an informal agreement that we should just do it.

Although the university language policy does encourage parallel language use, Charley’s comments suggest that what was considered most relevant to the production of departmental texts was an ethically grounded policy based on informal discussions. When I asked if there were any defining moments in the ‘corridor talk’ that might have led to some changes, Charley gave an account of a meeting that was said to have taken place only ‘5 or so years ago’, shortly after the first employees not (yet) proficient in Swedish entered the department.

Excerpt 2.

Charley: I was in a [departmental] meeting with a couple of people who were talking about research and we were bilingual at the meeting. So, we were speaking English at the meeting because there were people who did not know Swedish. […] I was talking to [Leo], who is a PhD student. […] It always comes down to time. That you don't have the time. It takes a lot of time to just write something in Swedish and then to do it again in English, which is not your, you know, the mother tongue. It takes twice as long, even more. […] But then when [Leo] said that, that it doesn't matter if there's one person or 50 persons that don't speak Swedish. If you don’t write it in English, that person's excluded and that is bad enough. And I thought, he's right. Of course, he's right. And we should have thought about this from the beginning. […] so, when I had emails to send to the department, I started to write first in Swedish and then in English.

There are two significant and interrelated points of interest in Charley’s account. Firstly, the presence of just one interlocutor not (yet) proficient in Swedish is said to be the source of desire motivating Charley to produce texts in both Swedish and English. Depicting an ethical relation, it is on account of English being the language of the other, albeit just one other, that Charley uses it in departmental communications. When claiming that the production of texts in both Swedish and English ‘should have [been] thought about from the beginning’, Charley is referring to the time at which the department recruited its first staff member not (yet) proficient in Swedish.

Secondly, Charley raises the issue of time as relevant for administrators who go on to write texts in more than one language. Writing bilingual text takes more time. Further, the extent of the extra time needed will depend on one’s confidence in employing a language one is not accustomed to or has little/no experience using in particular registers. Such points will be taken up in the discussion below, but suffice it to say here, despite Charley’s change to on-the-ground parallel-like language policy, itself encouraged by this particular university, no extra-support or allowances are given to administrators for the extra time inevitably spent on additional language work. If motivated by an ethical concern to put the non-Swedish speaker first, this is not (yet) recognised in the language policy or planning. However, as we shall now see in the discussion of a job interview at the department, while the desire to respond to and preserve the language of the other may receive no concrete institutional support, it is very much valued.

An ethical relation: putting the linguistic resources of the other first

In opening discussions with Alex, a junior administrator who had been at the department for no more than 2 years when the fieldwork began, I asked about the departmental recruitment process with a view to uncovering the ways in which one’s linguistic background might be seen as relevant for Alex’s professional position.

Excerpt 3

Alex: Well, they said, ‘you have a lot of languages. Do you think that will be useful for us?’ And I said, ‘yeah, well, why not?’ (laughs) Then [Kim] started speaking Spanish with me in the interview.

Being addressed with Spanish in the interview – a loaded and typically formal institutional event, Alex sensed, perhaps with surprise (suggested by the laughter), that having a multilingual repertoire had value and relevance for the position. Indeed, introducing a language into such a critical gatekeeping event that is not related to any official departmental practices suggests that the department and its employees place value on hospitable acts that welcome others and their linguistic resources not yet at home there. The linguistic hospitality described by Alex is not pre-determined by any linguistic requirements stated on the job description, e.g. Swedish and English. Rather, for Alex, Kim demonstrates that for those apparently already ‘at home’ in this department, there is value in going beyond the language of the institution in meeting the other on their own terms. Here in this department, perhaps, the staff practice speaking the language of the one who stands on the outside, whether professionally or linguistically. Accordingly, one might suppose that upon making it through this gatekeeping process, Alex would be free to practice this ‘ethics-first’ linguistic hospitality as part of the new professional role.

When I asked Alex about any potential affordances of having a diverse linguistic repertoire in the department, another instance of Spanish use was described. In a phone call with administrators in a Spanish university, made on account of one of the departmental staff’s involvement in an Erasmus project, Alex described the challenge of working with a language not used on an everyday basis and the pride involved.

Excerpt 4

Alex: I didn't know if he understood, or, like that, but it was really hard to understand because his Spanish was so fast. […] So, after I’d tried a lot, I felt that we really needed to call in [Kim]. So yeah, I told [Kim] and [the head of the department] that. And then, actually, we did this operation. We were proud of it actually. It was a big thing for us. [The head of department] was like, ‘Oh, it's good, [Alex], because you don't, you know, you're not afraid to handle these things and with other staff.

Here, Alex describes a personal attempt to directly engage with the language of the other, in this case Spanish, as well as of cooperation and solidarity with colleagues to best support their interlocutor while getting their job done. For Alex, Kim and the head of department, at least, a hospitable drawing on all linguistic resources available is positively valued. In seeking to support this particular interlocutor and solve the issue as soon as possible, Alex worked to respond according to an ethically oriented logic of hospitality, welcoming the interlocutor without pre-determining the linguistic resources that would be necessary. Such an act was supported by Kim through the willingness to assist, and positively marked by the head of the department.

The value placed upon having a rich linguistic repertoire in Alex’s interview and the description of a successful and collaborative navigation through the multilingual realities of contemporary academia indicate a desire for a hospitable and multilingual place of work. However, it remains to be seen whether this unconditional logic of hospitality towards the (language of the) other might be practiced and regarded with the same degree of success within the department when in direct communication with departmental colleagues.

‘Trouble, trouble’ and the politics of hospitality

For Alex, one positive aspect of being in an internationalising department is the opportunity to be able to practice and develop (English) literacy skills with colleagues at work. This opportunity came about in interactions with Yona, an international researcher/teacher, who Alex said had previously expressed a preference for communicating to Alex in English.

Excerpt 5

Alex: I like to write to [Yona] in English because I want to train my own language. The skills. But sometimes, [Niki] says, no, you can write to [Yona] in Swedish because [he/she] wants to learn Swedish. So yeah, so I started to write in Swedish to [Yona]. But right now, when I write in Swedish, they message back, but only in a few words, like two words in Swedish.

Alex here recounts how the mutual preference for English was interrupted on account of the concerns of Niki, a more long-standing colleague, in a more senior position. While rooted in a previous negotiation (see excerpt 7), Niki’s comments nevertheless functioned to interrupt Alex and Yona’s own implicitly or explicitly negotiated communicative norms. After changing such norms accordingly, Alex soon found that the switch of languages led to certain work-related troubles.

Excerpt 6

Alex: It’s not trouble trouble, but it like made the work last longer. I needed to put more energy into it. When it would take one hour, I used three weeks. Of course, it was the language, because [Yona] didn’t understand what I wrote.

Researcher: Did you discuss this with your other colleagues?

Alex: Yes, [Niki said], ‘[Alex], you should talk to [Yona] instead of writing like that. To get the message.’ […] But I thought like, [Niki] told me something and so I did it. And, yeah, it became my fault.

For Alex, responding to Niki’s comments and changing the approach to internal collegial interaction led to a breakdown in communication. Niki’s call for Alex to interrupt the interactional approach taken with Yona may thus seem unjust, especially in comparison with the seemingly unconditional hospitality practiced by Alex with external colleagues. Indeed, Niki’s concerns did relate to something beyond the (language of the) other.

In Alex’s account, Niki’s concern related to the perceived desire for Yona to learn Swedish. Yet, curiously, Niki’s response to the breakdown was not that Swedish should have been imposed, but that the matter should have been discussed first. For Niki, the reasoning behind the interruption was explained with reference to previous interactions with Yona.

Excerpt 7

Niki: For example, [Yona] is rather good in Swedish. So, I know that and people told me you can write to [Yona] in Swedish. [He/She] understands everything, but [he/she] answers me in English, because, I don't know, maybe [he/she] is not so good in writing Swedish. And [he/she] is not comfortable with that. So, I have to talk with the person and sort of make a deal.

With a description of communicative practices in which both Swedish and English are used after having made a deal, the account suggests Niki to be open to making the most of all linguistic resources available to make all present feel welcome. While such negotiations may not point towards an act of unconditional hospitality in which one does not ask anything of the other, Niki’s interruption of Alex and Yona’s interaction, ‘because [Yona] wants to learn Swedish’, does call for a negotiation that points beyond one’s own subjective desires. Furthermore, an act that responds to the social and political context shared with one’s interlocutors does not overwrite the ethical relation with the other; rather, it can indicate a Levinasian move from the anarchy of ethical responsibility to the question of political order that demands negotiation be made with the other (Levinas, 1981, p. 161).

Under negotiation: an ethico-political hospitality

After discussion surrounding the negotiation of linguistic norms in the department, Niki introduced me to another researcher/teacher, Luka, and their email correspondence. Luka’s working life required some Swedish, although, predominantly, it had required the use of English (not Luka’s L1, which as it happens had proved valuable for supporting a student in the department). Upon signing a new part-time contract with the department in 2019, having completed a post-doctoral qualification there 4 years previous, Luka wrote in English to the administrative support, as had been the norm when Luka left. Luka asked for a part-time desk in the departmental space. Niki responded:

Excerpt 8

Hej [Luka]! Kan jag skriva svaret till dig på svenska? Undrar [Niki]

(Hi [Luka]! Can I write the answer to you in Swedish? Wonders [Niki]).

Luka responded with:

Hej [Niki]! Yes, of course. Du kan skriva på svenska. Tack! [Luka]

(Hi [Niki]! Yes, of course. You can write in Swedish. Thanks! [Luka]).

Niki’s initial response here, having already come to know Luka during their previous time as departmental colleagues, is a request to respond in Swedish. In this email correspondence, Niki demonstrates the approach taken which accepted (and continued to accept) Luka’s writing in English, while maintaining the right to respond in Swedish. For Niki, to do otherwise would have made the management of a heavy workload seemingly impossible, gone beyond a long held linguistic sense of placement (Salö, 2015), and perhaps beyond what felt linguistically possible. In reference to conducting administrative work in English, Niki reported that, ‘I’m not so comfortable writing in English. [Knocks desk]. Point. (laughs)’.

Caught up with the unconditional hospitality seen in Alex’s interactions above, it is perhaps easy to overlook the position of those employees who, with the recent linguistic changes in departments such as this one, might suddenly find themselves no longer ‘at home’ if compelled to communicate solely in the language of the other. If compelled to speak English or any other language, administrative staff such as Niki may to some extent find themselves positioned as uninitiated linguistic guests in their everyday working lives. Following this logic, Niki’s ‘knock knock’ on the desk reported above, might well be heard as a knocking on the doors of the university that may no longer feel like home.

Despite the high ideals of management who speak of theirs being a multilingual university, many like Niki will find it difficult to operate in a second language (Tange & Lauring, 2009, p. 224), especially when it comes to the specific and technical registers required for professional positions such as those occupied by the participants in this study. For Niki (and Luka), a call to support colleagues in another language, is something that may prove impracticable. Yet in the above interaction, we see that this difficulty was met with an ethico-political hospitality: through negotiation and on the basis of the linguistic resources available to interlocutors. Niki may not have felt comfortable responding in English, but accepted Luka’s writing in English.

Thinking in relation to the context, one may ask whether it is not in Luka’s professional interests to develop Swedish, especially in a humanities department in which Swedish proficiency will doubtless afford one greater academic, and potentially scientific capital (see Salö et al., 2021). Moreover, if proficient in Swedish, Luka would be able to take a more host-like position that would relieve those Swedish-speaking colleagues of their unsupported need and/or desire to provide such linguistic hospitality. Indeed, putting ethics first, Luka did emphasise the desire to preserve the singularity of others in interaction.

Excerpt 9

Luka: I surely feel guilty for not being able to speak Swedish as much as I would want. So, I guess that, you know, if I might seem to come off as a bit sort of apologetic in what I say. Yes, it is to take into account the discomfort that using English might cause to people who would more naturally use Swedish.

Yet, despite a desire to move beyond English to better support the needs of colleagues, achieving a sufficient level of Swedish would require time that does not appear to be there for Luka.

Excerpt 10

Luka: I did attend the Swedish classes that were offered by the department, and then I also went to sfi [Swedish for immigrants] at some point. But when I realised that, you know, that more effort or more time would have been required at some point, I was like, I'm sorry, I have to work. So, my priority has always been my work, and my work involves English.

Given the work-related pressures felt by Luka, the guilt of not (yet) being able to provide unconditional hospitality to colleagues like Niki was something with which to come to terms. Current conditions coupled with a desire to remain professionally competitive made it a seemingly impossible problem to address. In such a position, Luka related to me how one can come to be positioned as an eternal guest, since Swedish is required when engaging in activities beyond teaching and writing for publication – acting as an examiner and fully engaging in research processes within a research team were given as examples (see Salö et al., 2021). So, while not (yet) proficient in Swedish, Luka was well aware that any knocking to come into a Swedish university, would remain quiet. Yet, without a solid list of publications and teaching experience (largely dependent on the use of English), such a knocking would likely remain quieter still. Niki’s openness to negotiation with colleagues in a position such as Luka’s thus facilitates a profession increasingly characterised by precarity and international mobility.

As we have seen, for both Niki and Luka, coming to terms with the impossibility of providing unconditional hospitality to the other involved a desire and/or readiness to negotiate language norms. Crucially, the act of entering into negotiations is one of ethico-political (linguistic) hospitality, rooted in a desire to provide unconditional hospitality to one’s interlocutors and the linguistic resources they have available (or not), while responding to the context in which the interaction takes place, i.e. an internationalising Swedish university that encourages ‘parallel language use’. In this light, since both face ethico-political challenges in responding to the other, neither one can be said to be at home in the department. Yet together, united as guests who desire to host the other, their interaction suggests that the fundamental language-related concern in internationalising academia is not the encroachment of any particular language per se, but a scarcity of resources.

Discussion and conclusion

In this study, the relations of administrative support staff working across linguistic difference have been shown to be ethically grounded. Such relations have been defined by a desire to unconditionally welcome the other in the preservation of their linguistic otherness. While the perversion of unconditional hospitality is perhaps inevitable, those acts in the data that were justified in relation to the social, linguistic and political realities of Swedish university life were nevertheless grounded in an ethical event of negotiation. In the current section, these ethico-political acts will be further discussed within the framework of hospitality, with a view to drawing out what the position of these administrative staff reveal about language politics in internationalising academia, while concurrently emphasising the value of this framework for sociolinguistic research.

Grounded in an ethical event of interaction between two interlocutors, hospitality is perhaps most ideally explored by means of a linguistic ethnographic approach. In undertaking a preliminary investigation of the departmental spaces, where one finds on- and off-line texts in both Swedish and English, one might reasonably make the assumption that this use of two languages is only symbolic and politically motivated, reflective of national and institutional concerns for universities to maintain their competitiveness in an English-dominant international market (Liddicoat, 2016, p. 234). Such market-based readings remain compelling. As such, to be able to entertain Charley’s explanations of such texts in interview – that they are, at least to some extent, produced so as to preserve the otherness of those non-Swedish speakers coming into the department, ethnographic investigation of the participants’ everyday interactions was conducted. After all, to simply take the word of an interviewee like Charley would be ‘to assume that what there is to find out can be found out by asking’ (Hymes, 1981, p. 84).

Through the exploration and analysis of various interactional events and texts within a framework of hospitality, administrative staff here show themselves to be making language choices undetermined by the ebb and flow of any national/international political ideologies which they may subsequently come to get caught up in (see Hornberger & Johnson, 2007, p. 527). In accordance with a Levinasian notion of hospitality, ethics came first here and was multilingual in character. Even within the formal constraints of a job interview, the participants’ practices went beyond Swedish and English – the languages so often fixated upon in Swedish university language policy, planning, and debate. In Alex’s job interview and cooperative Spanish phone call with Kim, a desire was expressed amongst those in the department to respond in accordance with the language of others present in contemporary university life. Alex and Kim felt compelled to take a multilingual approach in their interactional encounters, working in response to the linguistic resources available, despite this approach being in excess of what is explicitly recognised and supported by those engaged with Swedish national and institutional language policy.

Taken into interaction with internal interlocutors working in the department, however, Alex and Kim’s unconditional hospitality was shown to be impossible (see Deumert & Mabandla, 2017; Karrebæk & Ghandchi, 2017). Charley began writing public departmental texts in both Swedish and English on an ethical basis – to prevent any person from being excluded. The act was ethically grounded, but Charley’s comments in excerpt 2 suggest that it was not a gesture that could be done without raising certain political questions, e.g. how should one make time for such language work, and why is there no state/institutional recognition of the challenge involved in producing professional texts in more than one language on an everyday basis? Similarly, Niki went beyond unconditional hospitality, to open up negotiations with Luka with a view to reaching a relation according to which neither of them would have their (non)available linguistic resources unrecognised, nor their professional obligations overwritten. Neither Charley nor Niki sought to impose any bureaucratic/policy regulations on their interlocutors and instead made a non-determinate gesture toward the other revealing their acts to be ethics-based and politically concerned.

In an attempt to navigate the linguistic heterogeneity of the department and in light of the impossibility of unconditional hospitality, negotiation was shown to be key. When Niki’s predominantly Swedish-medium working life was interrupted by Luka’s English-medium request for support, Niki proceeded to negotiate in light of Luka’s perceived needs. This was needed since neither Niki nor Luka were able to provide unconditional linguistic hospitality, which their discomfort and guilt suggest they had the desire to provide. Such frustrations suggest that national and institutional policy makers have not (yet) provided the support necessary for anything like a ‘parallel language policy’ to be made realisable, whether for the administrative staff facing extra language work, or for the teaching/research staff struggling to learn Swedish. In response, calls have been made for more language support centres to be established (or existing ones enhanced) (Gregersen & Östman, 2018). This study echoes such a call. However, such support would still not respond to the linguistic heterogeneity of the staff within and beyond individual departments such as this one, nor to the working pressures and often temporary contracts of international staff whose language needs will continue to impact upon the work of administrative support staff.

Essentially, the framework of hospitality brings to light the fact that it is not the question of language choice that was fundamental to providing ethico-political hospitality here, but rather the act of negotiation itself. In excerpts 5 and 6, we saw that for Alex, the perceived need to impose language norms in interaction with Yona came about on account of Niki’s concern for Yona to be given the opportunity to practice Swedish wherever possible. Alex’s response was to switch languages and use only Swedish with Yona, leading to a breakdown in communication. In Levinasian terms, the function of such a switch was to reduce the infinite structure of the ethical relation with the other, to a rationalisable structure of totality, according to which negotiation is terminated. It served to reduce heteroglossia to monoglossia and to efface the ethical event with administrative authoritarianism. The communication breakdown led to extra work for Alex and Yona, and feelings of resentment on Alex’s part (at least), as revealed in Alex’s indignant complaint (excerpt 6), ‘it became my fault’. Crucially, however, the apparent cause of Alex’s resentment was Niki’s reproach, which in fact emphasised the need for Alex to negotiate language norms with Yona, not to switch in the absolute manner of administrative authoritarianism just described. Alex’s ‘fault’ was to overlook the ethical grounding when setting new language norms with Yona.

Internationalising (Swedish) university life I argue, has brought about a seemingly impossible situation that simply demands ‘on-the ground’ negotiation. As with previous language-related studies using the framework of hospitality (esp. Vigouroux, 2019), such negotiations have here been shown to undermine any certainty in relation to who the guests and hosts in contemporary academia might be. Such negotiations have also been shown to allow for the creation of solidarity and good working relations amongst (international) colleagues as they work across difference to recognise, accept and make the most of any shared linguistic resources. However, an ethico-political framework of hospitality does not promote an ethics-based anarchy. To reduce the negative impact of the ways in which internationalising academia makes guests out of those required to support new international interlocutors, a responsibility in relation to the socio-political context and the existing linguistic resources held by those already present must be maintained by more than just those 'on the ground'. The needs, desires, successes, and failures of this study’s participants suggest that in order for the smooth functioning of our universities to remain tenable, those involved with language policy and planning at both institutional and national levels need to better engage with and support those working to respond to the challenges involved in the everchanging multilingual realities of contemporary university life.

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the careful reading and encouragement offered by the anonymous reviewers of this paper. I am also extremely grateful for the insightful readings provided by Ben Rampton, Kathrin Kaufhold, Christopher Stroud, and my doctoral supervisors, Caroline Kerfoot and Linus Salö. I would also like to thank Margaret Holmes for the invaluable proofreading. Most of all, I would like to thank my participants for the hospitality provided to me throughout the research process.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Luke Holmes

Luke Holmes is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Research on Bilingualism at Stockholm University, Sweden. His main research interests are sociolinguistic in nature and his focus is on increasingly diverse and trans-local academic contexts, and the language-related challenges being met therein.

Notes

1 Prop. 2008/09:153 (2008, pp. 29–30).

2 The distinction between need and desire is relevant here on account of its relation to the framework of hospitality set out below. For Levinas, while need seeks to fill a negation or lack in the subject (whether identified by oneself or from the outside), desire is positively attracted by something other not possessed or needed (Levinas, 1969, p. 19)