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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1010

Part of Session 169: Sociolinguistic perspectives on the internationalization of HE (Other abstracts in this session)

Be mobile, go abroad, be successful. A Critical Discourse Analysis of the presentation of exchange and mobility programmes in universities’ self-marketing.

Authors: Triebl, Eva
Submitted by: Triebl, Eva (Karl-Franzens University Graz, Austria)

Since the EU’s inception of the Bologna Process in 1999, aimed at creating a European Higher Education Area, European universities have been trying to adapt their image to the objectives set up in documents such as the Leuven Communiqué of 2009. The need to meet the demands of the vision of “comparable, compatible and coherent systems of higher education in Europe” (www.ehea.info) mainly manifests itself in the self-marketing of European universities. Bologna buzzwords such as lifelong learning, employability and mobility now feature on most universities’ websites – for example, the University of Surrey Roehampton in London promotes itself with providing “employability advisors”  and tries to attract international students by stating that “studying abroad […] enriches your curriculum vitae and gives you that much needed edge when applying for jobs.”  (http://www.roehampton.ac.uk)

The notion of mobility in the context of education is ambiguous, referring to the willingness and desire to study and/or work abroad for a period of time during your studies and to change workplaces after your studies in order to enhance your employability and be maximally responsive to the demands of the job market, possibly giving up life-long plans for the sake of being sufficiently ‘flexible’. This ambiguity as well as that of the desire to move and the need to move – of moving and being moved, as it were – is being increasingly blurred, creating a very positive conception of mobility. Assuming that universities themselves will play a major role in constructing this positive image and blurring its ambiguities, I will examine how universities represent mobility and exchange programmes as key prerequisites towards employability with the aim of attracting students. Based on the theoretical framework of Critical Discourse Analysis, I will quantitatively analyse a corpus of 100 texts advertising mobility and exchange taken from websites of UK universities, trying to detect regularities in their language policies and to ‘uncover’ the worldviews implicitly conveyed by these texts.