Abstract
This study aims to contribute to the ongoing scholarly debate about linguistic privilege in academia. The article pushes this debate forward by considering the role of English in the career development of academics in Anglophone universities. More concretely, our study empirically explores the career trajectories of multilingual scholars in Ireland who speak English as an additional language (EAL). Adopting a Bourdieusian lens, the article conceptualises academia as a locus of competitive struggle over authority, recognition, and prestige, in which scholars avail themselves of different kinds of capital, including linguistic capital, and deploy strategies to flourish. Through a qualitative approach, the article examines data from university documents and procedures, from interviews with EAL scholars in different disciplines and at different stages of their career, and from interviews with academics holding senior management positions in three universities in Dublin. We analyse the language-related challenges that EAL scholars encounter and the affordances with which Anglophone universities provide them, as well as the ways in which language impacts on their career progression. The empirical data reveals a complex and nuanced interplay between language and other academic factors. Our findings suggest the need to go beyond simple hierarchies of academic privilege or disadvantage based on a scholar’s first or additional language alone.
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Data availability
The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
Notes
This research obtained ethical approval from the Research Ethics Committee of DCU’s Faculty of Humanities and Social Science.
Assistant professor is a tenured position in the Irish system.
Transcription conventions: #, short pause; ##, long pause; [xxx], uninterpretable speech; [%], laughter; <…>[?], unclear speech; […], ellipsis of text; [TEXT], the authors’ clarification of the interviewee’s words; X, where words or phrases have been omitted to anonymise the data
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This work was supported by the Research Initiative Fund, Dublin City University.
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Erdocia, I., Soler, J. English language and the career progression of academics in Anglophone universities. High Educ (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-023-01151-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-023-01151-4