Browsing by Subject "migrant"

Objectives. The research task of this study is to describe, analyse and interpret the use of “migrant student” and similar terms in two documents of an international intervention project, which aims to make assessment more equitable for “migrant students”. More specifically, this study aimed to answer the research question “In what manners is the migrant student positioned?”. Positioning involves the assignment of attributes to people, either to another individual/group or the utterer/their ingroup (Davies & Harré 1990). On top of assignment of attributes, naming and agentivising of “the migrant student” were considered to contribute to positioning, and were thus investigated as well. Methods. The material consisted of two documents, a grant proposal and an informational document for stakeholders, written by multiple authors, who are researchers. Documents were analysed with quantitative and qualitative means, namely frequency analysis of agent-verb-object combinations and discourse analysis. Both analyses drew from semiotics, semantics, and enunciative pragmatics. Results and conclusions. It was found that “migrant students” are consistently othered (Jensen 2011) - positioned as disadvantaged, incompetent and challenging. It was argued that the unfavourable positioning of the “migrant student” could serve to convince funders and stakeholders of the necessity and the success of the project, which is essential for securing academic funding. The implications of conducting educational initiatives that claim to advance equity for students, but simultaneously other them, were considered. It is suggested that academic othering may be necessitated by the structures that impact the agency of researchers. It is also recommended that future research not only explores academic othering in other academic genres, but also involves those in powerful positions in structures like universities.