Ethical events in the internationalising university: engaging, learning, and knowing in spaces of otherwise

This paper suggests that a sociolinguistics of potentiality is an "ethical"sociolinguistics that will grapple with the difference of others. Drawing on a linguistic ethnography of Social Sciences classrooms in a Swedish university, it illuminates how students and teachers work to foster improved sociality and mutual responsibility across social and linguistic difference in internationalising university life. The paper develops through a consideration of Levinasian "ethical events", defined as interactions involving that which is not known, normative or ordinarily visible, but for which all involved are called upon to take responsibility. Analysis of the ethical events involving instances of embodied interdiscursive performance brings to light how late liberal values such as individualism and competition could be disrupted in favour of collaborative and mutually responsible academic and social practice. Yet, as is characteristic of "spaces of otherwise", the task of shaping such new relations in and around the classroom spaces involved risk and exhaustion. The study concludes by arguing that constructing university spaces as open to different ways of engaging, learning and knowing involves an orientation in response to others' desire for mutuality and reciprocity.