Background: This paper describes findings from research conducted on students who participated in a service-learning course in South Africa. Objective: The study aimed to understand how participants constructed their experiences of service-learning and to interrogate their emotional investments in these constructions. Method: Data were collected…

Patriotic education plays a crucial role in the national policies of many countries, focusing on students as the primary beneficiaries and educational institutions as the main platforms for its implementation. Despite its importance, there is limited research on how students engage with patriotic initiatives. This study explores how patriotic…

How does the process of racialization unfold as a discursive project at the university? How do students and faculty in the classroom use racial categories in supposedly post-racial places? How do People of Color in higher education in Norway narrate their experiences of being 'Othered'? We draw on two linked studies and use membership…

Utilising discourse from college students who participated in a three-day seminar focused on racism and white privilege that I designed and piloted, this study examines and critiques participants' constructions of these constructs. I collected data via a pre- and post-seminar survey, and through recordings of students' participation in small and…

Power distance (PD), a cultural value denoting acceptance of asymmetrical power relationships, influences the force of rhetoric used by a writer to address their reader. However, AI technologies such as ChatGPT lack an explicit awareness of PD, which could affect the quality of AI-generated persuasive texts used for language learning. To…

This study explored how individuals spoke about the dissonance they experienced due to their own intersections of identity within religious and/or spiritual spaces in their communities and on college campuses. In addition, we as researchers sought to understand how discourse may or may not have challenged the idea of dissonance as a negative…

This research article on feminism gives an account of the interaction between a female teacher and her students at a public university in Tunja, Colombia. The study aims to evidence features of feminism within an English as a foreign language classroom by analyzing the transcriptions of the teacher's discourse using the Feminist Poststructuralist…

"To what gender and status one talks" governs more the speaker, in deciding their culturally and socially accepted strategy in conversation, than "who talks"; as the airport runway dictates the pilot's landing strategy. This paper, employing conversational analysis, tries to explore how the gender and social status of the…

South African public higher education has been dogged by student protests since 2015. Many of these disruptions raise pertinent issues for the sector, as well as bring about valued awareness and change. Critical scholars have remarked that in every social or political movement, something of pronounced importance is being said -- usually emerging…

The 2016 U.S. presidential election brought to light longstanding tensions and bigotry across the country that were further exacerbated when Donald Trump won the presidency on November 8th. While college and university leaders have traditionally refrained from commenting on election results, looming concerns of possible campus protests and…

Most studies on campus and private policing take on political, anthropological, sociological, and criminological perspectives. Although there were investigations on policing in South Africa during apartheid, scant research has focused on how students in South African higher education (SAHE) relate their experiences of campus policing. Due to…

A critical discourse analysis of comments written in response to an online article related to the University of Connecticut's announcement about the ScHOLA2RS House, a culturally-themed residential program to retain and support African American male students is presented. Following this announcement, articles were published in various online media…

Beginning in the 1970s, education has responded to the rise of neoliberalism across macro-, meso-, and micro-level contexts through shifts in practice and structure. Meanwhile, language learning is often promoted as an instrument in job attainment and transnational business communication. For example, in language education, courses in language for…

This qualitative study explored administrative responses to local and sociopolitical events challenging campus climates at public research universities. Using critical discourse analysis, we examined the use of language as a form of power in publicly available documents addressing campus climate for diversity and inclusion at 31 U.S. institutions.…

Higher education yields individual and collective benefits, to include higher earnings, increased civic engagement, and national economic growth. While social and democratic benefits are included in the expansive lists of positive outcomes, economic benefits, both for the individual as well as for society, remain at the forefront of national…