The Privileging of English Language Use in Academia: Critical Reflections from an International Doctoral Seminar
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, we, a Canadian team of doctoral researchers, reflected on our journey during an International Doctoral Research Seminar held in Beijing in 2015. As five doctoral students and two academics, we met with our doctoral colleagues from academic institutions in Brisbane (Australia) and Beijing (China). Although we did not discuss or negotiate which language we would be using in China, we were confronted with our assumption that English would be used, and that some the participants had a lower level of English competency than expected. It was apparent that this assumption of English language use privileged some (i.e., Canadian and Australian teams) while disadvantaging others (i.e., Chinese team). This confrontation brought up questions and concerns about equity in participation. As a result, this article chronicles the Canadian team reflecting on the International Doctoral Research Seminar including our privilege of using English, and coming to the position of wanting to create a more inclusive space for all participants to engage equitably in this international collaboration. As such, our reflections in this article focused on the domination of English as a lingua franca in academic spaces, in addition to how we decided to facilitate a transcultural space for all participants to be included.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".