Reflexive encounters with internationalisation(s): a critical rhizomatic narrative journeying

Abstract

The story of reflexive encounters with internationalisation is a story of deep humanity and hope. Beyond being an institutional imposition that has cajoled us, shamed us, and rewarded us, the stories of internationalisation have the potential to offer us opportunities to reflect on what it means to be human, with others, and how we might otherwise live our lives with others. These (un)timely reflections force us to confront the question of what it means to ‘internationalise’ and ‘be internationalised’, and how we might be with ‘internationalisation’ otherwise. As I journey from Morocco to Scotland, I seek places of shelter, places of belonging. I narrativise (un)homely lives, places of pain and rejection, othering and dehumanisation. I navigate the deep crevices of silence…my silence and the silence of others. The echoes reverberate with self-silencing. The stories of my journey do not freeze in the silence and self-silences. Conversing with critical rhizomatic narrative (Swanson, 2004, 2008) as methodology enables me to rhizomatically grapple with contradictions and ethical dilemmas. Through ‘moments of articulation’, I seek to engage – in critical, affective, embodied and reflexive ways - with a set of ethical dilemmas, contradictions and forms of cultural hegemony that are lived and relived. Simultaneously positioned as insider and outsider, interpellated to occupy irreconcilable positions that pull me apart and that institute a cutting duality at the heart of my being, I narrativise by way of offering provocative rhizomes for grappling with these lived ethical dilemmas. This is not a personal story, a musing, a jeremiad. It is the story of others, and of me in the world with others. Caught in the violent web of historical, geographical and political legacies, legacies in which their futurity is already mapped out, the others of internationalisation are inferiorised, dehumanised and pathologised. In my narrative renderings, and through postcolonial/decolonial journeying, I invite the reader into the lived experience of the other, and to take an ethical and political stance in order to contest and resist sites and actions of injustice. I invite the reader to join a conversation that opens up other conversations in a myriad of rhizomatic directions, in order to seek, together, more hopeful visions of the future. This invitation into a disruptive narrative text might be disorientating for the reader, yet the invitation is a form of ethical address. I join others in decolonising methodologies of research. In so doing, I put out tendrils towards possibilities of a more hopeful world. In narrativising these dilemmas, and in bringing together different methodological, ethical and political explorations into play in aesthetic forms, I intentionally do not adhere to the norms of conventional social science research methodologies. To do so would be an act of colonising and self-colonising. Instead, through the evocative and provocative power of narrative, and the conversations it permits with imaginaries of possibility and hope, a new relational world is ever-more-closer brought into being.