Australian Association for Research in Education,Annual Conference,

Sydney 2000, December 4-7.

PRESENTER: (Dr) Jeanette Rhedding-Jones

Faculty of Education

Oslo University College

Oslo, N-0167, NORWAY

email: Jeanette.Rhedding-Jones@lu.hioslo.no

TITLE OF PAPER:

(To be presented in the Symposium 'Developing research literacies in multicultural settings')

ABSTRACT : The paper targets the practices of English language take-over and resistance in international publication and the local awarding of higher degrees. Viewed as resistance, the continuing and developing of local research practices through much spoken language, in academia, produces powerful effects. In contrast, the necessity of English, as reading and occasionally as writing, operates to regulate, dilute and inform the theories and the methodologies constructing the research products. Spoken language practices such as the well attended public examining of Doctoral degrees, and the promulgation of knowledge through frequent day-long seminars and intellectual chat, are usual in Northern Europe. Here English is other to the languages in use, and Anglo-American research cultures may be ignored, considered a little or highly integrated into the local productions. When what is other to English is itself sophisticated and independant, the situation is not the same as for so-called 'developing countries'. In this paper the research cultures exemplified are Nordic (from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden.) The researcher/presenter currently teaches Pedagogisk teori og praksis, Forskningsmetode og Vitenskapsteori .

This paper is organized so that it deals firstly with undergraduate literacies in relation to English. It does so to show where postgraduate literacies are coming from, as beginning researchers in a non-Anglo culture must negotiate another language (English), as well as another academic culture (research). For researchers continuing their practices by taking up Anglographic texts and genres and discourses, the politics of thesis writing, international conference presentation and international publishing may be daunting. Developing researchers' knowledge and use of epistemologies, methodologies and contemporary issues, however, happens not only through encounters with their own language, but through what is published internationally as English . Thus becoming literate for research (that will be theorized and not simply reported as information) probably requires non-Anglos to encounter another language. This is complicated by the colonizing tendencies of English, as Anglophones imagine and position themselves as central, with other research cultures and languages as peripheral. For a globalization that homogenizes this research literacy has modern qualities. For a postcolonial future, hybridities and diasporas transform and disrupt Anglo supremacy. When this happens, Anglophones construct other literacies for themselves.

If we look at the development of research cultures in Education faculties outside English-speaking locations, a measure of the use of academic English is what is on the list of set reading for undergraduates. In Norway, to which I migrated three years ago, I now have permanent residency, via the institutions of the Foreign Office and Police Force. I also have a permanent job. This involves amongst other things teaching both undergraduate and postgraduate coursework: in Norwegian, unless I am awfully tired or the students don't seem to mind my English too much. For undergraduates there is nothing whatsoever on the list of set texts that is not in a Scandinavian language. For postgraduates about a quarter of what the students must read is in English, and in their dissertations they must produce an English language summary of what they have researched, theorized and consider important. This is the only English anyone writes (or pays a translator for), so obviously my reading of Norwegian is now my normalized teacherly practice. (The continuing story of my own research literacy is that I'm now invited to examine a Doctor of Philosophy thesis written in Swedish, but that is not a story for this particular paper.)

For postgraduate students, not having worked beyond the undergraduate level before, the task of upgrading their literacies to encompass not only epistemologies, research methodologies and contemporary themes but also another language can be highly problematic. This is despite the fact that English as a 'subject' (Rhedding-Jones, 1997b) is now compulsory throughout primary and seconday schooling in Norway. For older postgraduate students, English will probably be more problematic than for the younger students, as there was less English in Norwegian schooling earlier. Similarly, some teacher educators aged over fifty or so may decide to never speak any English at all (unless having a holiday in Spain or Italy), as proficiency is quite often equated with 100% perfect grammar and pronunciation. Other reasons for never speaking English relate I suspect to personal strategies of power and identity. This suspicion comes from my own experiences of linguistic and cultural marginalization, although Norwegians, being used to travel, television and the internet might not see their access to English as any different from my access to Norwegian. (I'd never heard or seen any Norwegian language until nine years ago.)

As one of the teacher educators in Norway who works with both undergraduate and postgraduate higher education pedagogies, I imagine how these undergraduates may eventually want to take their study further, perhaps by doing research. Wanting to develop their literacies for these possibilities later, and not only for their future performances as teachers and carers in schools and preschools, I focus on texts and their effects for more sophisticated reading and writing. Being disabled by having to speak Norwegian, I devise particular stragegies which sometimes work and sometimes result in me giving up and putting on a video, or handing out set tasks or getting the students to entertain themselves with debates and discussions. None of these practices goes against the development of literacies however, and in any pedagogical case learners must set their own pace, and even topics, if they are going to get much out the events and sites of curriculum.

As a way of describing the scene regarding this exemplified non-Anglo literacy culture (in Norway), I name some of the textual practices constructing the literacies of this higher education. A quite typical text book set as required reading for second year undergraduates in teacher education (Nordland, 1997) concludes with a reference list naming 270 publications (p. 177-187). As I must teach 'from' this book, in Norwegian, a quick way for me to do my lecture preparation is to see whose texts published in English infomed it, and make up my lectures on the basis of what I remember from them, plus what I have now read in Norwegian. All this gets blended with what I currently think and know, and might be able to express given sixty or so undergraduates who need practical and engaging activities so they don't think my teaching is too bad. Hopefully they will also gain something useful.

Given that the focus for this paper is the development of research literacies, I begin by indicating how this might be for postgraduates, given what sorts of texts they encountered earlier. Here the quality of the utilized English texts is quite questionable. (I notice this because I am an Anglophone. As a Norwegian I would probably notice only what is Norwegian.) For this paper I counted the English language publications in the reference list of the set book for second years (Nordland, 1997). Roughly they fall into two categories: popular texts (such as Getting to Yes: negotiating agreement , and The Amazing Brain) , and established classics published between 1934 and 1979 (such as Maslow's Motivation and Personality, and Tolstoy's War and Peace). Also some well known Anglo publications are translated into Norwegian (Debra Tannen's, Gregory Bateson's, Andy Hargreave's). One writer of known ethnic minority status in Norway is also published in Norwegian (Al-Kubaisi, 1996). The split between Norwegian (with a couple of Swedish publications) and English is 243/27. One of the English language texts is edited and published by Norwegians. Of the remaining 26, 13 are what I would call popular texts. The other 13 are 'academic' and written by men who became famous well before 1980. A list of eight recommended journals follows, all with Norwegian titles.

My understanding of an academic reference list is that it shows what the writer has read that informs her or his text, and that the reader may turn to. In Norwegian the reference list is prefaced with something to this effect: 'Valgt ut fra behov for aktuell litteratur og for klassikere på området' (literally, 'Choose according to your needs for current and classic work in the field'). Now I know that the writing a text book that will sell as undergraduate coursework is not the writing of a Doctorate. But as an indication of how English is being used by one non-English culture of teacher education, my quantitative reckoning would appear to request a more critical professionalism.

The positioning of English is that it colonizes other languages and academic cultures. Yet what is 'other' is only sometimes so (Rhedding-Jones, 2000b) . Further, the current politics of selling English as higher education coursework gives enormous advantages to those who are clever with it, as students, as teacher/lecturers and as manufacturers of computer programs. Adding to the complexity is the problem of access to ideas that are conveyed because of the nuances of language, in particular the subtleties of writing within the postmodern. Although this is just about impossible for even Anglographs without a literary background (reading and writing 'quality' novels, short stories and poetry), it may be quite impossible for non-Anglos to produce their versions of postmodernity in ways that Anglo-only readers can make appropriate sense of. How then do we judge people's writing/scholarship? This question underlies the politics of working elsewhere, of using power to determine the (academic) futures of others, and of assuming that your own Anglo positioning is not that of she/he who sits in the centre. One argument here is that Norwegian academic language needs to be developed and used, if Norwegian culture is to be reconstructed within and without today's globalizations. Another argument is that not reading currently published cutting edge work in English restricts the development of thinking, practicing and theorizing. I would say that for postgraduate students, research literacies in both languages, plus a knowledge of this politics, are today's requirements.

Having touched on the literacies of undergraduates and postgraduates, I now turn to the literacies of those already doing research. Here my target group are Nordic researchers of gender and education (Nordic = from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Saami Land and Sweden). Here the research literacies involve going across languages, which may sometimes be many, and certainly will include a high level of English. Those not engaging in English may be very successful in getting research funding from their own nations' Research Councils however, and may be promoted to Professor without having published in an international refereed journal. This is because international refereed journals come out in English, and English may not be valued all that highly. Hence academics and teacher educators may be famous and publishing books (and so not have to teach much) in Norway without much English. Going to an international conference is another matter, and senior professionals will not want to be silent or make an idiot of themselves. So those who go and speak English in public (in my experience of international conferences) are most likely going to be Doctoral students or others who don't mind using English. This leaves quite a large group out.

The researchers I shall name in this section of the paper are working in the field of gender and education. Many of them presented research papers at my invitation, at the Gender and Education International Conference, the University of Warwick, England (Blind 1999, Hállden 1999; Knudson 1999; Lehtonen 1999; Lenz Taguchi 1999; Lind 1999; Reisby 1999; Saarinen 1999; Saldo 1999). As readers and writers of English, in addition to their own languages, Nordic researchers of Gender and Education sometimes present their research to English-speaking foreigners (Gannerud, 1997; Hynninen, 1998; Kemuma, 1998; Kruse, 1992, 1998; Lahelma and Gordon, 1996; Reisby, 1998; Ve, 1998). The two recognised ways of presenting research are through textual products and through personal presentation at a conference or seminar. The latter require proficiency in spoken language. The former require much greater proficiency in writing; or a paid translator. The politics of presenting research internationally thus involves a shift from the local to the global, with the related use of spoken and written English. Although all researchers make a shift when they go international, there are additional problems for researchers whose home language is not English. This as an educational matter, with particular implications for gendered positionings in research practices (Rhedding-Jones, 1996; 1999a), because of who the researchers are, and because of who has publication power.

Despite the fact that it is highly informed by internationally published English, much Nordic research stays within the language group for whom it is written, and never makes it into English. There are good reasons for this: accountability to one's culture, the importance of local knowledge, links between writers and texts and audiences, and the necessary living growth of home languages. My point here though is that what English speakers (Anglophones) may believe is cutting-edge theory or radical methodology, or innovative pedagogy, may not be. Here an ignorance of what is happening elsewhere causes a peculiarly Anglophonic deafness to the qualities and the values of other cultures' research. One of the political strategies of the reference list for this paper, therefore, is naming the academic work of Gender and Education researchers from the Nordic countries. Located at the northern periphery of Europe, the countries of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden have their own languages, dialects, customs, histories and research cultures. They draw on their various Nordic theories and situated knowledges built up over time. These are knitted into their research, and into their ways of conducting and presenting it.

For theorists whose home language is other than English, the prerequisites to 'success' will probably be conversance with more than one language and more than one research culture. Such writers/theorists develop their theories through contact with the international research cultures of conferences, through reading texts in a range of languages, and through academic conversations in their own languages as well as in English. For Nordic researchers of gender and education, as in other academic fields, it is English which has allowed the global publication of their research (Berge, 1998; Berge and Ve, 2000; Bjerrum Nielsen and Rudberg, 1995; Gordon, Holland and Lahelma 2000; Gordon, Hynninen, Metso, Lahelma and Palmu, 1999; Lie and Malik, 1994; Ohrlander, 1998; Pedersen, 1996; Öhrn, 1993; Ålund, 1997; Ås, 1985). Seen from this perspective, English decides who gets where, what gets said, how theoretical trends develop and whose themes count. Put into reverse, a lack of English stops these things from happening outside one's own particular culture and language. The politics in question involve one's curriculum vitae, one's publication in international refereed journals and one's presentation at the international conferences that link discursively to academic success. Here it seems that an unspoken ageism may also be at work, as younger researchers usually, but not always, write better English. Older researchers, especially the women who may have come to research work later, often suffer in international publication competitions.

In particular, the Education-related disciplines, of Teacher Education, Health Professions Education, Early Childhood Education, Special Education, Pedagogy/Didaktikk and Curriculum Studies, where the majority of researchers are women, function mostly at the local level only. This disadvantages these women when it comes to employment, promotions and research grants; and it means that in professional discourses and debates their voices may be absent. All of this impacts on women's consequent lack of power in the changing of Education's (and Higher Education's) practices and policies. Further, it keeps the 'caring professions', named above, down. In other words, the status and the related salaries of these disciplines and jobs, compared to other disciplines and jobs, is problematic. Although many men also find accessing another language and culture difficult, what women say is that they are the ones usually not wanting to do quantitative research; and quantitave research is not so problematic regarding academic written language. Yet it is the qualitative writing and data gathering which relies so much on linguistic and poetic skill, on everyday observations and relations of equality between the researcher and the researched. As this is the research work which many women say they want to do, then even research methodology, and its consequent international publication possibilities, becomes a gender problem in research and academic career progression.

Today's qualitative research methodologies make much use of interviews as conversations, of field notes as subjectively written research journals, and of found documents or archives as springboards for analysis. These become differently problematic for the researchers who must try to publish in what for them is a foreign language. Turning the intricacies of the everyday into appropriate English is very heavy going, especially when compared to the data of the quantitative research so often preferred by researchers less close to the locations and the workers they profess to study. A brief survey of who teaches quantitative research methodology in Education Faculties will usually point to the fact that this is mostly a men's domain. As Moldenhawer says, a problem for qualitative researchers in Education moving into the use of English, is that when beginning to work between languages there is a tendency to use the other language in a very instrumental way (Moldenhawer, 1995; p. 82). So language itself becomes more problematic for qualitative researchers than for quantitative researchers. This is because of an apparent lack of ability to play the other language (English) and use it more experimentally. Further, it takes much more time to produce a paper in a foreign language than in your own language. All of this makes it extremely difficult to access global and international contexts for presenting and publishing research. Here the questions are: who is likely to have access to the economic wherewithal that allows them to travel professionally outside their own countries, to pay a translator to correct a text, to own a first class computer, to have the time to re-present the research in another language? It can be seen that language and agency, so closely connected to feminist debates regarding silencing, power and the public-private dichotomy, are important issues. For feminists and others working for benefits of marginalised groups these are familiar themes (Bjørhovde, 1996).

For qualitative research in gender and education, from non-English speaking countries, the problems are as follows. Translated into English, interviews may be laboured, discourse analysis may be suspect, and research journals may sound false. Further, key academic references and other documents deconstructed and theorised from, may be unknown to an English-only audience (eg. Widerberg, 1995; Ås, 1982). For academic women who because of their gender want to stay true to their own vernaculars and their home languages, then identity and subjectivity, the themes so frequently found in contemporary feminist research, are at high risk. On a practical level a crucial question regards the allocation of words: providing original languages and translations takes double the space but statistics and tables are read unproblematically. Doing qualitative gender and education research is thus, in many countries, still a gendered matter. The matter of English compounds the problem.

For scholars wanting to publish internationally, a further matter of concern is the use of local theory. Because English-speakers are not familiar with theories published only in other languages, the risk of quoting, even translating, from something unknown is high. Seeking publication or another qualification, as Nordic gender and Education researchers say, is always a political action (Bystad, 1995; Ås, 1985). Here there are parallels to the early beginnings of feminist theory, and its non-acceptance for higher degrees. As a politics of power (Järvinen, 1999) is one of the driving forces of academia, such marginalised discourses are thus designated as the unknown, and hence undervalued, theories. For feminist scholars in Education, a major research practice is the study of the interactions of learning and teaching, of students and teachers, of texts and of contexts. Applying these research skills to international discourses in higher education leads to the challenge of undoing the power structures of cultural and linguistic discourses,

I am saying that the ways that researchers work, methodologically and theoretically as well as linguistically and textually, are culturally constructed. With today's internationalisation of gender and education research cultures, a global take-over by methodologies and theories should be rejected, with cultural and historical differences in theories and methodologies seen as resources. In education, those of us who work with and for gender do not use feminist theories only. We link our work to a range of empowering and explanatory theories in mainstream and in critical educational theory. This is also a Nordic practice, though very often here the initial contact with a non-Nordic theorist happens through his or her personal visit, to a Research Centre or a University. Hence Anthony Giddens and Pierre Bourdieu loom large in educational theory, including that of feminists. Although many feminist and pro-feminist scholars visit the Women's Research Centres, these scholars' theories do not appear to be relied on too much for Doctoral dissertations and prestigious publications. And feminists who have not visited the Nordic countries personally may not be read at all. Part of this is a result of an admirable oral culture of learning within Nordic academia and schools, a sharing of knowledge without so much print dependence. Anglophones could learn a lot from this practice. One theoretical reading of the publication situation thus regards the effect of the internationalisation of feminist and related critiques, where change and power are seen as central everywhere. Another theoretical reading is that localisation always throws up an Other, who on investigation turns out to be the same. In a theorisation of the foreign and the not-so-foreign, differences matter.

Taking further examples from the research on gender and education, three edited Nordic texts currently inform feminist thought and action in gender and Education (Arnesen, 1998; Bjerén and Elgqvist-Saltzman, 1994; Mackinnon, Elgqvist-Saltzman and Prentice, 1998) In the first text (1998) the contributors from Finland and Iceland write in either Danish or Swedish (eg. Olafsdóttír, 1998) with those from Scandinavia writing in their own languages, and mutually understood. This text is already in use as Teacher Education coursework in the Nordic countries, with its practical ideas well mixed with understandable theory. As the editor says (Arnesen, 1998; 5-11) Nordic concerns are equality and resourceful differences, of many kinds. Democracy is central, with power, competition and individualism emerging as problematic themes.

The second text (Bjerén and Elgqvist-Saltzman, 1994) was the first book to present Gender and Education in English, from four Nordic countries (Rhedding-Jones, 1997a). Themes here are gendered methodology and women's lives in relation to their learning. The book was written by people without a particular background in Education (or Pedagogy, as it is named in Scandinavia). For English-speaking educators this is surprising, as academics are usually only interested in Education if that is where they are employed. The political issues of who once did school or preschool teaching and who now researches it are complex, however. They involve, amongst other things, parental aspirations and economics. Hence the kinds of research that get done in the name of Education are because of our histories, learning practices and interests. Here gender plays a major part in our constructions of ourselves as researching subjects, and in our desires to research and critique curriculum.

An important move in the Nordic countries, for gender and Education research, was the symposium organised in Sweden in 1995, to which various scholars from non-Nordic countries were invited. From this came a third text, one that is Asian, Australian, British, Canadian and Nordic (Mackinnon, Elgqvist-Saltzman and Prentice, 1998). With a book like this there is admirable geographical representation; and one more demonstration of the colonising power of English, yet through the medium of English we have a shared research culture, where people learn from each other's knowledge. A marked feature of this text is that the writers of the chapters address each other, and use each other's work (Rhedding-Jones, 1999d, forthcoming). In feminist scholarship this is particularly important. One of the sadnesses of much collaborative work on gender, as in edited books and at symposia, is that the work of indigenous people, people of colour and ethnic minority background, gays, lesbians and men is not there. So that research situations and theory developments are not simply cross-referencing between dominant groups, those who are in the majority must make overt efforts to listen and to read strategically. For gender and Education researchers this applies especially to White Anglophone women (Rhedding-Jones 2000b.

A fourth recent text, not edited from Education faculties and presumably not read by Education audiences, deals with Nordic feminism (von der Fehr, Rosenbeck and Jónasdóttir, 1998). It does so from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including the work of gender and education sociologist Hildur Ve. Highly informed by not only Nordic research, in its many languages, but also by English and untranslated French and German, this book is certainly international (Cameron, 1999). Its editors say that what is significantly Nordic is a 'focus on the organisation of everyday life, on dialogical and gendered individuality, and on ontological realism' (p. 18). In plainer language then, Nordic feminisms are said to be about the natures of being and of doing; some would say much the same of feminisms elsewhere. These writers write that it is not sufficient to work with theory, although they do so with impressive skill. They say that because of the history of the welfare states, all of the social sciences are strongly work oriented, and this effects theories, empirical research and ideologies. It seems to me that all of these reflections also come through the chapters of the three specifically Education books briefly discussed above.

Connecting the above to research literacies may be seen as an imposition. The researchers whose work I have named above are already researchers, not beginning postgraduates. They are Professors, Doctoral candidates, and/or well published. Their academic literacies are thus far advanced, although what they write in English may not be indicative of what they do in their home languages. Literacy is not a concept that regards only beginners, like children for example. All literate peoples have new literacies constantly being acquired, as we move into new fields, new genres, technologies, vocabularies and languages. For Education faculties what is crucial for postgraduate teaching is the transformation or identity shift as teachers become researchers, and consequently have to read and produce complex texts and engage theoretically with discourses previously unencountered. There are thus several issues at stake. These may be considered by virtue of prepositions.

If we say 'research literacies of ' we consider the properties already belonging to particular people. This involves what they can do, their academic reading and writing performances as it were. When English language colonizes non-Anglo research cultures, languages and research cultures other than English are seen as of less value, to be taken over, by higher education and publishing institutions (Rhedding-Jones, 2000a). In a postcolonial scenario, homogenized research culture, and the monolingual reading and writing practice that goes with it, are transformed to postmodern manifestations. But the naming the research literacies of other people is an objectification, as this implies a rating of skills, a pointer to what remains to be learned. Reversing the object and thinking of self, how many researchers consider their own literacy proficiencies, deficiencies and developments? Traditionally, teachers and supervisors have decided what students need next. Breaking free of traditional teacher/student binaries, each teacher and student reflects and reconstructs their literacies anew. Not colonizing other people, be they of a race or a language group different from our own (or children) becomes a lesson for these times.

To continue with the prepositions: 'research literacies for ' particular groups and individuals has many of the above overtones. Doing something for others also carries Christian constructions of charity and hope, quite some distance removed from postcolonial post-missionary possibilities. Yet teaching and supervising acts have always involved giving, even love. What then do we do with unwanted remains of resisted religion? And what is between the binary of agency (for self) and behavioural objective (an agenda imposed by others), for example? For a postcolonial future the latter must surely go. That leaves literacies for particular people, such the non-Anglos I have been pointing to, as more for the development of research themes and theories than for the 'good of the people'. But any nominalization including the suffix 'non' involves a negative. Reversing this and naming my targetted group 'Nordics' (with Anglophones becoming non-Nordics) has the opposite effects. So saying this to Nordics this is probably better politics; but this paper is written for Anglos, isn't it?

At risk of being overly didactic, the preposition with may have been a better choice. After all, a curriculum of negotiation usually gets the dominated on side, especially if one works diplomatically to convince 'them' that what happens was really their own choice after all. Here cooperation is known to produce better results. So working together to develop the literacies, by talk, the production of early drafts of writing, discussions of shared academic texts and set reading, become the preferred methods of instruction, or curriculum activities. At the level of the professional conference, international contacts and exposures develop literacies through the sharing of common academic events, such as paper presentation, plenaries and keynotes. That many non-Anglo cultures resist English for the performance of these ( eg NFPF in Scandinavia) is no measure of their research literacy. Rather it is a political assertion of the right to the local, over the global use of English (Rhedding-Jones 2000a). Resisting English, as a research literacy strategy, thus functions positively for non-Anglos by allowing 'them' to develop their own.

As local research cutures in education, 'little habitats' are where aspects of globalization 'seep in at different rates, in different colours, contours , and guises' (Luke and Luke 2000: 291). From one of these habitats, namely Norway with its contextualizations of the other Nordic countries, I have described some of the uses of English as it allows for other literacies. Being literate in Anglo research cultures' publications and academic writing genres is in many cases problematic. For a non-Anglo nation, the desirability of a 'universal' English, without the academic development and uses of the national languages, would demonstrate a hegemonic globalization. Thus requiring a literacy that requests the domination of the home culture's research practices, by taking over its language, would be a hegemonic and colonial practice. This fine line appears to be balancing a bilingual research culture so that both (or more) languages are adaequate for the reflections, critiques and reconstructions of what counts as research. Who can do this? Certainly not Anglo universities and their representatives acting only in their own interests and only from their own linguistic experience.

Following Robertson (1995: 38) who follows Tomlinson, English would be 'differentially received and interpreted; and "local" groups would "absorb" communication from the "centre" in a great variety of ways'. From the perspective of language and learning however, reception and interpretation and absorption are only the beginning or the half part. What counts is what gets said and written. The political aspects of judging research, by letting a dissertation pass well or not, and by publishing in prestigious places or not, are therefore where the critical action needs to be (Rhedding-Jones, 2000a) For Appadurai (1996: 2), describing his earlier self as 'equipped with the Right Stuff - an Anglophone education, an upper-class Bombay address', working radically is not enough. In the 'global now' he calls for 'rupture'. To do so he takes in media and migration, to interrogate and subvert contextual literacies. This involves 'producing locality ... in new globalized ways' (p. 9). From postcolonial theory, and therewith critiquing Anglophonic and Anglographic 'supremacy', the notion of linguistic hybridities and diasporas raises challenging questions for teachers, examiners and editors of English. If we take seriously the effects of postnational readings of global encounters (Gandhi 1998: 129-131), then 'we' need to rethink the gate-keeping of English. Accepting diaspora and hybridity as fine for cultural theory but not for linguistic and pedagogical practice thus becomes problematic. All of this becomes highly political when research literacies are seen as owned by particular cultures and languages. In the case of Anglo dominance, in the binary of modernist categories, what is non-Anglo becomes devalued. That Norwegians refuse this devaluing (of their research cultures and language) is apparent from how their own particular research cultures and thier related research literacies operate.

In theory this relates to a critique of a discourse at the base of TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language), schooling practices, subjectivities and assessments. Here the notion of English as a Foreign Language as a discourse, works against the familiar, and against transformation into multiple Englishes, of transnational spoken and written language etc. This discourse of 'the foreign' (the unknown which pedagogy professes to know, the other as deficient and needing remediation, the modernist categorization of people as foreigners or not, as learners or teachers, as able to be ranked and rated by institutions) embraces subjects, pedagogies, lifestyles, disciplines and truths. Challenging this discourse of the foreign, whereby what is non-Anglo must be converted, usurped or made better, is at the base of the TEFL discourse which denies the rights to familiary (in English) for people not speaking it at home. Such familiarity, rather than foreignness or a combination of the two, is thus denied by colonial discourses.

After Gandhi (1998: 13) what I am critical of here is 'Englishness'. The uses of English as a 'foreign' language demonstrate colonizing discourses: modernist practices in a postmodern world. This raises matters regarding hierarchies of privilege and power. Resisting and critiquing the homogenising qualities of globalization (Gough 2000) is thus the ethical work of academic literacy teaching elsewhere.

It can be argued that the quality of a text must be allowed to vary given global conditions. These conditions include the grammar of the language spoken in the mother-tongue, the habits of addressing, the genres that are usual, the discourses that are absent or frequent. In other words, allowing for difference, by altering what is acceptable, can be seen as a practice of respect for the local. Here the research literacies of non-Anglos would result in differently written textual products and differently valued academic talk. Yet all educational change takes place and is embedded in culturally constructed contexts. For the monocultural to shift to multiple or transformed cultural enactments, representations and reconstructions, a prerequisite is an awareness of the contexts of these times. Simplistic models of globalization present the global as opposite to the local. Doing away with either/or choices allows for the emergence of what some have termed 'glocalization' (Robertson 1995). This disallows the binary division of local and global, and hence the 'triumph of culturally homogenizing forces over others' (1995: 25). Within this concept English can not operate hegemonically, as it has done in modernity, in colonialism and in binary epistemology. For a glocalized English the grammar, the word choices, the pronunciation and any outsiders/examiners' assessment of their usefulness or appropriateness undergoes a rearticulation. With a globalization overriding locality, universal standards of English apply. With a locality including ethnic and linguistic diversities and cultural complexities, the Englishes constructed in consequence irredeemably change the language. I am arguing that locality matters, even if it is to a large degree constructed by larger cultural and geographical forces (Robertson, 1995). This argues for a blending of the particular with the universal, with new Englishes in consequence.

It may seem from what I have been writing that monoculturalism is the opposite of cultural pluralism (Nederveen Pieterse & Parekh 1995). I would argue that in these times we may sometimes take in and reconstruct a simultaneous monoculturalism (read this here to imply monolingualism, after Derrida 1998) and a cultural multiplicity (leading to multi and translingualism). Thus being of one positionality only, even if that positionality is complex and diverse, is not only against the postmodern undoing of binaries (Phillips 2000) but impossible (Derrida 1998). Here the complexities of taking up both positions at once, and in fact transforming them, is the experience of many children and adults who constantly go between cultures and languages.

All of this relates theoretically to what Massey (1999) has called 'power-geometries of time-space'. To spatialize social theory here is to reconceptualize globalization by critiquing its 'intellectual and political grounds' (1999: 27). Following this, the work is to disrupt English, and to 're-work modernity away from being the unfolding, internal story' (1999: 28) of how to do research and how to write it up (in English). Critiquing and deconstructing the cultural embeddedness of research literacy assumptions, nd linguistic normalizations, thus what I am pointing to. With these comes the possibility of alterity (Phillips 2000: 167-168), as different stories of what happens emerge from new spaces. 'Places and spaces' (Massey 1999: 32) thus construct globalization and research practices otherwise. Instead of conjuring up the vision of free unbounded space, this globalization allows not for homogenization but for plurality of the effects of differences. This, as Massey says, (1999: 39) is not a hegemonic story of globalization, nor that of early modernity and High Imperialism. Rather it is a globalization of imagination, where local people and local places have rights to difference. Translating this to the institutional requirements of doing research and assessment it, is thus highly problematic for an ethical practice.

For globalization to move beyond centre and periphery theories and practices, to vernacular globalizations (Appadurai 2000) calls for ever changing centre-periphery relations. These challenge how 'the globalized culture of performativity' (Lingard 2000: 102) affects how research literacies are viewed . Here the critiqued globalized culture is that of homogenization as normalization. Examples here are the formats of research products, the voices of academic writers and a predictable reference list of much-quoted Anglophonic academics.

Viewing the products of research literacies as contemporary cultural productions, we must ask: What are the effects of bicultural, multicultural and transnational locations? If they are to not be erased, then who values the literacies of such persons, groups and nations? If the traces of internationalization and globalization that Gough calls 'transnational imaginaries' (2000: 334) are to be not only reflected in research products and practices, but (re)constructed by them, then which research institutions will allow this to eventuate?