The presentation of internationalisation on university websites in England: impoverished discourses

The study investigates how internationalisation is presented on university websites to external audiences, especially to prospective students. Data were gathered from the websites of eight universities, each differently positioned in England’s marketised and stratified higher education system, in 2020 before and during the Covid-19 pandemic. A Critical Discourse Studies approach was then used to analyse the webpages’ discursive strategies, linguistic devices and other semiotic resources. Presentation of internationalisation was found to be narrow and limited, largely confined to webpages aimed at recruiting international students. Internationalisation was rarely mentioned on the more general webpages, not even within the dominant employability discourse. The more highly ranked institutions sometimes also used internationalisation competitively to promote their own excellence and distinctiveness. Missing completely was a broader view about benefits “for all” of internationalised education, in formal academic settings and university life more generally. This matters, the study argues, because such impoverished discourses may lessen expectations, and thereby narrow internationalisation in practice. Sociological theories of ‘emotion management’ and risk are then used to suggest possible reasons for universities conveying such limited perspectives on internationalisation. Finally, the study indicates how these findings and its methodology could be taken forward to encourage wider versions of university internationalisation.