The private story of the researcher is not usually provided in a research report, though it seems to some extent inevitable if life history methods generated by a practitioner have been selected. It may seem that such an account runs the risk of being more self-indulgent than reflective or critical, and yet my story does link and may also contrast with the stories of the individuals I research, - something that I have needed to become very aware of. Richardson’s (2000) poststructuralist ‘pleated text’ on the politics of a sociology department was an inspirational starting point for my own journey of self-reflection at the beginning of the research process:
The story of a life is less than the actual life, because the story told is selective, partial, contextually constructed and because the life is not yet over. But the story of a life is also more than the life, the contours and meanings allegorically extending to others, others seeing
themselves, knowing themselves through another’s life story, re-visioning their own, arriving where they started, and knowing “the place for the first time” (Richardson, 2000: 158)
Moreover, the underlying interest in the very topic of internationalisation of academic identity was first derived from my own life, and only after that, from my every day work experience in my institutional context.
In the autobiographical account given below, I start by identifying some key life experiences understood (self-constructed) as turning points marking out major periods, and I continue by discussing ‘critical moments’ and motivations for some significant decisions in the recent past. All the selected aspects of the biography are meant to testify briefly to my own experiences of internationalisation and they do not represent the whole life story, but they do represent my educational and professional autobiography more or less from its beginning to the present moment.
The year 1989 was the beginning of transition from the communist regime towards democracy and market economy in Poland. I was fifteen and had just started at the same Gdansk secondary school where my mother worked all her professional life as a physics teacher. My family had been first generation professionals with higher education degrees, my grandparents having immigrated into the city after the war from southern and eastern Poland. The Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, a site of resistance of workers to the communist regime, stood right opposite my secondary school, and I often witnessed demonstrations there or in its vicinity. At fifteen, I had my personal transitions and regimes of school, adolescence and a
awareness. Nevertheless, I was entering young adulthood in a moment marked by historical change and that is when my educational story took shape and my individual identity begun to be formed. My learning at the high school was both tedious and full of humiliation, with my grades and my confidence in the humanities getting lower and due to my rebellion against the all-prevailing prestige of the science subjects. There was no social science alternative available or known to me at that time. During the whole of my high school career until I got into university, I was supported by my just divorced mother (in itself another defining moment of my life at fifteen), and retired grandparents, right at the time of the most difficult economic transition.
Around the same time, I experienced my first contact with the inhabitants of countries outside the communist block, previously understood rather as Hollywood film stories: desirable in a very vague way but not accessible at all, almost not real. Arriving in Milan in the winter for a school exchange trip, which it suddenly became possible to organise during the first months of the new political situation, aged 15, in very strange clothes by the local standards, I took a look at the gleaming shop windows and was quite shocked to realise where I came from in economic and political terms. It was not so much the realisation that shops, houses and whole towns could look so prosperous, but the knowledge that in comparison, I came from a world of relative poverty that allowed me to gain a sense of socio-economic and cultural difference and a curiosity to explore this further. This was the first time in my life I truly encountered different national and cultural patterns of behaviour, and understood the meaning and purpose of foreign languages. The one week in the winter of that year ‘hanging out’ with my peers in a
medieval Italian town was probably as significant as any future extended experiences of internationalisation.
The enjoyment I felt communicating with my well dressed Italian peers in my very elementary English sparked a motivation for learning foreign languages, which later would take me to university and which meant that new experiences, identity and sense of self could emerge. Of course, it was the beginning of a process of Westernisation of my education, and of relatively early and profound ‘individualisation’ away from the closely knit family-oriented and collectivist society. Only a year later, I had already completed a course in Italian both in Poland and in Florence were I spent two months (on a scholarship from the local council of education). I was able to communicate fluently with my Italian friends in their own language, which meant also an ability to participate in their ways of being at least partially. The association between having a foreign language and a literally open world of possibilities and cultural meanings was set in my mind at that time, and this determines my multicultural outlook on life to day. Other school exchanges (to Denmark) followed and provided the highlight of my high school experience. English language took over in importance by the second year of high school and going to university to study it became the only acceptable and the obviously practical choice. It linked enough with my interest in humanities and provided that all-important window onto the world in which I wanted to exist. When studying English I also took every opportunity to travel to UK, and US for student and summer jobs (starting right after my final high school exam).
My academic choice of English philology meant that my entire university education was spent interacting, writing and thinking in English and in general (believing like I was) becoming someone half English in mindset, whilst never moving from Poland for more than a couple of months. I was very aware that we were being educated as if outside the local environment, at that time a strange breed of Poles with British or American accents, teaching English, having foreign friends, watching movies ‘in the original’. Some of our professors were British or American, others bilingual and bi-national and still others were just graduates of the same department, but some of them clearly leading ‘internationalised’ lives. I had graduated from the English Philology department in Gdansk in 1999 with a thesis in cognitive linguistics. I had a strong but unfulfilled interest in gender studies and feminism which I had acquired through my exposure to sociolinguistics but which was much extended due to my participation in two additional courses led by a visiting American professor at the sociology department. These courses were also my first entrance into ‘the Soros network’ which had a program sending foreign teachers to post-communist countries. Significantly, these two courses (or the attention of the above mentioned professor) led to my first international (student) conference that took place at CEU, and even resulted in a published paper.
My first year spent at CEU as a post-graduate student in the Gender Studies department led to many new personal relationships and a new life with lots of friends of equally international character, to an academic partner also working at the university, but also to further research scholarships and degree programs I was now able to get access to. In many ways, it is at this stage of my life that internationalisation had become the main basis of my academic and professional as well as personal identity. It had provided a completely new life trajectory that
can be traced back to 1989 as a starting point. The year 1999 when I arrived at CEU completed this transformation. Most importantly, it provided me with a new personal identity and cross-cultural and intellectual confidence which I had never felt up till that point.
Four years later, after the time of EU accession of the ten countries including Poland, I embarked on my doctorate at Keele, whilst already working for the outreach department of my American university (still part of the Soros network I entered as a student in that conference in 1998), where now I provide training and administer programs for faculty from an entire post-communist region. As a ‘graduate’ of the Soros network, I have been in a position to work for programs similar to the one I myself had benefited from as a student. My first American sociology professor has become a good friend as we teach on a summer program together.
My internationalised life style has become the ‘normal’ life. My current closest professional collaborators are located in other countries. Among my closest friends there are no more then two individuals who come from the same country. Thus, in the choice of my profession, in private life, and in social settings I still continue to lead an internationalised life as well as to contribute to the internationalisation of other professionals. I am not unusual among my ‘cohort’, since many of my university friends, particularly from the postgraduate years, now lead similar lives, often living in different countries, sometimes having a second citizenship and raising billingual, or trilingual children, very often working for international organisations and European institutions.
Though the ‘transition’ of my country made my entire particular story and my educational development possible, as part of the first generation of internationalised or globalised young professionals/academics, I also feel that my agency and individual history have played an important part. Internationalisation clearly seems a meaningful and a productive aspect of my identity as I had made that process perhaps the most defining characteristic of my adult life to date.
The story above is only a starting point for my research interest, it is in no way the research interest itself, it merely illustrates that there is a personal autobiographical justification for how I became interested in internationalisation or got a ‘hunch’ that it is indeed meaningful and deserves to be further studied. What part internationalisation plays in academic identity and professional practice among my interviewees may be very different from my own life; my main expectation was that it plays a definite part, for better or worse. It also means a realisation that as a researcher, I may be inserting meanings generated through my experience into the construction and the analysis of the research process, hopefully self-reflectively and with an appropriate dosage of the sociological imagination and critical thinking.
The initial starting point for the research project was that the experience of internationalisation is clearly not something specific to me, it is probably more commonplace now than in 1989. Academics from Eastern Europe coming into the profession now may well be far more exposed to formal opportunities for this form of engagement than was I as a high school first year student.
For others, in other locations, and other social circumstances, it may be a much more difficult and problematic aspect of the higher education profession and of their own lives. I also needed to remain aware that the process may be far more contradictory, partial and problematic. For research purposes, my attention is particularly on those individuals, who, unlike me, have returned or remained in their home country for a more sustained period of their working life. The questions of how they use their experiences have been of particular interest to me in developing this project.