Us and Them: Affective materialities and the binarizing effects of “study abroad”

Stanley, Phiona

Abstract

In a previous research project (Stanley & Stevenson, 2017), I video-recorded a US-American teacher introducing the topic of study abroad in class. On the recording, she says:
This is Tom, and Tom is currently living in the UK. But he hears about a program to go to university in Australia for six months. So now Tom is going to [pause] in Australia. Who can fill in the sentence for me? What is Tom going to do in Australia?
One student offers, “study”. But the teacher gestures no, eliciting further ideas. Eventually she feeds in the term ‘study abroad’ herself (p.8).

Watching this, my Australian collaborator and I (=British) had the same reaction: “Why not ‘study’? Why fish for ‘study abroad’? Is this an American thing?”

Study abroad is not a peculiarly US phenomenon but the terminology seems to be. In both my UK and Australian universities, for instance, ‘exchange’ and ‘student mobility’ appear much more prominently on institutional websites than ‘study abroad’. In this paper I discuss the salience of this nuance, proposing that ‘study abroad’ functions —in USA educational discourses— as a compound verb rather than a verb-plus-preposition, with imaginaries of “abroad” forming a core part of both propositional and connotational meaning. The effect seems to be the reification of a (problematic) binary between” Home and Not-Home and, by extension, Self and Other.

This binary matters. It frames students’ experiences, in this case studying Spanish and/or engaging in volunteer work in Guatemala, Nicaragua, or Peru (Stanley, 2017). The resulting affective assemblages –riven by this boundary– allow for an othering and consequent belittling of local people, artefacts, and processes.

In the chapter, then, I examine how such binaries are talked into being and how they operate as part of students’ affective materiality (after Erin Manning, 2013) in the assemblages of “study abroad” and “volunteer abroad” settings that I researched in Latin America.


References
Manning, E.. 2013. Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance. Durham NC: Duke University Press.
Stanley P. (2017). A critical auto/ethnography of learning Spanish: Intercultural competence on the 'gringo trail'? Routledge: London & New York.
Stanley, P. & Stevenson, M. (2017). Making sense of not making sense: Novice English-language teacher talk. Linguistics and Education, 38: 1—10.

Citation

Stanley, P. (in press). Us and Them: Affective materialities and the binarizing effects of “study abroad”. In D. Grammon, S. Loza, D. Magaña, & A. Schwartz (Eds.), Aquí se habla: Centering the local and personal in Spanish language education. De Gruyter

• Acceptance Date: Aug 8, 2023
• Deposit Date: Aug 10, 2023
• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Book Title: Aquí se habla: Centering the local and personal in Spanish language education
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/3165716