Polarized agents of internationalization: an autoethnography of migrant faculty at a Japanese University

In recent years, government policies that target the rapid internationalization of Japanese higher education have provided new career opportunities especially for scholars with experience of studying and teaching abroad. This autoethnographic paper draws on such “migrant” faculty’s engagement in formal curriculum development to illustrate their active negotiations within the micro-level processes of internationalization of a Japanese University. More specifically, the analysis focuses first on the enactment of agencies to negotiate diverse understandings of “culture” and “discipline” in the process of building a “Japanese Studies” curriculum. The paper then draws on those negotiations to show how those agencies were transformative; namely how they impacted on and challenged the framing and the practice of the official framework of “Japanese Studies” at University X. This study aims, therefore, to shed light on the ways individual migrant faculty members of diverse backgrounds, may constructively contribute to internationalization processes of higher education when such faculty’s active interactions are carefully looked at and sought for, beyond established and often imagined cultural, disciplinary, and institutional boundaries.