Talking Back: Autoethnography and the Contact Zone

Abstract

The focus of this paper is an exploration of Pratt’s notion of the contact zone in understanding and enacting curriculum in international education. The last two decades have seen a rapid growth in the internationalization of higher education, which needs to be understood alongside the conditions of globalization and the consequential market orientation of higher education, and neo-colonial contexts of history, culture and power. In searching for conceptual lenses that advance understanding of curriculum in these conditions, I use Mary Louise Pratt’s (1992/2008) book ‘Imperial Eyes: Travel writing and transculturation’, an account of travel writing in the European colonial era. The book is an analysis of ‘centre-periphery relations and a critique of the political, cultural and economic ideologies that drove colonialism. Pratt’s framework of the contact zone and concepts such as anti-conquest are useful in identifying the pitfalls of an uncritical enactment of international education in current times, and in identifying the characteristics of the status quo of curriculum in the contact zone. I argue that Pratt’s notions of transculturation and autoethnography could decenter and disrupt the inequitable relations in the contact zone of the globalizing university by illuminating the possibilities of improvisation and appropriation as desirable outcomes. Thus, the internationalization of curriculum in the context of the globalizing campus encourages and recognizes the role of transculturation in provoking a curricular ‘talking back’.