Sewing narratives: engaging in lessons toward an other internationalisation

Abstract

Answering Cavalcanti’s (2006) call to an Applied Linguistics enacted at its interfaces with other disciplines, in this paper we are inspired by an other globalisation, a concept coined by the geographer Milton Santos. Having the internationalisation of higher education as a process that embraces both of our studies, we look at it with suspicion in order to start framing an other internationalisation. To pursue that, we present two narrative scenes that took place at University of Campinas with undergraduate international students pertaining to different academic mobility programs who were learning/learned Portuguese as an Additional Language (PAL). These narratives index evaluations about the internationalisation process at the university and, in our view, reflect limited experiences of reterritorialisation from different angles. Considering the localities of the context, we propose some lessons to be learned and enacted towards an other internationalisation, including some more specific lessons oriented towards PAL policy.