Identidades académicas en cambio en el seno de la universidad multilingüe

Abstract

This article presents an analysis of some of the consequences that the internationalisation of the university has had on the reformulation of the professional identities of academics who develop their activity in a minority language. The starting hypothesis is that the global processes of change that are altering higher education are affecting the professional roles and identities of academics. More concretely, the article aims to show that the recent professional requirements to which lecturer-researchers are adapting also include imperatives of a linguistic type that are being progressively incorporated into changing identities. The empirical study was carried out in a multilingual university context with a minority language: the University of the Basque Country, and involved in-depth interviews that gathered the perceptions of Basque-speaking lecturer-researchers about their professional efforts. This study, which focused especially on the linguistic components of the academics' professional identity, made it possible to identify some tendencies of change revealed through generational change that have an impact on the development of the minority language. In particular, the emergence of strong strategic orientations in the design of academic careers, the growing centrality of the research identity against the teaching identity, and the pre-eminence of an academic ethos linked to the disciplinary identities of the technologies and the experimental sciences.