My article on university language policies

I wrote an article about my lived experiences with some tensions between de iure and de facto language policies at my university from an international staff member point of view. I often experience that international researchers with limited proficiency in Finnish are excluded from discussions at meetings and various other events. I summarized my goals with the article as follows:

Managing a huge multilingual workplace such a university is [...] challenging. However, negotiating language policies and implementing them in a flexible way would make the barriers between the 'Finns' and the 'international staff' less visible and would create a working environment that is much more comfortable for everyone included in our academic community. I hope that sharing my experience invites others to tell theirs so that we can initiate or extend such negotiations.

Acatiimi magazine is the joint publication of the Finnish Union of University Professors, the Finnish Union of University Researchers and Teachers, and the Union for University Teachers and Researchers in Finland. The magazine is published in three languages (Finnish, Swedish and English), and regularly publishes texts that deal with organizational cultures, administrative regulations, employees' well-being, etc.


 Szabó, T. P. 2016. Finding no words: exclusion in academia. Acatiimi, issue 4, pp. 42–43. URL:  http://acatiimi.fi/4_2016/04_16_17.php