Discourses of ‘internationalisation’: a multimodal critical discourse analysis of university marketing webpages

This paper reports on an investigation of a Higher Education institution’s webpages for prospective students. The study is used to illuminate how different conceptions of internationalisation are, or are not, represented to home and international students in university marketing. Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is used to investigate the webpages’ discursive strategies through detailed analysis of linguistic features and images. The research explores how discourses frame or sideline conceptions of internationalisation, and it shows that in this case the dominant discourse of internationalisation is a narrow and exclusionary one. The paper concludes that in the webpages of this non-elite university a broader version of internationalisation is being marginalised in a neoliberal climate perhaps because it cannot be quantified, does not fit the individual consumer model, and so is squeezed out under the pressures of other discourses.