Integration as Translation: Academic Hosts and Migrant Academics in the UK, the US and Canada

Abstract

This thesis conceptualizes the academic integration course of permanent and long-term migrant academics in higher education institutions in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada as a macro-social translational process constituted through interacting micro-level socially grounded self-translational events. It critiques transfer-centred paradigms within Translation Studies that frame migration primarily in terms of movement and material reconfiguration, arguing that translation must also be theorized as a process of relational and affective transformation. It further argues that academic integration is not the outcome of regulatory reform and individual adaptation but the patterned (re)articulation of unevenly distributed acts of institutional and migrant self-translation unfolding over time.

Methodologically, the study adopts a hypothetico-deductive approach (Chesterman, 2017) and analyzes twenty published personal narratives of first-generation migrant academics alongside secondary sources in higher education and migration studies. The empirical chapters demonstrate that academic hosts engage in institutional self-translation primarily through modulation of merit criteria, diversity language, and recruitment frameworks, thereby expanding formal access while retaining interpretive authority over academic recognition. On the other side, migrant academics undertake continuous and multidimensional self-translations across linguistic, epistemic, pedagogical, and affective domains in order to sustain intelligibility within evaluative environments marked by unequal authority. This asymmetry produces a translation mismatch: access to academic positions is granted, yet mutual intelligibility, recognition and belonging remain fragile.

The discussion mobilizes the concept of “social translation” (Basalamah, 2022, 2025) to reframe integration as a shared ethical process grounded in responsibility, reciprocity, and the provisional emergence of a regulated frame of reference. However, while social translation articulates the ethical and political conditions of shared mediation, the analysis shows that it does not explicitly theorize how translational duration is differentially lived and sustained across asymmetrical positions. The thesis therefore advances the concept of translational labour - genealogically anchored in Ricœur's (2006) notion of labour - to name the cumulative cognitive, affective, and temporal effort required to sustain intelligibility once access has been achieved. Translational labour renders visible how social translation is unevenly borne across institutional and migrant positions, and how fatigue, withdrawal, or suspension function as translational signals rather than failures.

By articulating academic integration as macro-translation constituted through interacting micro-translational events, and by theorizing translational labour as the experiential register of translational duration, the study extends Translation Studies beyond interlingual transfer into the analysis of coexistence within (academic) institutions. It offers a framework for examining how translation operates as the constitutive condition of integration within heterogeneous academic societies and clarifies the ethical and sustainability conditions under which social translation may remain viable over time.