Reframing the "International" in UK International Scholarship: Perspectives on Diversity and Equity beyond English as Lingua Franca and Multilingualism

This article critically examines dominant models of internationalization in UK higher education, focusing on how initiatives such as the UKRI Global Challenges Research Fund and the UK Government’s Turing Scheme, along with evaluation frameworks such as the Research Excellence Framework (REF), emphasize uniformity, competitiveness, and broad scope. This approach can lead to a homogenization of academic collaboration, often overlooking the diverse operational, sociocultural, linguistic, and epistemic contexts of scholars involved in the United Kingdom’s increasingly internationalized scholarly environment. Drawing on an expanded notion of diaspora influenced by intersectional feminist theory, this article proposes a reconceptualization of what internationalization means in the United Kingdom. Through the case study of two experimental online reading events, The Re-Reading Room at Coventry University, it demonstrates how diasporic academic communities can actively co-create more inclusive and equitable collaborative environments in praxis, challenging the prevailing norms of competition, alignment, and uniformity underlaying the way international scholarship is framed in the United Kingdom.