Sounding Out Professionalism: Small Stories from International Academic Workers

Drawing on semi-structured interviews with and journal writing from 16 international academic workers working at universities in Ontario, Canada, the purpose of this article is to sound out these workers to explore how they sound out the particularities of sounding professional in the context of higher education. Paying special attention to their telling of small stories, which encompass less-structured narrations of everyday perspectives, activities, and so forth, the article explores how the workers defined professionalism in three vocal domains. These included pronunciation, which could seemingly affect intelligibility and perceptions of competence, tone, which pertained to displaying approachability and authority, and ordered speech for the purposes of transactional communication and representing advertised services. Rather than objective conceptualizations, these domains were products of ideologies pertaining to such constructs as (non)nativeness in English, patriarchy, and race. The article concludes with recommendations for undoing the oppressive functions of vocal professionalism. Such recommendations mostly relate to individual and collective workplace learning that involves the interrogation of listening practices, developing ethical communication practices, and revising/dismantling structures of oppressive listening within (higher education) organizations.