FRAGL 27: Positioning in Scholarship Applications: On the intercultural pragmatics of an academic genre

Abstract

 
This article discusses the presentation of self and others in scholarship applications to German institutions by applicants from foreign countries. My data consist of a collection of applications by graduates, doctoral candidates and post-doctoral university teachers from Caucasian and Central Asian countries that were formerly Soviet republics (but not from Russia). I combine text and genre analysis, politeness and positioning theory (Davies/Harré 1990) and place my study within intercultural pragmatics. I found institutionally problematic or unsuitable positionings in a third of the applications from the social sciences and humanities. I discuss various text segments that, among other things, show difficulties in handling explicitness and implicitness in the communication of specialist competence. In segments where reasons for the choice of a guest university should be presented, Germany is often positioned as the helper of the applicant’s country. Scientific communities will be viewed as “communities of practice” in which standards of self- and other-representation are learned. The scholarship appl. genre displays the hegemonic division lines in international science; it is evident that the applications were submitted by persons with far less chance of participating in international science than students from the USA, Australia, New Zealand or Western and Northern Europe.


 

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