Conclusion

This chapter concludes the book. It first summarizes the main themes and contents of the previous chapters around languages, cultures, and personalities and from our data and projects. Following this it focuses on the key areas of languages, cultures, and personalities in separate sections that contextualize these areas within wider perspectives. The first of these three sections contextualizes Language in the approach of EMI and questions whether EMI should be followed at all, suggesting that English is so unique to subjects that it renders it worthless for other contexts and that the cognitive weight of studying a subject at the same time as having to encode and decode into a foreign language means that students cannot learn the subject as effectively. The second of these sections contextualizes cultures within governmental policies, suggesting that these policies shape institutional cultures, that they differ in different parts of the world, and that they are continually changing. The third and final section focuses on personalities and outlines what we feel are the key personality traits of being relentless in pursuit of a goal, of being open-minded, and of being forgiving. The conclusion ends with the note that the data we outlined are all the unique experiences of the people we spoke to and of our own positionalities but that we nevertheless hope that other IAS, particularly those starting out on their careers, can learn much from in helping inform what decisions they make about the direction of their own working and non-working lives.