Knight (2012) calls attention to how internationalization, as a major force currently shaping higher education, is marked by extreme complexity diversity and difference. Knight emphasizes that internationalization has two major manifestations: ‘at home’ (involving for example curriculum focus and the hosting of foreign students and academics) and ‘cross-border’ (involving student and staff mobility). This paper critically analyses reports of Brazilian university students in a program of internationalization, and more specifically in a cross-border mobility program where the focus is exclusively on equipping students in terms of linguistic competence in the foreign language of the destined institution and in terms of content-based disciplinary knowledge of the specific chosen area of study. Our analysis departs from a perceived lack of student preparation in terms of what we call transcultural ethics. With Welsch (1999) we presuppose that cultures can only be seen as interconnected ‘transcultures’ and not as separate islands. With Caputo (1993) we see ethics from a negative, non-substantialist, non-normative stance, the result of an experience of relationality, co-existence and interconnectedness, rather than the product of a move to introduce a solution from outside or above. In terms of interconnectedness, Li (2006) refers to two major options traditionally used to describe transnational encounters from a western perspective: the modernist-humanist perspective which dichotomically sees them as an encounter between a modern, rational powerful self and a spatially and temporally distant primitive weaker other, and the cultural relativist perspective which sees such encounters as incommensurable and not permitting comparison or justifiable evaluation. In terms of international student mobility programs, neither of these options point to the benefits to be gained by experiencing a foreign culture. Our final presupposition in this paper is that, pedagogically, a transcultural ethics in international student mobility programs involves epistemic and affective dislocations on the part of students as a result of their transcultural experience abroad.

Caputo, J. 1993 Against Ethics, Bloomington, Indiana University Press Knight, J. 2012 Internationalization: three generations of cross-border higher education, New Delhi, India International Centre Li, V. 2006 The Neo-primitivist turn: critical reflections on alterity, culture and modernity. Welsch, W. 1999 Transculturality: the puzzling form of cultures today, in Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World, ed. by Featherstone, M. and Lash, S. London: Sage