This paper thinks through and synthesises differences across researchers and researched subjects that have to be ethically bridged in ongoing research on higher education internationalisation. It argues that disciplinarity can be understood in two ways: horizontally as academic disciplines, and vertically as policy and practices spanning different domains of higher education activity, including policymaking, administration, curriculum, pedagogy, civic engagement, support and care. In addition to the disciplinary differences marking “academic tribes and territories” (Becher and Trowler 2001; Trowler, Saunders and Bamber 2014), types of academic policy and practice span formal to non-formal and collective-individual dimensions. Inter-disciplinarity must address a range of academic practices and ‘economies’ (Khoo, forthcoming), with different (and often contradictory) expressions and interplays of dominating, subordinated and resistant identities. For example, the EIHE project researched both “implementation” and discipline-defined academic aspects of internationalisation. Academics perform roles coordinating, leading and managing internationalisation in general, as well as expressing/ implementing it via academic disciplines. Interview findings were ambivalent, sometimes aligning with key rationales for internationalization such as building institutional profile and global branding (Knight, 2013, Khoo and Torres forthcoming), and other times perceiving internationalisation as a distant, ‘extra’, top-down, managerial agenda (Taylor, 2010). Methodological approaches should be flexible enough to enable researchers to interpret variable and contradictory views. Researchers of higher education internationalisation require methodologies that are able to capture the diverse nature of respondents’ subject positions and the contexts, yet also enable interpretation across differences and learning from research. This paper brings together diverse authors and new knowledge partners to respond to insights from sociolinguistic and pedagogical theory, applied to cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural internationalisation research. Taking on the two dimensions of disciplinarity, perspectives and possible roles for non-formal education and community partners are also considered. Innovative insights are suggested by socio-linguistic studies on bi/multi language learning, offering potential for understanding inter-disciplinary and transdisciplinary research (Leavy 2011) in new ways, focused on inter-and transdisciplinary pedagogy and learning. We adapt critical pedagogical research on bilingual learning to research practices, focusing on translanguaging as a pedagogical phenomenon (e.g. Velasco and Garcia 2014; Lewis et al 2012). We propose that global social justice has the potential to act as an ethical lingua franca, offering possibilities for good-enough, albeit imperfect internationalisations performing modes of global higher education and global learning that accommodate both global diversity and global social justice in research, analysing systemic imperatives and systemic critique, without resorting to epistemicide.

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