This reflective paper explores collaborative autoethnography (CAE) as a research method by analyzing 15 of our CAE English language teaching and applied linguistics studies published from 2015 to the present. Focus is given to tying CAE to its ethnographic roots, including autoethnography and duoethnography. The implications of CAE representing a methodological expansion of ethnographic methods from researching and reporting on the other to researching and representing one's own authentic experiences are explored. We discuss the "counter-narratives"that CAE spaces facilitate, where minoritized opinions and experiences can be safely shared and (re)affirmed, including how to facilitate transformative experiences in practice. Two implications for CAE practice are shared. The first concerns the need for CAE participants to be conscious of different levels of participation, particularly as life circumstances change, and to flexibly accommodate these. The second concerns how CAEs should represent a process that facilitates growth and transformation rather than a final, published product. We conclude by noting that while CAE may have shortcomings, it represents a promising avenue of exploration for practitioners interested in developing professional practices through reflection and discussion with research collaborators.

Background: We previously demonstrated that in a Japanese national university’s medical faculty, overall paper publication frequency increased between 1979–1980 and 2017–2018, while original paper publication did not increase. Further, publication language changed from predominantly Japanese to English. However, whether these trends are specific to medicine or representative of other faculties remains unclear. Methods: We diachronically analyzed annual university library-produced publication reports for four pharmaceutical and three medical units between 1979–1980 and 2019–2020, elucidating how publication frequency, type, and language medium changed. Results: All publication types increased for the pharmaceutical faculty, from 2.87 per faculty member per year to 10.77. Publication of original papers more than doubled, from 1.06 per faculty member per year to 2.37. This increase was exclusively in English publication, with no publication of Japanese original papers in 2019–2020. This contrasts with medicine, which, while it demonstrated similar increases in all publication types combined, from 4.92 papers per faculty member per year to 12.78, did not demonstrate as striking an increase in total original paper publication (English and Japanese), from 1.21 papers per faculty member per year to 1.30. However, these two faculties observed similar trends in that English largely replaced Japanese original paper publication. That both faculties’ Japanese original paper publication decreased suggests English language original paper publication comes at the expense of publishing in Japanese. Concerning both faculties together, the increase in publishing frequency for all publication types more than tripled from 4.01 to 12.38. This was largely driven by changes in conference paper publication for the pharmaceutical sciences faculty, where English publication increased 2,775% (0.06 to 1.7 papers per faculty member per year) and Japanese language publication 258% (1.33 to 4.77). While conference paper publication did increase for the medical sciences, its change in total publication frequency was largely driven by ‘other’ types of publication, which increased from 0.51 publications per faculty member per year in 1979–1980 to 5.41 in 2019–2020, largely driven by Japanese language publication. Conclusion: In 2019–2020, pharmaceutical sciences faculty members largely published original papers in English, so postgraduate education should consider the future likelihood of graduates needing to publish in English.

The dominance of English in academic discourses is well established, with increased English publication used to evidence its increasing use at the expense of national language publication. However, while English publication frequency has increased over time, few studies have examined how university faculties outside higher education's Anglophone center have changed their language of publication frequency. Thus, in this investigation, we analyzed a Japanese national university's medical faculty's overall frequency of publication along with publication frequency by language medium, expanding on an earlier diachronic analysis of university publication reports. We previously found English language publications largely replaced Japanese language publications for journal articles and that overall publication frequency dramatically increased. However, that initial diachronic analysis did not show when those changes manifested. The current investigation explores this through a decennial time trend historical document analysis of publication reports from 1979 to 2020. This analysis elucidates how publication frequency, type, and language medium have changed. Specifically, we find that the largest change in the overall frequency of publication is between 1989-1990 and 1999-2000. These changes are primarily driven by conference papers and other publications, publication types not typically examined in analyses of journal citation databases. Our findings establish a foundation to discuss potential causes of the trends we identify in this Japanese national university's medical faculty's publications.

We investigate how competing forces interdiscursively manifest in Japan-based higher education through a critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1993, 1995). Higher education job advertisements are constitutive of institutions' public images that are targeted toward academics in specific fields. They are discursive spaces where marketized discourse has colonized previously dominant discourses of universities as independent authorities (Fairclough, 1993, 1995). Such marketized discourses within higher education express neoliberal ideologies and free-market conventions (Ball, 1998; Pack, 2018). However, the international extent of university discourse marketization is largely implicitly assumed rather than empirically examined, hence we investigate these forces with respect to Japanese higher education.

In this investigation we use keyword analysis to critically analyze higher education discourse, specifically job advertisements. Using two sets of advertisements, one from Japan-based and another from US-based institutions, we examine what is indexed (Blommaert, et al., 2015) in the advertisements, considering how those indexes are differentially scaled by each. We discuss these scales (Blommaert, et al., 2015) from the viewpoint of the process of the advertisements’ creation as encompassing multiple stakeholders and discourses that intersect with different degrees of tension and agreement. These tensions manifest in the advertisements through how they differentially scale the concepts they index. Finally, we consider the implications of our analysis for understanding higher education discourse. Specifically, this analysis helps reveal how antiracist, or “woke,” inclusionary ideologies expressed in the advertisements tend to use formulaic language that signals their relatively low priority scaling relative to the other features (Khaitova & Muller, 2022) that they index.