Acceso usuarios
Mudassar Mahmood Ahmad
, Mirza Muhammad Zubair Baig
English-medium instruction (EMI) is widely promoted in non-Anglophone higher education as a route to internationalization, employability, research visibility, and institutional competitiveness. Yet EMI policy research has largely treated time as exposure duration, implementation chronology, or program length rather than as a governing mechanism. This article examines how time is produced, organized, and contested in EMI-related policy reform in Pakistan. Drawing on Torres’s concept of temporal regimes and Koselleck’s theorization of historical time, it analyzes 17 official Higher Education Commission (HEC) sources through critical qualitative document analysis, combining reflexive thematic analysis with theory-sensitized policy discourse analysis. The study asks how HEC policy documents operationalize time in English-driven internationalization and what neoliberal, neocolonial, and policy-discursive openings they contain for alternative multilingual academic rhythms. Findings show that HEC policy organizes higher education through five temporal mechanisms: calendarized compliance, degree-time corridors, audit-time cycles, transnational synchronization, and temporal stratification. These mechanisms align institutional quality, English-mediated academic legibility, and global competitiveness with deadlines, review cycles, completion rules, rankings, publication timelines, and eligibility thresholds. The analysis further shows that neoliberal temporalities of efficiency, audit, and measurable performance intersect with neocolonial temporalities of external recognition, English-dominant indexing, and globally benchmarked legitimacy. However, the corpus also retains limited openings through flexibility, contextualization, force majeure, local relevance, and alternative delivery provisions. The article argues that EMI-driven internationalization functions as chronopolitical governance and proposes a Temporal Equity in EMI (TE-EMI) framework for designing more time-sensitive, multilingual, and context-responsive higher education policies.
