The move towards English medium instruction (EMI) in higher education has been connected to university internationalisation, which aims to diversify the body of students and faculty but also reflects neoliberal trends. Recent research has underscored the need to consider socio-economic factors, materialities, and ideologies surrounding EMI (e.g Hultgren & Wilkinson 2022). Our study taps into this line of inquiry by focusing on the discursive construction of EMI and the entanglement between global, local and elite in promotional materials. Drawing on multimodal analysis approaches developed in critical discourse studies (e.g. Machin & Mayr 2012; Thurlow & Aiello 2007), we examine four videos promoting EMI programmes in business and economics at Swedish universities. The analysis reveals how the use and representations of English in the programmes – combined with different symbols, artefacts, and concepts – are used to position the promoted programmes as both global and local. References to international rankings and multinational business partnerships position these EMI programmes on the global education market. At the same time, the programmes are locally situated in the academic tradition or entrepreneurial context of Sweden. Images of local nature, the Swedish fika, and Scandinavian design present them in a way similar to tourist destinations. Tokens of economic and cultural eliteness, blended into visual narratives, create an extra layer of distinction, thereby contributing to the added ‘elite’ value of EMI, where English is both taken for granted and serves a gate-keeping device. Such discursive construction of programmes as both local and global resembles what Jaworski (2015) describes as ‘globalese’, a new visual-linguistic register, which is meant to appeal to the mass consumer of international higher education. By exploring the discourses surrounding EMI, our study seeks to contribute to the line of research focusing on the connection between English in higher education and current socio-political trends.