Revisiting a framework for Researching Multilingually: Contributions from critical theory, intercultural

relations, ethics, and the creative arts

Prue Holmes (Durham University)Richard Fay (The University of Manchester)

Jane Andrews (The University of the West of England)Mariam Attia (The Universities of Manchester and Durham)

Bucharest SymposiumBucharest, 4-6 November 2015

Preview

Our initial framework Building the framework drawing on contributions

from: Translanguaging & translingual practice Critical & indigenous methodologies Ethics and Rmly Multilingual relationships and intercultural capabilities Reflective practice

Where to next? Questions to our audience!

Aim of the initial Rmly project

To investigate and clarify the epistemological and methodological processes of researching in more than one language—whether dialogic, observational, textual, or mediated—and their implications for research design, instruments, data collection and generation, translation and interpretation, and reporting.

the understanding, reporting, and representation of people of other languages

Opportunities, affordances, challenges, obstacles

The “Researching Multilingually” process

… from the inception of a research project, to designing the project, the lit review, research questions, research framework, choice of methods, ethics and reflexivity, analysis, modes of (re)presentation

RMly conceptualisation

1) Purposefulness• Making informed and intentional researcher decisions• Researcher reflexivity & sensitivity, identity

2) Relationality• Researcher, supervisor, participants, translators/interpreters/transcribers• Trust, ethics, power

3) Researching multilingually – spaces (including context) • Research; researched; researcher; re/presentation• Interdisciplinary insights

Defining our terms

Researcher purposefulness - The informed and intentional research(er) thinking and decision-making which results from an awareness and thorough consideration of the possibilities for and complexities of all aspects of the research process (including RM-ly).

Research spaces (or context) - The multilingual aspects of the project, e.g. the research phenomenon (the “what”), the context of the research (the “where”), the linguistic resources of the researcher (the “who”), the representational possibilities (the language(s) of dissemination, the “for where” or “for whom”). Research relationships - Who are the people in the whole research project, e.g. researcher(s), supervisors, participants, translators, interpreters, transcribers, editors, and funders, and how do their relationships influence language choices within all phases of the project (from design to (re)presentation and publication).

(Holmes, P., Fay, R., Andrews, J., & Attia, M. (2016, in press). How to research multilingually: Possibilities and complexities. In H. Zhu (Ed.) Research methods in intercultural communication. London: Wiley.

Rmly@Borders brief …

… the members of the RMTC 'hub' will lead the development of integrated conceptual and methodological approaches, tools, and methods for researching translation processes and practices at borders where bodies are often at risk, in pain and/or in transition

RMTC RQs (from proposal)

• How do researchers generate, translate, interpret and write up data (dialogic, mediated, textual, performance) from one language to another?

• What ethical issues emerge in the planning and execution of data collection and representation (textual, visual, performance) where multiple languages are present?

• What methods and techniques improve processes of researching multilingually?

• How does multimodality (e.g. visual methods, ‘storying’, performance) complement and facilitate multilingual research praxis?

• How can researchers develop clear multilingual research practices and yet also be open to emergent research design?

RMTC Developments in the Rmly@Borders project

To develop a theoretical understanding of how researchers draw on their multilingual resources, and those of others, in multilingual contexts of pressure and pain, e.g., where people are stateless and homeless due to war, poverty, persecution, and economic instability.

• Generally, we are concerned with the following:– what it means to “language”, “be languaged”, “be languagers”, and “language

oneself” in the world today– what alternatives or other modes of researching and representation might be

possible– what is unsaid, liminal– the messiness, precarity, unpredictability of RMly experience

Further emerging research questions

1. Do conventional methods of researching do justice to research in contexts of pain and pressure? How can researchers forge new ways of “languaging” in their researcher praxis?

2. How do critical theories support a “researching multilingually” approach?

3. How do researchers negotiate relationships and ethical practices through language in the research site? What intercultural capabilities are researchers drawing on?

4. How are the creative arts translating the experience of researching multilingually in a multimodal way?

5. What are the issues for conceptual transferability when researching multilingually?

Languaging

Languaging“… a way of articulating the full, embodied and engaged interaction with the world that comes when we put the languages we are using into action.”“… being a person in that language in the social and material world of everyday interactions.”

Languagers…“… engage with the world-in-action, … move in the world in a way that allows the risk of stepping out of one’s habitual ways of speaking and attempt to develop different, more relational ways of interacting with the people and phenomena that one encounters in everyday life.”

(Phipps, 2011, p. 365)

Languaging

Languaging is …•relational - about the feelings we experience with others, through place, positioning

– Intercultural, interpersonal, interagentive

•rhizomatic – “the dense tangled cluster of interlaced threads or filaments any point in which can be connected to any other” (Ingold, 2000, p. 140).•involves a language ecology that includes the senses and sensory experience•phenomenological – how people perceive the world

Translation as a languaging response to phenomena “… a way of living in translated worlds, the worlds that meet in relations and that come to make sense through relations” (Phipps, 2011, p. 372).Languaging – not just cultural work, but translation as embodiment of feeling, and ways of relating to place and to words; shared through habitation

Yolland speaks of the land to Marie using the Irish names Maori identity – whakapapa, mihi

How can researchers draw on languaging in their researcher praxis?

Languaging

Translingual practice

“My aim has been to provide new research insights into the ways in which mobile semiotic resources are negotiated for meaning in global contact zones, and also to suggest pedagogical approaches to develop such co-operative dispositions and performative competence for cosmopolitan relationships” (Canagarajah, 2013, p.202).

Our concern – maybe a translingual mindset could be nurtured in researcher praxis? If so, how?

Critical theory - Southern theory

“Southern” emphasises “relations of authority, exclusion and inclusion, hegemony, partnership, sponsorship, appropriation—between intellectuals and institutions in the metropole and those in the world periphery” (Connell, 2007, p. ix).

Critical indigenous methodologies

Indigenous communities seek a “set of ethical principles that are feminist, caring, communitarian, holistic, respectful, mutual (rather than power imbalanced), sacred, and ecologically sound”

Denzin, Lincoln and Smith (2008, p. 569)

Critical indigenous methodologies …

seek to address injustices through research processes that demonstrate an ethical and reciprocal relationship between researcher and researched.

acknowledge marginalised people and “recognize the need to avoid forms of representation that maintain power in traditional locations” (Cannella & Lincoln, 2011, p. 82).

For Rmly researchers, they enable the examination privilege created by language in research practices.

Critical indigenous methodologies …

… offer frameworks for democratic research that advocate for voices—that have been, and continue to be, marginalised and unauthorised by dominant (and often colonial) regimes of power—to be heard.

(Linda Tuhiwai Smith, 1999; 20120

(Freire, 1972; 1976)(hooks, 2003), )

Ethical practices in Rmly work

Speaking back We have to find ways in which the marginalized can enter our discourses in their own genres and their own terms so that we can learn to hear them. They have a universal right to impart information and ideas through any media [and any language—my addition] and regardless of frontiers, and we have a duty to listen and understand them through engaging in new acts of becoming (Krog, 2011, p. 384).

Ethical practices - Halaqah

Islamic indigenous methodology - “a spiritual circle-time . . . conducted purely orally with students and teacher sitting in a circle on the floor” (Ahmet, 2014, p. 567)

It may be transmission-based teacher-led, or dialogic/student-led, or a collaborative group effort

It “enable[s] participants to articulate themselves within their own epistemological and ontological context and engage in critical reflection within an Islamic paradigm” (p. 561).

Multilingual relationships and intercultural capabilities

To ensure the trustworthiness of the research, Rmly researchers may/should engage in the following:•build and nurture relationships (underpinned by power and positioning) among all stakeholders •recognise the values and motivations of those initiating, undertaking and evaluating the research (project funders, managers, researchers, policy implementers)•negotiate the institutional parameters of the research site or context: the institutions involved •the in-between, and often unexplored, spaces—the silences, interruptions, apprehensions, unexplored and unarticulated tensions and decision making—invoked in the minds of researchers and research participants (and perhaps other stakeholders)

Reflective Practice

Reflections represent is key to exploring RM-ly practice on our project.

Following the project plan, two main sources of understanding about RM-ly practice are:

Reflective Practice

a) “reflections and narratives gathered from researchers’ journals, virtual communication tools, and multilingual researcher practice”

b) “RMTC hub members’ dialogues, reflections, observations, and where necessary, their own data collection with researchers and participants, and with documents”.

Reflective Practice

The RMTC Hub is responsible for facilitating researcher reflection on the experience of RM-ly, and, in keeping with our adoption of an Exploratory Practice frame for exploring such practice.

Reflective Practice

The following definition (Boud, Keogh and Walker, 1985: 3) provides the starting point for our RMTC Hub thinking on Reflective Practice.

It is sufficiently broad, we hope, to encompass other traditions which maybe more familiar to the wider project team:

Reflective Practice

A generic term for those intellectual and affective activities in which individuals engage to explore their experiences in order to lead to new understandings and appreciation.

Seen like this, Reflective Practice is a goal-oriented “process of turning experience into learning … [in which we take] the unprocessed, raw material of experience and engag[e] with it as a way to make sense of what has occurred” (Boud, 2001: 10).

Reflective Practice

The RMTC hub has specific research questions, and these RQs - along with the overall project research questions and the questions specific to each Case Study and to the CATC might offer focus for our reflections.

.. So, too, might the different stages of the project (e.g. literature review, data generation, dissemination, etc).

Where to next? Questions for you!

• How do/might these approaches inform your researcher multilingual practice?

• What opportunities do they offer?• What challenges?• How can researchers’ creative arts processes

complement researching multilingually processes? • Or: How can the creative arts be incorporated into

our developing “researching multilingually” framework?