WRONG. It turns out that typing “what is a systematic literature review” into Google will only overwhelm a new researcher! I came across plenty of journal articles that claimed to be explaining what an SLR was (and how that somehow differed from another term I was learning – a scoping review), but for the life of me I could not find a clear-cut set of instructions. All of the information seemed to be pitched at a level far above the one I was operating at, and I began to feel frustrated that I could not find a source that was putting this methodology into terms that the average person could understand. But I knew I needed to figure it out, so over the course of the next few weeks I read what felt like dozens of explainers and guides.

Eventually, my reading and furious note-taking paid off, because by the end of 2023 I had successfully completed my research, entitled “How are language barriers bridged in hospitals?: a systematic review”. But in the process, I had spoken to so many academics who also voiced their frustration that they couldn’t find explanations on how to conduct an SLR in clear lay terms, and so I knew I hadn’t been alone.

Something I feel VERY passionate about is that, as academics, we must be able to talk to people outside of academia, and that means that we need to be able to communicate complex ideas in easily digestible ways. Higher knowledge shouldn’t be reserved for people who have weeks to teach themselves a new research methodology, and I wanted to be able to explain an SLR to everyone, not just other researchers.

And so, I created this “SLR: Easy Guide” explainer for anyone and everyone who would like to conduct an SLR but has no idea where to start. If that’s you, please feel free to use this resource – and know that you aren’t alone as an early researcher who is learning things for the first time. We’ve all got to start somewhere, and we can make it easier on others by sharing what we’ve figured out the hard way!

FAQs

What exactly is a systematic literature review (SLR)?

Ok, so you know how you need to do a literature review before you write a research paper? In that literature review, you are basically summarising what other researchers have said about your research topic so that you can show how your research is building on prior knowledge.

An SLR is different to that. An SLR is your research (your “experiment”, if you will). In an SLR, you read and analyse lots of different published journal articles in order to see patterns in already-published data. There’s an actual methodology that you have to use (which I detail in SLR: An Easy Guide) in order to select these journal articles.

I haven’t heard of an SLR, but I’ve heard of a meta-analysis. What’s the difference?

Literally nothing. They mean the same thing! Surprise! Academia is fun and not at all confusing.

I’ve also heard of a scoping review. Is that the same as a systematic literature review?

In this case, there actually is a difference, albeit a relatively small one. The methodology for both types of reviews will be the same (whew!), but the reason for conducting one versus the other will be a bit different. Let me give you an example based on my own research. When I began looking into how hospitals manage linguistic diversity between patients and staff, I knew that there was already a lot of literature out there about the subject (generally having to do with the work of professional interpreters). I had four very specific research questions that I wanted to answer based on that literature. This is why I conducted a systematic review – because I already knew that I would be able to find existing research that could answer my questions.

HOWEVER, you might not know how much literature already exists on a given topic. Maybe your topic is fairly niche, so you haven’t seen much about it in publications. This is where a scoping review comes in. In conducting a scoping review, you’ll find out exactly how much literature on the topic already exists. In doing so, you’ll be able to make an argument for why a particular area of research should be looked into more.

If this still sounds confusing (totally understandable!), be sure to talk to a fabulous university librarian. They are really good at knowing the difference between the two!

Is there any kind of SLR “authority” that I should know about?

There sure is! There is an organisation called PRISMA (which stands for Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses). You can go to their website for two very crucial items that you will need for your SLR: a checklist and a flow chart.

The PRISMA checklist is great because it tells you exactly what you need to include in your SLR. The PRISMA flow chart is what you include in your SLR to show why/how you included and excluded studies during your screening process (which you can see in steps 3 and 4 of my SLR: An Easy Guide resource). But don’t worry, you don’t need to create the flow chart from scratch. If you use Covidence, the platform will create it for you. And speaking of Covidence…

This feels overwhelming! Is there one place I can go to manage all my SLR data easily?

Absolutely. I used Covidence, an online platform that essentially walks you through the SLR process. I would HIGHLY recommend using Covidence or a similar service to help you manage all your data in one place. Covidence will also automatically create your flow chart for you as you go through your screening process. What I especially liked about Covidence was that I was able to custom-create my data collection template based on my specific research questions. This made my data analysis much easier than it would have been without it!

What do I do if I’m still confused or feel like I don’t know how to do this?

Remember that every single one of us who goes on to do higher degree research feels like this. We don’t know what we don’t know! I’ve now completed two Masters degrees and am currently working on my PhD, and let me tell you, the learning curve is steep! But you know what? You can do it. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Tell your supervisors and colleagues when you feel lost. Remind yourself that learning these research skills is just as important as the research itself. And when you get super stressed, grab a cup of coffee, stand in the sunshine and take a 10-minute break. You’ve got this!

Download and cite my free “SLR: An Easy Guide” resource

“SLR: An Easy Guide” is a free cheat sheet for your systematic literature review. You can download it here.

If you find it useful, please cite as:

Quick, B. (2024). Systematic Literature Review: An Easy Guide. Language on the Move. Retrieved from https://languageonthemove.com/systematic-literature-review-easy-guide

The interview explores the Alliance’s origins, research themes, and future directions. The episode not only highlights the significant contributions of this dynamic research group but also provides a glimpse into the personal and professional journeys that have shaped this academic endeavor.

Enjoy the show!

This is early days for the Language on the Move Podcast, so please support us by subscribing to our channel on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Further reading

Li, C., Shen, Q., Zhao, K., & Zheng, Y. (2022). The Shanghai alliance of multilingual researchers: Fudan University, Tongji University, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, and Shanghai International Studies University, China. Language Teaching, 55(4), 583-587. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261444821000379

Transcript

Yixi (Isabella) and Yongyan present about language management in global corporations

Welcome to the Language on the Move podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Yixi Qiu. You can call me Isabella.

I’m a PhD candidate in Applied Linguistics in Fudan University, Shanghai, China. I’m also a member of the Language on the Move team. My guest today is Professor Yongyan Zheng, a full professor at the College of Foreign Languages and Literature, Fudan University, Shanghai, China, where she teaches English academic writing and applied linguistics.

Her research interests include second language development, bilingual and multilingual education, and academic literacy practices. She is the editor-in-chief of Language, Culture, and Curriculum, and also the co-editor-in-chief of System. She is a leading scholar in the Shanghai Alliance of Multilingual Researchers. In today’s interview, we will focus on this Shanghai Alliance of Multilingual Researchers, talking about the motivations behind the Alliance, its key research themes, and some of the methodological innovations that the Alliance has pioneered. Welcome to the show, Professor Zheng.

Zheng: Thank you, Isabella, for having me today.

Bella: Could you please start us off by telling us a little bit about this Shanghai Alliance, its members, and its main focus?

Zheng: Yes. We are a group of scholars from four leading universities in Shanghai, especially the northeast part of Shanghai, including Fudan University, Tongji University, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, and Shanghai International Studies University. We’ve been working together for over 15 years already, and our focus is on the role of multilingualism in China’s unique cultural and educational landscape. Now, our team includes about 10 core researchers, and we are also currently guiding around 30 master’s students, doctoral and postdoctoral researchers. Our work covers three main areas, multilingualism in language education, its influence in Chinese society, and the research methods we use to explore these topics.

Bella: Well, thank you very much for the introduction, Professor Zheng. Now, I’m quite curious about the origins of this Shanghai Alliance. What motivated you and other members to establish this group?

Zheng: The idea for the Alliance actually started from personal connections and shared interests among leading scholars. We are, me, of course, and then Professor Qi Shen from Tongji University, Professor Ziting Li from Shanghai International Studies University, and Professor Ke Zhao at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. We actually are friends in our life, and Professor Li and Professor Zhao and I, we went to the same PhD program, and so our friendship goes way back. But then we work together, and especially our universities are quite close to each other, so we believe in knowledge construction, we share common interests in exploring multilingualism.

Then we say, why don’t we just start our own alliance? Well, there is a little story here. When we first started, we didn’t call ourselves Shanghai Alliance, but gradually, through our practice, we realized that we were doing something really significant. Originally, we wanted to call ourselves Wujiaochang Alliance, because Wujiaochang, namely the Pentagon Square, is where the four universities are located. But then we thought probably Shanghai Alliance, this name is easier to remember, and here we go.

Bella: Okay, thank you very much, and especially thank you very much for telling us the story behind this group. Could you please share the core philosophy behind Shanghai Alliance? How do you personally view its role and impact of this alliance?

Zheng: Yes, so as I mentioned before, we believe in collaboration, we believe in sharing our research, and particularly because we are doing multilingualism, we believe in the concept of researching multilingually.

So this approach was actually proposed by Professor Prue Holmes and her colleagues at Durham University UK, but then we believe that this approach is also suitable for our own research agenda. This approach encourages the use of multiple languages in the entire process of doing research, from idea generation, data analysis, interpretation, knowledge dissemination. So this approach enables us to orchestrate diverse linguistic and intellectual as well as cultural resources to cover a broader range of topics and break free from the constraints of single language research traditions.

Personally, I think this alliance is especially driven by the philosophy of researching multilingually as a transformative force in the field of applied linguistics, because it allows us to pull our resources together, our ideas, expertise, methodological repertoires together, not only to enhance our collective understanding of multilingualism, but more importantly, to impact how multilingualism is studied and understood in Chinese society.

Bella: Thank you very much for sharing the philosophy behind this group, and researching multilingually is indeed impressive, as it emphasizes the process rather than just the outcome, and emphasizing the cooperation and the growth that can be the most rewarding aspects of studying multilingualism. I have the personal experience in that aspect as well.

And as we discuss how multilingualism is studied and understood in society, you mentioned earlier three main areas of focus within the alliance, and could you please introduce about the multilingualism in education, how do you approach multilingualism in language education in your alliance? Y

Zheng: Yes, of course. The main concern or the very first impetus for me to put my emphasis on multilingualism in language education was the realization that there was too much emphasis on English, despite the fact that I was an English professor. So, our work in this area wants to look at language in education planning at a macro as well as the meso level, and we also want to explore the lived experiences of multilingual teachers and learners at different levels.

For instance, I had the opportunity to collaborate with Professor Andy Gao from the University of New South Wales, and we together co-guest edited a special issue entitled Multilingualism and Higher Education in Greater China, for the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development back in 2019. This special issue was very well received by the readers, and some of the articles were still highly cited even until today. So, then our interest actually expanded to not only the lived experiences of students, but also to the meso level language planning.

Researchers such as Dr Xiuwen Chen, Professor Ke Zhao, and Dr Jian Tao from the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics have conducted a series of studies in the context of China’s national initiative to diversify foreign language education. Me, myself, and also my PhD students have also explored how an elective Arabic program was successfully implemented at Fudan University. So, these initiatives have some social impact on the learning experiences of our students as well.

Another focus is teacher development, because we believe that teacher development or teacher in-service training is also a critical component of our multilingual education planning. So, researchers in our alliance have launched various projects aimed at supporting multilingual teachers’ development, particularly in response to the huge pressure of the university research assessment system.

Bella: Thank you so much for the detailed introduction to the first theme. Let’s move forward then. I think we are particularly curious about the next focus area. I think it’s the multilingualism in Chinese society. How does this alliance explore the complexities of multilingualism in China?

Zheng: The second theme is related to another strand, language policy and planning and the sociolinguistics or let’s say the sociology of language that we have been focusing on. This strand is particularly featured by Professor Qi Shen and his team at Tongji University. They have been very productive in this area, particularly through their work over the past five years.

Back in 2019, Professor Shen and Professor Andy Gao also guest-edited a special issue entitled Multilingualism and Policymaking in Greater China, Ideological and Implementation Spaces for the Journal Language Policy. This special issue was also highly cited. So, they explored the notion of resource orientation and then they want to see how this notion allows various stakeholders to negotiate language policies which could help preserve linguistic diversity within China’s tradition of linguistic unity.

Bella: Yes, that sounds like a critical exploration of policy that could actually shape the future language policy and planning in significant ways.

Zheng: Yes, right. We hope so. And at the micro level, our research explores family language planning. We’ve looked at ethnic male families in southwest China, ethnic Korean migrant families in Shanghai, urban families of varying socioeconomic statuses. So, our studies highlight the intricate interplay of family dynamics, socioeconomic factors, language practices and identity against the backdrop of China’s modernization, urbanization and globalization.

And currently, we’re also examining Chinese transnational families in the USA, in Latin America as well as Arabic families doing business in China. We want to explore topics including heritage language maintenance, adolescence bilingual identity construction, parental agency as well as language ideologies. We believe that these topics are highly insignificant for us to understand the linguistic diversity and how people from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds can equally participate in social affairs.

Bella: Yeah, indeed. And it’s really fascinating to see such a wide range of research areas that you mentioned. And then how about the third strand? The third strand is about multilingualism in the workplace.

Zheng: We are studying how multinational corporations in China manage language policies and practices. For instance, Professor Ke Zhao and her team at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics have analyzed a Spanish bank’s language management in Shanghai, the complex language dynamics in foreign banks against the changing context of foreign direct investment. And they also explored corporate language capacity at a German IT multinational company in Shanghai.

So, they emphasized the crucial role of middle-level management in designing and implementing language-related activities to support the goal of developing corporate language competence. I believe this strand is also related to the focus, the economic and financial focus of Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. And nowadays, Professor Ke Zhao and her team are also focusing on the language or the corporate language capacity building of Chinese corporations which want to go overseas. So, I believe that this is an interesting, under-explored area in social linguistics.

Bella: Wow, thank you for outlining how the second theme is approached in the alliance, with each member bringing their unique focus. Given the innovative approaches you’ve mentioned, our audience might be eager to learn more about the research methodologies utilized by the alliance. Could you elaborate on some of these methodological innovations used in this alliance?

Zheng: Yes, we believe that methodological innovations are indispensable for pushing the boundaries of theoretical development. So, guided by this kind of spirit, our group places a strong emphasis on pioneering qualitative research methods. For instance, my colleagues and I are the first batch of Chinese researchers who use the Q methodology in applied linguistics.

This method has proven useful in offering a systematic and a comprehensive exploration of subjectivity. So, we have already published a lot on Q methodology. For example, on a modern language journal, language teaching research, and also a journal of multilingual and multicultural development.

If you’re interested, you’re very welcome to check our publications on those journals. Additionally, we explore the use of social network analysis. For example, Professor Ziting Li from Shanghai International Studies University combines this social network analysis with ethnographic methods to study the pragmatic choices of international students in China.

Currently, Li and her team are applying different social network analysis techniques in their projects. One focuses on how multilingual STEM doctoral students from Africa and South America construct their personal networks to support their academic endeavors in China. And the other project examines the interaction between various types of support and personal network development in enhancing Chinese language teachers’ professional capacities.

Bella: I’m truly impressed by the theoretical and especially methodological advancements achieved by the alliance. And building on this, could you please explain how this alliance, this Shanghai alliance, promotes and shares its research and findings both within the academic community and with the wider public?

Zheng: The alliance is committed to advancing research methods on multilingualism among Chinese researchers. And equally important, we are committed to training early career researchers who are interested in doing multilingual research in Chinese contexts.

So we have already hosted eight language studies forums for emerging scholars since 2015. The most recent forum focused on English medium instruction in emerging contexts and attracted around 2,000 participants online. We have also invited distinguished scholars like Professor Li Wei from UCL, Professor Zhu Hua from UCL to conduct workshops on multilingualism and academic writing.

These events were offered mostly free to Chinese researchers. And we have also three social media accounts that share research insights and they have already gathered more than 20,000 subscribers. The upcoming forum, we call it the language studies forum for emerging scholars, the upcoming one will be held in early July.

That will be the ninth forum in a row. We hold this kind of forum every year. So this year’s topic is linguistic landscape and multilingual education. We believe that this would also be a very interesting topic to explore in the Chinese higher education as well as basic education contexts.

Bella: Thank you very much and thank you for sharing the information on the upcoming event, especially the July activity. And I’m very much looking forward to participating in this productive event. And before we wrap up, could you please tell us what’s next for the Alliance? Where is this amazing community headed?

Zheng: Yes, absolutely. We will continue to focus on three main research themes and further innovate our methodological approaches. For example, we are currently enhancing our use of social networks as both a theoretical framework and an analytical tool to investigate the various aspects of multilingualism.

Our team is also advancing the use of other innovative methods like qualitative comparative analysis, QCA, and more data-driven natural language processing techniques to study language policy and planning. These techniques are crucial as we explore patterns in language and education planning and language management across educational institutions and transnational families.

Bella: Thank you. I love those ideas. It’s absolutely amazing to see the techniques expanding and developing. Thank you very much, Professor Yongyan Zheng, for speaking with us today. We really appreciate it. And thanks for listening, everyone. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a five-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend the Language on the Move podcast and our partner, the New Books Network, to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Till next time.

When: Thursday, December 14, 2023, full day
Where: Macquarie University
Keynote speakers:
Dr Alexandra Grey, University of Technology Sydney
Dr Trang Nguyen, University of Melbourne

What: Despite the ever-increasing linguistic diversity of Australian society, our institutions continue to be organized as monolingual spaces. This creates barriers to full and equitable social participation for those who do not speak English, do not speak it well, or have low levels of (English) literacy. At this point in time, research into language barriers to education, work, healthcare, law, and all aspects of social life faces at least three intertwined conceptual and methodological challenges, which this workshop is designed to explore:

1. Emerging languages: some of the fastest-growing communities in Australia include speakers of under-served, under-resourced, and non-standardized languages. This raises significant challenges for the provision of language services, from translation and interpreting to heritage language maintenance and community schooling.
2. Language technologies: the past few years have seen an explosion in assistive language technologies from automated translation via multilingual chatbots to digital diasporas. These technologies offer fresh opportunities for linguistic inclusion while also creating new barriers for linguistically minoritized populations.
3. Epistemic justice: the open science movement challenges us to rethink the research life cycle from design to dissemination. Co-design, data-sharing, multilingual team research, big data, and citizen science are some of the issues reshaping how we approach linguistic diversity and social participation.

The workshop is designed to be highly interactive and we are particularly interested in hearing from HDR candidates and early career researchers working in these areas. We have a small number of short presenter slots (10-15 minutes) on our panels. To have your abstract considered for presentation, submit here by Monday, November 06.

Attendance is free.

International Women’s Day is a great opportunity to share news about the book and reflect on the strength of women’s academic collaborations.

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Ingrid Piller, Donna Butorac, Emily Farrell, Loy Lising, Shiva Motaghi-Tabari, Vera Williams Tetteh

***

Life in a new language

Life in a new language examines the language learning and settlement experiences of 130 migrants to Australia from 34 different countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America over a period of 20 years.

The aim is to understand the dual challenge of learning a new language while living one’s life through the medium of that language. This is a challenge that remains poorly understood and non-migrants tend to underestimate its severity and the hardships involved.

1. There is the shock of finding oneself in a new linguistic environment where you may not understand much of what is going on around you, while all the time being cognizant of the fact that not understanding what is going on may have acute repercussions for your wellbeing.
2. There is the difficulty of finding work that will not only pay the bills but also sustain your ambitions and self-worth. Most participants took years to recapture their careers, many never did.
3. To improve proficiency in the new language, migrants need to interact in the new language, a task that is made difficult by the frequent absence of interlocutors willing to indulge newcomers, a lack of common topics, and the pervasiveness of misunderstandings. Misunderstandings may go on to reverberate through future interactions as each misunderstanding leads to a loss of confidence that needs to be reclaimed over time.
4. Migration intrudes even into the most intimate domains of life and alters family roles and relationships. It is not only that familial obligations and duties are redistributed but also that new family tasks emerge. Prominent among these are new ways of parenting, including setting an—implicit or explicit—family language policy, and managing child language learning of both new and heritage languages. As children usually learn the new language faster, the potential impact of their superior (oral) proficiency on parental authority can become another tribulation for adult migrants.
5. Migration continues to be imagined as a point of difference from the idealized sedentary mainstream population of their destination. This difference often marks those with a migration history as perpetual outsiders to their new society. Difference may be audible in their ways of speaking and visible where they are differently racialized. Experiences of Othering, exclusion, discrimination, and racism based on such differences create another level of adversity, as migrants need to cope with micro-aggressions, invalidations, insults, and sometimes even assaults.
6. Migration severs the self into a before and after. As pre-migration habits and identities have disappeared, new selves with a new sense of belonging, home, and community need to be fashioned.

Through the voices of our participants, we document the magnitude and anatomy of these challenges. Understanding them leads to an appreciation of migrants’ courage, perseverance, and resilience.

Ethnographic data-sharing and re-use

The research behind Life in a new language was conducted over a period of more than 20 years in six separate sociolinguistic ethnographies. For this book project, we revisited those six projects, shared our data, and re-analyzed them to answer questions about language learning, employment, interaction, parenting, experiences with racism, and sense of belonging.

Our methodological approach was inspired by open science principles and the desire to share our data and to pool our existing resources to be able to paint a bigger picture of language and migration. While most researchers now accept the value of data sharing and reuse, implementation and practice remain patchy, particularly when it comes to qualitative data in the humanities and social sciences. In ethnographic research, data sharing and reuse is in its infancy as researchers struggle with questions on what open research might even mean for them and how to implement FAIR principles, i.e., making their data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. These problems are compounded by time pressures and the absence of tried and tested workflows for reanalyzing and bringing to publication shared datasets.

During one of our rare in-person writing workshops

As such, Life in a new language ventures into unchartered methodological territory. We explain the academic motivations, affordances and limitations we encountered in the book. Here, we want to share a more personal story.

The story behind the book

Life in a new language is co-authored by six academic women, who have collaborated over an extended period as members of the Language on the Move research team. Donna, Emily, Shiva, and Vera conducted their PhD research under Ingrid’s supervision, and Loy was mentored by Ingrid as an early career researcher.

As such, Life in a new language shows what can be done with linguistic ethnography and provides a working model for how to combine existing small datasets into larger longitudinal studies of a social phenomenon or practice. It also provides a framework for supervising academics and their doctoral students to create a research and publishing community of practice that connects separate higher degree research projects under a single, post-award project umbrella. Similarly, our study provides a model for early career and experienced scholars to work together to create and analyze big datasets from qualitative methods of inquiry.

Life in a new language is personal in yet another way. For the six of us, the intersection of language learning and settlement is not only an academic research topic. Beyond our academic expertise, we share with our participants the experience of being migrant speakers. Like our participants, our group of authors reflects the diversity of 21^st century Australia. All of us are settlers on Indigenous land. We or our ancestors have come to Australia from Germany, Ghana, Iran, Ireland, the Philippines, and Yugoslavia. Those four of us who came to Australia as adults share with our participants the experience of settling in a new country through the medium of a new language. Our experience as English language teachers and teacher trainers also informs our account. We hope that the way we have pooled our lived experiences in a unique intercultural team to write this book will add richness and depth to our account.

Meet each of the 130 migrants in our book over the next months in a serialized Twitter thread

First up: Katja from Poland
Katja’s engineering degree was not recognized in Australia. She retrained as a beautician. Tremendous skills loss for herself and our society
1/n https://t.co/ehvPDznp6f

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) March 7, 2023

Good things really do take time

Data collection on the first project to feed into our analysis started in 2000, but the idea for the book and the reanalysis of previously collected datasets started to take shape in 2018, just around the time one of us had a baby. Seeing this little person ready to start school now, has been the yardstick for how long it has taken us to turn a brilliant idea into a completed manuscript.

We not only got derailed by the Covid-19 pandemic, but we also discovered that writing a truly co-authored book with a team of six authors, who are not even co-located, is more challenging than anticipated. It is also much more rewarding and fun.

We learned that the principles of open science can be best brought to life through the spirit of collaboration, engagement, dialogue, and friendship that guided our endeavor. And we warmly recommend collaborative writing to all academic women this International Women’s Day because pooling strengths can better keep us all afloat.

What’s next?

We hope we have whetted your appetite for Life in a new language. The academic publication process is a protracted one and we will share key dates here on Language on the Move as they come to hand.

For now, people in Sydney might want to pencil our International Symposium on Bilingualism workshop devoted to the project into their diaries. For everyone else, we have started a Twitter series @lg_on_the_move, where you can meet one of each of our 130 participants per day while we count down to publication.

Related International Women’s Day content

• 2021, Remembering cancelled women
• 2020, Female academics and shamans face the same glass ceiling
• 2019, Why are there so few notable academic women?
• 2018, Why do female academics publish less than their male peers?
• 2013, Migrant women’s empowerment in the city
• 2012, Strange Academic women

Anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon interviewing unidentified Yanomami people

Editor’s note: How do researchers in anthropology and sociology deal with linguistic diversity? Do they learn the language(s) of the people they work with or do they hire interpreters? Turns out that they are quite naive about language and do neither systematically, as new research by Katarzyna Sepielak, Dawid Wladyka, and William Yaworsky shows. How to make good decisions about language choice and language mediation in fieldwork needs to become part of research training.

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Katarzyna Sepielak, Dawid Wladyka, and William Yaworsky

***

We have surveyed field researchers in sociology and anthropology programs in the United States and found only limited proficiency in field languages, accompanied by a widespread reliance on translators and interpreters. The scholars, therefore, did not dispense with translators as early-twentieth century anthropologists called for (Mead, 1939); instead, they dispensed with the myth of linguistic fluency. At the same time, results indicate disparities in the use of vernacular and translation services in the post-colonial societies and haphazard ‘hiring’ patterns of interpreters that cause ethical and methodological concerns.

The imaginary anthropologist is a fluent polyglot; the real anthropologist is too time-poor to learn another language

When you think about an anthropologist, what stereotypes do you imagine?  Maybe a gaunt Englishman wearing a pith helmet with a copy of African Political Systems (Fortes and Evans-Pritchard, 1940) stuffed in his back pocket? Our imaginary anthropologist is, of course, fluent in a language at risk of extinction, learned during years of field research while living with an endangered community.

Perhaps your image of a sociologist is quite different. You might conjure a scholar working in an urban setting in their home country, which of course is in one of the complex industrial societies. They are studying social problems using their native language with locals who also speak the same tongue.

The shape of today’s societies however, as well as forms of field research challenge those effigies. Anthropologists cannot permit themselves the ‘luxury’ of spending years within a single community, being involved in many projects and teaching duties at home institutions. Sociologists, on the other hand, now work in culturally diverse settings and face the same issues as anthropologists a century ago.

Experience with Fieldwork Translation by Discipline

Yet, the scholarly associations and method textbooks are virtually mum on the problem of language, translation and interpreting in field research. To the contrary, a blatant disregard for translation services is noticeable in some discussions, that – righteously – attempt to reclaim the status of research assistants: “Research assistants play a vital role in the research process, often acting as more than just [! – exclamation and bold added] translators or interpreters.” (Dean & Stevano 2016)

We surveyed US-based scholars about their language practices

That is why we surveyed US-based scholars from anthropology and sociology programs. We analyzed 913 answers that provided insights into our respondents’ linguistic capabilities and their experiences conducting research in over 180 countries and interacting with over 400 languages. A more extensive presentation of the results may be found in our article published by Multilingua (Sepielak, Wladyka & Yaworsky 2022).

We discovered that in only 24% of the field sites with languages other than English present did scholars assess that they had professional (or higher) fluency. In almost 60% of cases, our respondents interacted with languages in which they reported a proficiency at or below a limited working level.

It would seem it’s not all bad news with 75% of respondents reporting fluency in at least one fieldwork language. However, they were typically fluent in languages derived from the colonizers, such as French and Spanish, but rarely in languages from the colonized.

Social science researchers are “getting by”

It is then worth noting that most anthropologists and sociologists were getting by at times like everybody else, using interpreters and translators, or conducting research using the English language. ‘Only’ 54.1% of the sociologists in our sample ever collaborated with a translator compared to 68.9% of anthropologists.

Translation and interpreting are often rendered invisible

Example: #interpreter was literally erased from this photo of meeting between Iran's Rouhani and Malaysia' Mahathir in media coverage #xl8 https://t.co/RIcNpy38t2 pic.twitter.com/aNCCivzY0F

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) April 30, 2020

It would, however, be spurious to claim that American sociologists had less need for translators due to their linguistic proficiency. It is rather due to the traditional research interests exposing anthropologists to an increased number of languages and geographies. In comparison, sociologists frequently work in the US and regions like Western Europe where one could claim to “get by” with English.

One could ask how can this reality diverge so significantly from the ideal of language fluency and dismissal of interpreters pushed by generations of authoritative field scholars?

Is English proficiency really the superpower of today’s social scientists?

English is the language superpower of the world (Piller, 2022). And our thematic analysis indicates that researchers turn to this ‘superpower’ quite often. This is due to a variety of circumstances hampering the acquisition of fluency in another language, such as short-term studies, multi-sited fieldwork, international collaborative research, or studies of communities with multiple co-existing languages. While the global popularity of English appears as one of the deterrents to mastering field languages among scholars, one should also note that Indigenous languages such as Nahuatl, Tlapanec and thousands of others are virtually extinct from academic curricula in the US.

Anthropologists, in particular, may be wary about revealing these linguistic deficiencies due to the fear it might undermine their ethnographic authority. They will be mindful of Margaret Mead’s fieldwork being criticized as ‘superficial’ in part due to her linguistics deficiencies (see Freeman 1983) or Napoleon Chagnon wasting months analyzing the fictitious and scatological “names” of Yanomamo villagers presented to him by amused tribesmen (see Chagnon 1992), mold current beliefs of scholars?

Paying lip-service to the importance of linguistic proficiency does make fluent researchers

Well, it would seem so, with 81% of our respondents perceiving knowledge of local language as important and 95% agreeing that knowing the vernacular enriches the understanding of “local knowledge”.  They also agreed that researchers who don’t speak the vernacular miss important data and have less control over the study. A clear example of detachment between the persisting ethos and contemporary practice reported in previous paragraphs.

The invisible translators and interpreters of social science

In this context, the question about what this heavy reliance on translators means for Western representations of post-colonial societies, persists as well. How do scholars perceive its effect on the research process? For one, most respondents agreed that translators help in gaining access to data and that scholars with foreign-language deficiencies should collaborate with them. Nevertheless, concerning was a trend of haphazardly “hiring” persons that interpret (including research assistants, spouses, colleagues, representatives of local institutions) driven by cost and convenience. This widespread practice carries a series of ethical, methodological, and even security risks rarely considered during methods training.

To that end, field researchers did not dispense with translators as early 20^th century anthropologists called for, instead, they dispensed with the sleight of hand of linguistic fluency. This state of affairs should at the very minimum deserve greater attention in current methodological and ethical discussions regarding fieldwork and collaboration with interpreters.

To read the full article

Sepielak, K., Wladyka, D. & Yaworsky, W. (2022). Language proficiency and use of interpreters/translators in fieldwork: a survey of US-based anthropologists and sociologists. Multilingua. https://doi.org/10.1515/multi-2022-0071

Related content

Laihonen, Petteri. (2020). Do concepts and methods have ethics? Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/do-concepts-and-methods-have-ethics/
Piller, Ingrid. (2016). Herder – an explainer for linguists. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/herder-an-explainer-for-linguists/
Piller, Ingrid. (2021). The interpreting profession in ancient Egypt. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/the-interpreting-profession-in-ancient-egypt/
Piller, Ingrid. (2022). How to challenge Anglocentricity in academic publishing. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/how-to-challenge-anglocentricity-in-academic-publishing/

References

Chagnon, Napoleon. 1992. Yanomamo: The last days of Eden. New York: Harvest Books.
Deane, K. & Stevano, S. 2016. Towards a political economy of the use of research assistants: reflections from fieldwork in Tanzania and Mozambique. Qualitative Research, 16(2). 213-228.
Fortes, Meyer, and E.E. Evans-Pritchard (eds.). 1940. African Political Systems. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Freeman, Derek. 1983. Margaret Mead and Samoa: The making and unmaking of an anthropological myth. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Mead, Margaret. 1939. Native languages as fieldwork tools. American Anthropologist 41(2): 189–205.
Piller, Ingrid. (2022). “Women, life, freedom” – the slogan swimming against the global tide. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/women-life-freedom-the-slogan-swimming-against-the-global-tide/

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Judith Reynolds, Sara Ganassin and Prue Holmes

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Readers of Language On The Move will be familiar with the idea that different languages and language varieties are imbued with different levels of social prestige, and that language use and language choice are closely tied up with issues of social justice in many contexts. But have you ever considered what impact the language choices made during a multilingual research process might have on the research outcomes, and on the individuals involved in research?

The Politics of Researching Multilingually

In our recently published edited volume The Politics of Researching Multilingually, this question is critically and reflexively explored by researchers from across the social sciences, many of whom are researching in global South contexts. We asked our contributors to think, write and research about the political dimensions of how they did researching multilingually, defined as ‘the process and practice of using, or accounting for the use of, more than one language in the research process’ (Holmes et al., 2016, p. 101). The result is a collection of 16 powerful chapters, in which our authors write candidly about their own ideological positions towards the languages involved in their research, their changing awareness of the power effects inherent in language choices and language use in research, and their journeys towards ‘researcher intentionality’ (Stelma and Fay, 2014; Stelma, Fay and Zhou, 2013) when researching in or through multiple languages.

In introducing the volume, we argue that our decisions about how we use linguistic resources in research are political, in that they involve the negotiation of relationships of unequal power in aspects such as the selection of research topics, engaging with different stakeholders, navigating the language hierarchies in play in the different contexts of the research, and determining the languages of dissemination of the research. The volume thematises both the constraints on researchers working multilingually, and their responses to such constraints, under four themes briefly presented here.

Hegemonic structures

Under the theme of hegemonic structures, contributions critically examine the role of institutional structures such as funding bodies, gatekeepers, the academy and the publishing industry in prioritising and legitimising or delegitimising certain languages in research.

In the context of French academia, Adam Wilson discusses the double linguistic burden placed on researchers seeking to publish and advance their careers in a dual French- and English-dominated globalised academic environment. In turn, Shameem Oozeerally describes the tensions involved in working as an interdisciplinary and multilingual research team in a Mauritian university context defined by a particular linguistic ideology and epistemological stance.

Lamia Nemouchi and Prue Holmes reflect on the experience of an international doctoral researcher implementing a project grounded in fieldwork in the multilingual context of Algeria, yet which was framed by the Anglo-monolingual conventions and expectations of a British university. In a different context, Wine Tesseur’s reflexive account of doing research about language practices within international NGOs operating in Kyrgyzstan emphasises the imperative to accommodate languages other than English in the research process.

Overall in this section of the volume, the impact of institutional frameworks of power on researching multilingually are highlighted.

Power relations

Trilingual sign at Mouloud Mammeri University in Tizi Ouzou, Algeria (Image credit: Wikiwand)

In contrast, within the second theme of power relations, contributions focus on the micro-interactional dimension of power and its negotiation in and through language use and language choices in a range of research spaces and relationships.

Jessica Chandras offers an ethnographic account of her heritage language learning process in the context of class- and caste-bound Indian-Pune society, and reflects on how this impacted on her research outcomes. In a study about multilingual refugee children in Cyprus, Alexandra Georgiou demonstrates the importance of understanding children’s views and perspectives through their own forms of expression using an inclusive research practice.

Helina Hookoomsing also highlights language choices and power dynamics in engaging in research focused on children’s multilingualism, albeit in the postcolonial context of multilingual Mauritius. In a further multilingual postcolonial context, Olga Camila Hernández Morales and Anne-Marie de Mejía discuss how they dealt with the linguistic hierarchies manifest in the Caribbean island of San Andrés in order to give access to the voices of the participants.

The contributions within this theme remind us that research is a domain of social life like any other, with inherent power dynamics that are negotiated in, with and through language(s).

Decolonising methodologies

The third theme of decolonising methodologies highlights how contributors to the volume have sought to address issues of inequality and voice in their research by drawing on methodological innovations and non-Eurocentric epistemologies.

Reporting on research examining community radio in rural India, Bridget Backhaus adopts a cognitive justice framework to theorise her collaboration with a local interpreter. In turn, in the context of a research project focusing on language learning experiences of forced migrants in Luxembourg, Erika Kalocsányiová and Malika Shatnawi describe a collaborative process of work between researcher and translator to faithfully represent participants’ complex linguistic repertoires on the page.

In the sphere of participatory arts research, Michael Richardson offers a reflexive account of the design and implementation of a UK based research project in deaf theatre, aiming to give equal prominence to spoken and signed languages. Finally, in a broader and more longitudinal account of their careers in research, Julie Byrd Clark and Sylvie Roy explore transdisciplinary and relational processes of interculturality that they have operationalised in their research on multilingual education for migrant youth in Canada.

The theme emphasises that when researching multilingually, researchers can and should engage in active processes of reshaping and repurposing the methodologies available to them in the research canon, in order to address epistemic and representational imbalances arising from and through language(s).

Decolonising languages

In the final theme of decolonising languages, contributors give accounts of the impact on their research of first, recognising that ‘named languages’ (Li, 2018, p. 19) often associated with nation-states are inherently political instruments carrying ideological baggage for participants; and second, acknowledging that human communication extends beyond named languages into languaging and translanguaging.

Welcome to Gagauzia! (Image credit: Wikipedia)

In this part of the volume, Rebekah Gordon proposes an approach to working multilingually with US-based transnational language teachers grounded in translanguaging pedagogy, that seeks to engage the linguistic and cultural repertoires of both researcher and participants. Liliane Meyer Pitton and Larissa Semiramis Schedel document language choices made in the different research phases of three projects conducted in Western Europe, exploring the reasons for these choices and analysing their (dis)empowering effects for researchers and researched.

Writing from Colombia, Rosa Alejandra Medina Riveros and Teresa Austin draw on critical multilingualism and translanguaging perspectives in their account of the research practices they developed for making decisions in a decolonising spirit in pedagogical research in this context. Finally, Christiana Holsapple shares an autoethnographic account of her own process of coming to understand the shifting significations and political nature of language practices in the Moldovan region of Gagauzia.

This theme opens the door to deeper conversations about the nature of research as a language process and product, and its potential to both preserve and maintain the status quo of established power relations and to disrupt, contest and resist that status quo.

Researchers as political actors

Overall, the volume takes a stance presenting researchers who research multilingually as social actors with the capacity for political action. We encourage all researchers, and particularly those involved in sociolinguistic, applied linguistic and/or intercultural communication research, to: (a) reflect actively on your own linguistic resources and those of others involved in the research; (b) become aware of the political and ideological implications of these language(s) in the spaces and relationships of research; and (c) take purposeful decisions about how to use which language(s) in research processes in ways that further the ultimate goals of the research and those whom it is intended to benefit.

Related content

Piller, Ingrid. (2022). How to challenge Anglocentricity in academic publishing.

Contributor bios

Judith Reynolds is a Lecturer in Intercultural Communication in the Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies at the University of Manchester, UK. Her research focuses on how language and culture intersect, and how both shape identities, in professional and workplace settings in particular. She has published on intercultural communication in refugee and asylum legal advice communication, and is the current Treasurer of the International Association of Languages and Intercultural Communication (IALIC).

Sara Ganassin is a Lecturer in Applied Linguistics and Communication at Newcastle University (UK). She teaches, researches and supervises postgraduate students in intercultural communication and education, with a particular interest in migrant and refugee communities. She has published on internationalisation and mobility, on Chinese heritage language and on languages and research.

Prue Holmes is a Professor of Intercultural Communication and Education, and Director of Research at the School of Education, Durham University, United Kingdom. Her research areas include critical intercultural pedagogies for intercultural communication, language and intercultural education, and multilingualism in research and doctoral education. Prue has worked on several international projects. She was the former chair of the International Association of Languages and Intercultural Communication (IALIC), and she is the lead editor of the Multilingual Matters book series Researching Multilingually.

***

The histories and everyday experiences of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia are etched in the landscape, the waterways and the voices of those who can speak and understand ancestral Aboriginal languages. They also thrive in post-invasion contact varieties such as Kriol and Aboriginal English.

Researching Aboriginal English through yarning

When our sociolinguistic project into Aboriginal English in Nyungar country (southwest Western Australia) started in early 2019 little did we know how much our fieldwork would enrich us. The premise was simple: head out into metropolitan Perth, set up the cameras and talk to people. Then use those recordings to figure out how Aboriginal English is changing. But there were so many questions. What model of research would be favoured and why? How should we collect our data? Who should we approach? What would people talk about?

It would have been reasonable to follow existing practice in sociolinguistics. But the canonical methods of the field are mostly based on industrialised, Western cultures and societies. How could we ensure that different ways of knowing would be incorporated into the project? How could we move beyond the Eurocentric mainstream to “hear the voices” of people historically pushed to the margins?

Data collection in a Perth city park (Photo reproduced with permission)

To the rescue comes Glenys Collard, a Nyungar woman, a native speaker of Aboriginal English and an experienced language worker whose input into the project changed the research forever.

Instead of a sociolinguistic interview, our data collection tool of choice was “yarning” – an Indigenous cultural form of storytelling and conversation. This type of conversation and storytelling is highly dramatic, using much gesture, facial expression and variation in tone and volume. The lack of pre-defined questions in the “yarning” format allowed speakers to remain in control of what they wanted to share while the cameras were on.

Recruiting research participants through listening

Instead of institutions, we headed out to meet people in their homes. But there was a catch. A significant number of Aboriginal people are homeless. In 2016, for example, Aboriginal people made up 3.7% of the total population of Western Australia but accounted for a staggering 29.1% of the homeless population in the state.

Glenys Collard was adamant these people’s stories should be heard, too. She led us into the streets and parks they call home. She reached out to them, she explained what we were doing and why. The photo shows Glenys Collard and the four women we spoke to at a Perth City Park in mid-2019. Glenys explains what was special about yarning with these women:

These yorgas [women] were too deadly [great], they could spin a few good yarns and they took after yarnin flat out about who they was, what they been doin. It was deadly. Celeste talked to them and they already looked at me so I gave them the ok with my eyes and closed mouth. The four of them were Aboriginal English speakers. I don’t think another researcher would have chosen them to speak with because of the area and the other people who were there. They all had a yarn and they wanted to share so we stay an listen.

They wanted to speak to us because of Glenys. She made the research safe for them. At the end of the session, Celeste asked Glenys why people – both in the park and elsewhere – had been so keen to speak to us. Glenys replied: No one has ever listened to them before.

These feelings are echoed by Dr Chelsea Bond, a Munanjahli and South Sea Islander woman and University of Queensland academic. Dr Bond explains that Australian society is founded on the non-existence of Indigenous people. She frames a lack of listening around police aggression. “Blackfellas are always speaking about police brutality – why aren’t people listening?”

Recording stories about police brutality and racism

Indeed, accounts of police brutality feature prominently in our collection. The corpus is replete with stories of racism and abuse.

Nita’s story stands out. We were outside a popular medical centre in downtown Perth when we saw her. Nita (a pseudonym) seemed upset, but she was keen to have a yarn so we set up the cameras. The microphones are on. Her twenty-something-year-old nephew is dead. Found dead at one of Perth’s private prisons. The police tells her and her family that her nephew killed himself. She and her family disagree: the bruises on his body indicate otherwise. She is sure her nephew was killed.

In another example, a prominent Aboriginal Perth leader spontaneously told us the story of a Nyungar woman who was evicted from her home in metropolitan Perth. When he arrived to try and stop the eviction, the woman’s heels were dug into the framework of the door, her little grannies (grandchildren) everywhere, police “by the mass”. He recalls seeing the police dragging the woman by the hair as her grannies looked on. He saw the Department of Child Protection officers take the woman’s grandchildren away.

Why aren’t people listening?

A young Aboriginal student we yarned with sums it up perfectly: “Someone who has grown up privileged cannot even fathom the idea of how we [Aboriginal people] might have grown up. It’s like a bad dream to them, like a nightmare. But that’s what we’ve lived, you know?”.

More than sociolinguistic samples

The voices in the stories we collected for our research are much more than high-quality linguistic samples of Aboriginal English. They are raw and real accounts of the community’s histories and everyday experiences. Our cross-cultural fieldwork allowed us to record the community’s voices using a culturally appropriate genre (yarning) and placing a community member, Glenys Collard, at the core. Her presence, experience and wisdom allowed us to move a step closer towards decolonising research into Aboriginal English. Importantly, her expertise allowed us to “hear the voices” of those rarely featured in sociolinguistic research.

Acknowledgement

This research is funded through a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) (DE DE170100493) and a 2019 Australian Linguistic Society Research Grant.

Editor’s note:

To view the other RECLAS ethics rants, click here.

***

When I think back to my last ethnographic study, one of the fondest memories I have is drinking tea and coffee with young women from Afghanistan in a school cafeteria. They were students at that school, working towards their basic education degrees, and had come to Finland a few years before I met them there. As the cafeteria emptied, we would often stay behind for one more cup, laugh, chat, show off the latest pictures we took on our phones, and exchange advice about workout apps and videos. When I describe, analyze, and interpret data from these conversations, who I am matters. In the women’s circle, I was an insider and outsider at the same time. I am a white, college-educated, relatively wealthy European and represent the population that too often others and mistreats them. But, like them, I am also a woman, an immigrant, a mother, and a Finnish learner – so in many ways, we could relate and they were able to trust me. My research can’t be understood unless one understands my positionality in it.

What is researcher positionality?

Researcher positionality can be defined as the position a researcher takes towards the world around them in general and vis-à-vis a particular research topic or study, its process, and participants in particular (Holmes, 2010). Both are shaped by a researcher’s identities, including social factors such as race, class, gender, sexual identity, ability, citizenship status as well as linguistic and cultural backgrounds, familial histories, personal experiences, and professional trajectories. All of these may – more or less overtly – have a bearing on the research process at every stage from the conceptualization of a study to the dissemination of findings (Holmes, 2016).

As Holmes (2010) emphasizes, a researcher’s worldview “concerns ontological assumptions …, epistemological assumptions …, and assumptions about human nature and agency” (p. 2), all of which shape how we engage in research. For instance, our research is rooted in what we believe to exist, how we know about, organize, and describe these entities, and how we understand the position of human power and its limits within a particular context. Such knowing and believing pans out in particular power dynamics that permeate the research process, e.g. between researcher and the researched, in the representation of voices in writing, and in the legitimation of knowledge (Muhammad et al., 2015). Unpacking those dynamics can increase the transparency and ethicality of our work.

(Why) Do we need this?

The notion that our identities and worldviews as researchers shape the work we do is not an uncontroversial one, especially given that much scientific work has aimed to minimize or even eliminate the researcher’s person from the research process with the goal of claiming objectivity or neutrality. Such claimed objectivity or neutrality, oftentimes conflated with the unmarked male, white, and middle-class position in scholarly work, has long been at the core of scientific quality measures, particularly when researchers have aimed to present their work as independent of the researcher, replicable beyond its original context, and thus scientifically valid. In Western religious pre-Enlightenment societies, such “research without researcher” has played an important role in establishing scientific traditions and methods, often in opposition to religious beliefs (Lin, 2015), but was also, to the detriment of qualitative research, foundational in promoting the positivist paradigm as the dominant and only legitimate one within many academic contexts. Although in some ways qualitative research is still struggling to shed this positivist yardstick, the notion that all research is shaped by researcher positionalities has in recent decades gained traction. While there may be great differences in how researchers approach their work ontologically, epistemologically, and methodologically, we all make decisions, act in particular social contexts, and are shaped by what we know, believe, and strive for. As Lin (2015) puts it,

Problems emerge if we fail to recognize the inherent partial and positioned nature of every research study (and researcher) that is inevitably located in a certain sociohistorical and epistemological position. (p. 15)

In a similar vein, Hamby (2018), speaking for social scientists and particularly her field of psychology, calls for a shedding of the ”cloak of objectivity” (para 7), emphasizing that “lack of objectivity is not just a problem, it is also an opportunity”. (para 9). Acknowledging one’s positionality, she argues, can enhance a researcher’s awareness of their own biases, assumptions, and points of development, but also their (potential) contributions to the field. It can enable us to

• better understand our own biases and (expected) blind spots, so we can begin to challenge them
• better understand and reflect on our position in the research field (e.g., insider-outsider of a community), and based on this, identify ways of building more ethical and fruitful relationships with our participants, colleagues, and audience
• interpret our findings with greater confidence and greater care, and in general, increase the trustworthiness of our work

It is important to keep in mind that stating our (potential) biases does not erase them. Our intellectual reflections cannot lift us beyond our socio-material realities (e.g., who, where, when, with whom we are …) and we cannot confess-away our subjectivity or create a “neutral” place from which we operate. However, the process and statement of acknowledging our positionality can open doors to a deeper understanding of our place and purpose within our field for our participants, our audience, and ourselves.

An important question to ask is what information we include in a positionality statement and how we go about that. Having engaged in a self-reflexive process does not mean we disclose all aspects of it – this would likely be unnecessary or impossible, and in some cases inappropriate, risky, and even unethical (e.g., because participants’ anonymity/safety or the researcher’s integrity/freedom are at stake). As we make decisions about what to include in a paper that is publically or widely available, the following questions can offer guidance:

• What are my goals as a researcher, particularly in regards to the study/paper in question?
• What/who has shaped my processes of selecting (and not selecting) the research field, participants, methods, terms, data, literature, etc.?
• How are my choices tied to who I am, what I know, what I have access to, and what I believe in?
• How may my choices differ from the ones of a reader/colleague who belongs to a different social, cultural, or disciplinary group? What do they need to know about me so they can relate to my choices?

If we keep in mind that the overall purpose of a positionality statement, in the end, is to make our work more transparent, we can minimize the risk of it either becoming a merely rhetorical exercise on the one hand or a disclosure that puts us or others at risk on the other hand.

Group membership: Where do I (not) belong?

When we explicate our position toward our topic, participants, and research processes, we do so in order to get a better sense of what we know and see and what we do not know and see. This is particularly true for researchers who work with populations that they are not members of. Most typically, group membership will be dynamic, complex (Dwyer & Buckle, 2009), partial and/or situational (see Huisman, 2008: Milner, 2007), so that awareness of one’s own insider- and outsiderness, privilege and power position (Muhammad et al., 2015), is a crucial first step (although no guarantee) towards building respectful and ethical relationships. In such situations, it becomes crucial to know how to actively disrupt deficit discourses and hegemonic notions of normality and knowledge, to name only a few harmful practices that researchers from socially dominant groups will encounter and unfortunately oftentimes perpetuate.

Useful questions to ask

• Which (racial, cultural, professional, ethnic, linguistic …) groups do I belong to, and in what ways? How has that shifted or might that shift in the future?
• How do my group memberships manifest themselves? How do they relate to each other?
• What is easy for me to see/focus on because of these memberships? Where do I assume to have blind spots? What might someone else see in my field/data/literature… ?

Epistemologies: What do I (not) know?

Part of the question about one’s own researcher identities, worldview, and relationship to the topic, process, and participants is also to develop a critical understanding of what we do and do not and what we can and cannot know (Muhammad et al., 2015). Many individuals and communities have historically been excluded from academic knowledge and knowledge production, so that research and its dissemination are still dominated by male, white and middle-class norms (e.g., Ahmed, 2017; Banks, 2009; Ennser-Kananen, 2019; Scheurich & Young, 1997). Although it cannot be an individual’s responsibility to rectify this, every researcher can be explicit and honest about their own epistemological limitations and contribute to a move towards epistemic and epistemological justice (Ennser-Kananen, 2019).

Useful questions to ask

• Which (racial, cultural, professional, ethnic, linguistic …) context does the literature I read and cite do belong to? What are or could be the blindspots and omissions of my work? (See Piller, 2018)
• What parts of the research process will I be able to do relatively easily because of my racial, cultural, professional, ethnic or linguistic memberships? Which ones might be challenging?

Positionality statements

Positionality statements are often integrated into introductory or methodology sections of research articles or theses, but they can also consist of smaller parts scattered throughout a piece of writing. Both qualitative and quantitative researchers can and should offer a statement of this kind that enables the reader to get a better sense of their approach to the topic, the research process, their analyses, interpretations, and conclusions. While positionality statements by definition have to be individualized and personalized, I recommend the ones by Matias and Mackey (2015, pp. 33-34) and Arsenault (2018, pp. 52-55) as inspiration and models for how such statements can be realized. Once a positionality statement has been made in written or spoken form, the job of acknowledging and critically reflecting on our position continues. In the end, positionality work underlines the importance of a supportive and (self-)reflective academic community, where open dialogue and spaces to learn are valued and fostered (not just tolerated). It is on all of us to create such spaces.

References

Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a feminist life. Durham: Duke University Press.
Arsenault, C. (2018). How white teachers’ identity development translates to classroom interactions with minority students. Doctoral dissertation. Educational, School, and Counseling Psychology. Retrieved in March 2020 from https://uknowledge.uky.edu/edp_etds/80
Banks, J. A. (2009). Knowledge construction and the education of citizens in diverse societies. Keynote speech. Interkulturell Pedagogik, Göteborg, Sweden.
Delamont, S. (2018). Truth is not Linked to Political Virtue: Problems with Positionality. In B. Clift, J. Hatchard & J. Gore (Eds.). How Do We Belong? Researcher Positionality Within Qualitative Inquiry: Proceedings of 4th Annual Qualitative Research Symposium (pp. 1-6). University of Bath.
Dwyer, S.C., Buckle, J. L. (2009). The space between: on being an insider-outsider in qualitative research. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 8(1), 54–63.
Ennser-Kananen, J. (2019). Knowledge is power is knowledge: Can we break the cycle of epistemic and epistemological injustice? Tiedepolitiikka, 4, 22-40.
Hamby, S. (2018). Know thyself: How to write a reflexicity statement. Psychology Today. Retrieved in March 2020 from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-web-violence/201805/know-thyself-how-write-reflexivity-statement
Holmes, P. (2016). Navigating languages and interculturality in the research process: The ethics and positionality of the researcher and the researched. In M. Dasli & A. R. Díaz (Eds.). The Critical Turn in Language and Intercultural Communication Pedagogy (pp. 115-132). New York: Routledge.
Holmes, A.G. (2020). Researcher positionality: a consideration of its influence and place in research. A new researcher guide. Available at http://shanlaxjournals.in/journals/index.php/education/article/view/3232
Huisman, K. (2008). “Does this mean you’re not coming to visit anymore?”: An inquiry into an ethics of reciprocity and positionality in feminist ethnographic research. Sociological Inquiry, 78(3), 371-396.
Lin, A. M. Y. (2015). Researcher positionality. In F. M. Hult, & D. C. Johnson (Eds.), Research Methods in Language Policy and Planning: A Practical Guide (pp. 21-32). London: Routledge.
Matias, C. E., & Mackey, J. (2016). Breakin’ down whiteness in antiracist teaching: Introducing critical whiteness pedagogy. The Urban Review, 48(1), 32-50.
Milner IV, H. R. (2007). Race, culture, and researcher positionality: Working through dangers seen, unseen, and unforeseen. Educational researcher, 36(7), 388-400.
Muhammad, M.; Wallerstein, N.; Sussman, A. L.;  Avila, M.; Belone, L.; Duran, B. (2015) Reflections on researcher identity and power: The impact of positionality on community based participatory research (CBPR) processes and outcomes. Critical Sociology, 41
Piller, Ingrid. 2018. Why are you not citing any African female expert? Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/why-are-you-not-citing-any-african-female-expert/
Scheurich, J. J., & Young, M. D. (1997). Coloring epistemologies: Are our research epistemologies racially biased?. Educational researcher, 26(4), 4-16.

Editor’s note:

To view the other RECLAS ethics rants, click here.

***

Let me start with a brief warning: most of this rant is not about ethics but about legal compliance, and deals with the impact of the EU’s newly adopted General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (EU) 2016/679. This may seem a bit odd at first, because law and ethics represent two fundamentally different orders of normativity, one a formal system of bureaucratically enforced rules, the other grounded in the self-regulation of conduct. Yet, engaging with this new bureaucratic-legal framework does require social scientists to take an ethical stance of some sort. This is particularly the case for those of us who do research in/on the public realm.

GDPR became operative on May 25, 2018. It sets a new standard for the technical and organizational measures that public authorities, business, and non-profit organizations must take to prevent data security breaches and to give individuals control over their own personal data. It states, for example, that personal data cannot be exported outside the EU, and that processing is only allowed if one can prove that the data were collected in accordance with one of the lawful grounds recognized by the regulation. When you are processing someone’s personal data, you should also let them know that you are doing so, by providing them a privacy notice.

GDPR caused quite a stir among anthropologists and social scientists, with certain voices bordering on the apocalyptic. A workshop at SOAS, for instance, had the title “Is anthropology still legal?” (Humphris 2018). Others were more optimistic and argued that the new regulation might help social science researchers to cast off the straitjacket of biomedicine (Sleeboom-Faulkner and McMurray 2018), or pointed out “regulatory provisos […] that accommodate for the specific requirements of ethnographic research” (Corsín Jiménez 2018: 1), creating room for ethnography’s exploratory character and recognizing the dialogical nature of its data-constitution practices.

This rant picks up one specific issue: the way GDPR engages with the ‘public sphere.’ Contrary to what many of us (including myself) initially naively assumed, the new directive does not provide a free ticket for processing personal data that are already publicly available. A crude lexicostatistic analysis of the regulation reveals that the adjective public systematically collocates with authorities, interest, and security. Public availability and public accessibility are occasionally mentioned, but as a basis for positing additional restrictions rather than as a license for processing. In short, GDPR is concerned with personal data, regardless of whether they were collected in a ‘public space’ or in the ‘public domain’. The GDPR’s restrictions on their use apply regardless. Yet, interpreting and applying GDPR does force us to critically interrogate what we precisely mean when we talk about public space. This is what this text purports to do. I will try to recover some of the polysemy hidden underneath the surface of this presumably monolithic category, and to this end, I will be tossing Goffman against Habermas (without claiming any credits as to the originality of such a move, see, for example, Sarangi 2011). Note that I am not interested, at least not initially, in distinguishing between ‘public place,’ ‘domain’, or ‘sphere.’ The underlying spatial metaphor that is present in all three of them refers “not [to] a thing but rather [to] a set of relations between things” (Lefebvre 1991: 83), and that is what matters at this point.

The intimacy of the public sphere

One anchoring point for theorizing the public sphere is Goffman’s well-known distinction, first advanced in The presentation of self in everyday life (1959), between front– and backstage. Frontstage is the arena where social actors act out the roles that are societally and institutionally expected from them, carefully controlling their performance in the knowledge that it will be evaluated by an audience of others. The backstage is the region where actors prepare for this role performance, where they can deviate from the script and engage in the performance of a more authentic self, unexposed to the public gaze. The notion of frontstage, then, is the one that is readily equated with the ‘public’ sphere (see, for example, Sarangi 2009). However, one should not forget that frontstage also inevitably refers to a constellation of people entangled with one another through co-presence (Goffman 1963). Co-presence occurs whenever social actors are aware that they are within each other’s perceptual range. It manifests itself in relentless mutual monitoring and in the reflexive self-regulation of one’s own conduct, in an attempt to regulate whatever information about ‘self’ and ‘other’ might be leaking through.

Do these pedestrians offer “publicly available data”?

If we look at it from this perspective, a large part of what we routinely gloss as ‘public’ suddenly acquires an unexpected intimate quality. Public conduct is not just a scripted role. It is a scripted role that we inhabit, and therefore it will always contains glitches, moments of uncertainty, and failures to meet expectations. These are highly intimate moments, and GDPR enforces respect for this intimacy. Nobody likes being caught on camera picking their nose, or arguing with their partner on the way to the supermarket. As a rule, GDPR prevents the processing of personal data collected during such ‘public’ performances of intimate conduct. The same rules apply as to other information which allows individual data subjects to be identified: You can only process personal data collected in a public place (for example, footage containing faces and/or voices) if you can demonstrate that processing is done based on one of the lawful grounds specified in Art. 6 (consent of the data subject, processing in the public interest, etc.). In a way, this makes perfect sense. The fact that someone engages in a certain kind of behavior in a publicly accessible space should not be taken to mean that it is up for grabs as data.

This new GDPR framework does not entirely prohibit Goffman-styled inquiries into how people navigate public spaces. Although it forbids processing personal data (photos, video footage, audio recordings) collected without permission from the data-subject, carefully anonymized field notes (which do not provide any clues as to the identity of the data subject) are still perfectly lawful. A good example is my earlier work on the various forms of practical geographical knowledge that Dar es Salaam commuters need for traveling from one part of the city to another (D’hondt 2009). As a rare instance of conversation-analytic research that does not use recordings of conduct, it combined a systematic interrogation of my own practical knowledge, as a user of informal minibus transport, with vignettes illustrating “noteworthy patterns of behaviour” (Iphofen 2015: 47) that I occasionally jotted down while on the move. As such, it represents a form of observational practice that, although not covert, elides the formal solicitation of consent (Iphofen 2015: ibid.). This practice can be questioned from an ethical angle, but under GDPR it does not pose a problem of legal compliance since no personal data are being collected. Dar es Salaam is a megalopolis of over four million inhabitants. Each day, literally hundreds of thousands of city residents rely on minibus transport for getting to work, school, etc. There is no way in which my fellow commuters whose conduct accidentally drew my attention could ever be identified from the short written notes that I entered in my notebook, let alone from the schematic descriptions of courses of action that ended up in the resulting publication.

Public, as in res publica

In The structural transformation of the public sphere (1962[1989]), Habermas describes how the aggregate of print media, coffee houses, lodges and reading clubs that spread through 18^th century Europe resulted in the formation of a new critical space, separate from the state, where individuals could interact and exchange ideas on public matters in a way that had never been possible before. Habermas’ account of this budding ‘public sphere,’ which mediates between the private life-world and the state apparatus, has subsequently been criticized from various angles. Later on, Habermas (1981) himself added that in modern mass-societies, the available space for rational-critical debate is gradually contracting, as clear-cut demarcations between the public and private, and between state and society, are eroded by bureaucratization and consumerism. Feminist scholars pointed out the policed nature of the public-private distinction and the pervasiveness of exclusionary mechanisms, while poststructuralists and postcolonialists called into question its monolithic character and insist on a plurality of public spaces (for a useful overview, see Koller and Wodak 2008). Still, the idea of a universally accessible common deliberative space has a strong normative presence in contemporary society. It is enshrined in Art. 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, on the freedom of expression and information. Social scientists are an integral part of this deliberative space, and instances of critical interventions that have transformed ongoing societal debates are manifold. Blommaert and Verschueren’s (1998) critical inquiry into the rhetoric of tolerance underpinning the 1990s debate on immigration in Belgium is a classic example of a study that fundamentally altered the structure of the debate it commented upon, by pointing out uncanny similarities between the discourse of far-right parties and of the self-declared tolerant majority. Arguing pro domo, I would say that my current ethnographic work on trial performance at the International Criminal Court (ICC; see, for example, D’hondt 2019) falls under the same category. Transnational legal orders, like the one epitomized by the ICC, exert a growing impact on national legal systems. However, the way in which the public exercise of authority by this transnational institution is negotiated in the court’s daily operation has never before been subject to critical scrutiny.

International forums like the ICC (but also the UN’s Universal Periodic Review or the UN Human Rights Committee, see Cowan and Billaud 2017, Halme-Tuomisaari 2018) are undeniably ‘public’ in the sense of Goffman, as the actors involved will always tailor their frontstage conduct to that of the other participants who are co-present (one might also add virtual audiences here, as many of these events are live-streamed). Still, one can sensibly argue that many of the restrictions on data processing mentioned in the previous section do not apply here, precisely because what transpires on these international forums is intrinsically connected to the deliberative space Habermas identified. Importantly, GDPR offers us a good starting point for developing such an argument.

GDPR formulates a set of general principles for personal data processing that apply universally. However, in addition it also specifies a number of ‘specific processing situations’ in which the application of these rules is legitimately curtailed (‘derogations’). It is up to the respective EU member states to specify the precise scope and content of these exemptions. In the national data acts through which the different member states implement GDPR, they must itemize the articles of the original GDPR that do not apply in these specific processing situations. Hence, GDPR Art. 89(2) stipulates that national legislations may provide exemptions for data processing “for archiving purposes in the public interest, scientific or historical research purposes or statistical purposes.” Significantly, this article does not contain any provisions as to where the research in question is supposed to take place, and Recital 159 explicitly includes “privately funded research.” In fact, the only place in GDPR that explicitly mentions academia is Art. 85, on the freedom of expression. This article gives EU member states the responsibility to specify exemptions in order to “reconcile the right to the protection of personal data pursuant to this Regulation with the right to freedom of expression and information, including processing for journalistic purposes and the purposes of academic, artistic or literary expression.” Of course, the nature of these exemptions will slightly vary form one member state to another, but the overall effect of Art. 85 is a “redefinition of the social sciences on a par with journalism, characterizing their activities as in the public interest and their pursuits as in themselves valuable as academic knowledge” (Sleeboom-Faulkner and McMurray 2018: 23). Not surprisingly, the British Academy and the Economic and Social Research Council in 2017 advised that British universities should maximally exploit the derogations this article provides. Similarly, the European Association of Social Anthropologists explicitly insists that “ethnographic research [should be placed] within the special clause on ‘academic expression’ included in Article 85(2) of the GDPR [, … which] has been designed to guarantee the critical social value of humanities and social sciences research” (EASA 2018: 1).

It seems, then, that there are at least two sets of derogations that social scientists can invoke to legitimize their data processing: the research exemption (Art. 89) and the one that guarantees the freedom of academic expression (Art. 85). For those of us working in critical research traditions, this second exemption is particularly relevant and liberating. Although GDPR makes no mention of the public sphere as such, it nevertheless provides the necessary exemption social scientists require for participating in the shared deliberative space outlined by Habermas, guaranteeing their right to critically engage with ongoing societal debates and allowing data processing on the condition that it is necessary to execute that right.

Ethics, after all

As I anticipated at the start, this excursion into legal compliance finally takes us back to ethics. For the time being, GDPR is still in the process of interpretation, and we are still waiting for case law in order to find out where lines will be draw and how GDPR will eventually be interpreted. This is a moment of uncertainty, and there is a tendency among universities and funders to err on the side of caution.

The chilling effect of these new regulations is real. It should be clear, however, that GDPR, in fact, offers quite some maneuvering space to those of us who are working with public data. At this stage, it would be perilous for applied linguists and ethnographers to assume a quietist stance.

The most dangerous kind of censorship is self-censorship.

In the current circumstances this aphorism is more relevant than ever. As scholars, we should be prepared to defend the available space for critical intervention. Universities should be prepared to back its scholars in this, as this debate revolves around basic democratic principles. In the end, even going to court should not necessarily frighten us. After all, it is an opportunity to stand up for the values we believe in.

References

Blommaert, Jan, and Jef Verschueren. 2002. Debating Diversity. London: Routledge.
British Academy & ESRC. 2017. A British Academy and Economic & Social Research Council submission to the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) call for views on the General Data Protection Regulation derogations.
Corsín Jiménez, Alberto. 2018. A Data Governance Framework for Ethnography. Madrid, CSIC.
Cowan, Jane K. and Julie Billaud, 2017. The ‘public’ character of the Universal Periodic Review: Contested concept and methodological challenge. In: Niezen, R. and M. Sapignoli (Eds.), Palaces of Hope. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp.106-126.
D’hondt, Sigurd. 2009. Calling the stops in a Dar-es-Salaam minibus: Embodied understandings of place in a drop-off routine. Journal of Pragmatics 41, no. 10 (2009): 1962-1976.
D’hondt, Sigurd. 2019. Humanity and its beneficiaries: Footing and stance-taking in an international criminal trial. Signs and Society 7 (3), 427-453.
European Association of Social Anthropologists. 2018. EASA’s Statement on Data Governance in Ethnographic Projects.
Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY, Doubleday.
Goffman, Erving. 1963. Behavior in Public Places. New York: Free Press.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1962 (1989). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge, Polity.
Halme-Tuomisaari, Miia, 2018. Methodologically blonde at the UN in a tactical quest for inclusion. Social Anthropology 26 (4), 456-470.
Humphris, Rachel. 2018. Is anthropology still legal? Notes on the impact of GDPR. Birmingham, IRiS.
Iphofen, Ron. 2015. Research Ethics in Ethnography/Anthropology. European Commission, DG Research and Innovation.
Koller, Veronika, and Ruth Wodak. 2008. Introduction: Shifting boundaries and emergent publics. In: R. Wodak and V. Koller (Eds.), Handbook of Communication in the Public Sphere. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 1-17.
Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Sarangi, Srikant. 2011. Public discourse. In: Jan Zienkowski, Jan-Ola Östman, and Jef Verschueren (Eds.), Discursive Pragmatics. Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 248-265.
Sleeboom-Faulkner, Margaret, and James McMurray. 2018. The impact of the new EU GDPR on ethics governance and social anthropology. Anthropology Today 34 (5), 22-23.

Editor’s note:

To view the other RECLAS ethics rants, click here.

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Approaches, frameworks, methodologies, and research designs have consequences for research ethics. Here I will discuss some things I have learned in my career as a fieldworker and researcher mainly while meeting minority language speakers in remote places and while trying to formulate practical relevance of my research for the wider public. I will specifically address the perception of research by research participants,  and the ethics of interviewing and other methods. I will close by sharing my take on researcher activism.

What’s in it for research participants?

All research should ideally benefit the researched communities and individuals in some meaningful and sensible way.

In general, participants have been happy to discuss language issues with me, some have even considered the interviews as an opportunity to tell their life stories to somebody and to have it recorded. Others mentioned, that, as a linguistic minority, they  have been “forgotten”. Participating in research felt like a good way to them to place their lives or their village on the map.

Petteri with research participants during fieldwork (Photo by Karina Tímár)

To meet my participants’ expectations, I have found it especially important to publish and present results not only in dominant languages and academic forums but also in the local language(s) and in accessible forums: in my case that has meant Hungarian and open access journals. Research published in English is largely irrelevant to my participants as it is mastered only by few of them.

In short, I consider it an important part of research(er) ethics to practice multilingual research multilingually (see Piller 2016 on the critique of doing research on multilingualism monolingually).

Beyond the research interview

In my dissertation, I provided detailed analyses on the constraints of the research interview as an ‘objective’ research tool by pointing out that the views on language produced in an interview are co-constructed by the interviewee and the interviewer. This helped me to see the research participants and researchers as equal partners in the production of information and knowledge, and my dissertation work made me very critical also towards objectivizing stances to research interviews. For example, certain things are often mentioned (or not and in a certain way) by an ‘informant’ only because they were asked (or not) by the researcher (in a certain way).

Most importantly, however it turned my attention to research ethics of treating the people we study as equal research participants, not merely as ‘informants’.

During my post-doctoral project (2011—2013), I became interested in the study of linguistic landscapes. The study of linguistic landscapes, or visual semiotics represents a turn “from spoken, face-to-face discourses to the representations of that interaction order in images and signs” (Scollon & Wong Scollon 2003: 82). In my current project (2016–2021), my fieldwork and data generation has also been focused on visual methods.

Originally developed to minimize the impact that researchers have on shaping the data, these methods have the potential to address the basic challenge research interviews have: interviewing appears to put the researcher in a dominant position.

Practicing inclusive research

Taking the concerns of research participant’s positionality and agency vis-a-vis the researcher seriously is a cornerstone of inclusive research. In my current project, I employed a local research assistant, who has been a significant help in building shared interest with the participants and partner institutions.

Revitalization program teachers have come to see our research as beneficial, especially due to the use of digital visual methods, which have provided examples of pedagogical experiments. To take one example: we have carried out iMovie projects with children, where the children’s first video recorded their villages and self-selected topics at home with an iPad provided by the project. Then they edited iMovies with the iPads during a revitalization class and finally showed the final recordings to other children, researchers, parents, and teachers.

Fieldwork projects, such as the iMovie project have served my research aims to gain analysable data through visual methods and thus getting access to participant language views and language practices.

Teachers’ views of research may have been changed as well: some more experienced teachers mentioned that previous research has not been similarly rewarding and that it had been difficult to engage the children in activities such as filling out questionnaires and surveys. In our case, they could see an immediate benefit for the program in the heightened student motivation to use the revitalization language.

Should researchers be activists?

To address this question, I need to begin by reflecting on my analytical framework, the study of language ideologies. I define language ideologies broadly as common linkages between language and non-linguistic phenomena in a given community. In the study of language ideologies I follow, it is a basic assumption that no idea or view about language comes from nowhere. As Silverstein (1998:124) explains:

We might consider our descriptive analytic perspective […] as a species of social-constructionist realism or naturalism about language and its matrix in the sociocultural realm: it recognizes the reflexive entailments for its own praxis, that it will find no absolute Archimedian place to stand – not in absolute “Truth”, nor in absolute “Reality” nor even in absolute deterministic or computable mental or social “Functional Process”. Analysis of ideological factuality is, perforce, relativistic in the best scientific (not scientistic) sense.

From an ”activist” approach, we could investigate how inequality is constructed through language ideologies and then show how such language ideologies are untrue, or “bad” representations of reality or how ideology is produced by “false consciousness” (as argued by Marx, see Blommaert 2006). Such an interpretation of ideology as a distortion of reality performed in order to naturalize a questionable political ideology, has been embraced by certain strands of Critical Discourse Analysis, where the analyses thus examine different linguistic forms and processes of twisting the truth (e.g., the use of metaphors to mislead interpretation, see Reisigl & Wodak 2001).

However, the activist goal of “speaking truth to power” is not an aim shared by researchers in linguistic anthropology, since language ideologies are everywhere and due to the lack of the “Archimedian place” mentioned by Silverstein above, they are false or true according to the perspective we choose or premise we follow (see also Gal, 2002).

To conclude, our research participants and their communities should benefit from the research. To reach this goal, my approach has been to focus on inclusive ethnography and methods of data collection that provide meaningful activities, events and discussions for the research participants and participating institutions. I have focused on examples of best practices, and at the same time remained critical by not trying to pretend that I can speak truth to power.

Finally, a goal for every study should also be to help people understand why research in general is needed and beneficial for people outside of academia.

References

Blommaert, J. 2006. Language Ideology. In Brown, K. (ed). Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics. Second edition, vol. 6. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 510-521.
Gal, S. 2002. Language Ideologies and Linguistic Diversity: Where Culture Meets Power. A magyar nyelv idegenben. Keresztes, L. & S. Maticsák (eds.). Debrecen: Debreceni Egyetem, 197-204.
Nind M. 2014. What is inclusive research? London: Bloomsbury.
Piller, I. 2016. Monolingual ways of seeing multilingualism. Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 11(1), 25–33.
Reisigl, M. & R. Wodak 2001. Discourse and Discrimination. Rhetoric’s of Racism and Anti-Semitism. London: Routledge.
Scollon, R. & Wong Scollon, S. 2003. Discourses in place. Routledge: London.
Silverstein, M. 1998. The Uses and Utility of Ideology: A Commentary. Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory. Schieffelin, B., K. Woolard & P. Kroskrity eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 123-148.