Holmes, P. (Durham University), Fay, R. (University of Manchester), Andrews, J. (University of the West of England) and Attia, M. (Durham University), Revisiting a framework for Researching Multilingually: Contributions from critical theory, intercultural relations, ethics, and the creative arts. Presentation as part of the AHRC Researching Multilingually at the Borders of Language, the Body, Law and the State symposium, Bucharest, Romania, November 3rd – 6th, 2015.

1. Revisiting a framework for Researching Multilingually:
Contributions from critical theory, intercultural
relations, ethics, and the creative arts
Prue Holmes (Durham University)
Richard Fay (The University of Manchester)
Jane Andrews (The University of the West of England)
Mariam Attia (The Universities of Manchester and Durham)
Bucharest Symposium
Bucharest, 4-6 November 2015

2. Preview
 Our initial framework
 Building the framework drawing on contributions
from:
 Translanguaging & translingual practice
 Critical & indigenous methodologies
 Ethics and Rmly
 Multilingual relationships and intercultural capabilities
 Reflective practice
 Where to next? Questions to our audience!

3. Aim of the initial Rmly project
To investigate and clarify the epistemological and
methodological processes of researching in more than one
language—whether dialogic, observational, textual, or
mediated—and their implications for research design,
instruments, data collection and generation, translation and
interpretation, and reporting.
⇒the understanding, reporting, and representation of
people of other languages
Opportunities, affordances, challenges, obstacles

4. The “Researching Multilingually”
process
… from the inception of a research project, to
designing the project, the lit review, research
questions, research framework, choice of methods,
ethics and reflexivity, analysis, modes of
(re)presentation

5. RMly conceptualisation
1) Purposefulness
• Making informed and intentional researcher decisions
• Researcher reflexivity & sensitivity, identity
2) Relationality
• Researcher, supervisor, participants, translators/interpreters/transcribers
• Trust, ethics, power
3) Researching multilingually – spaces (including context)
• Research; researched; researcher; re/presentation
• Interdisciplinary insights

6. Defining our terms
Researcher purposefulness - The informed and intentional research(er) thinking
and decision-making which results from an awareness and thorough consideration
of the possibilities for and complexities of all aspects of the research process
(including RM-ly).
Research spaces (or context) - The multilingual aspects of the project, e.g. the
research phenomenon (the “what”), the context of the research (the “where”),
the linguistic resources of the researcher (the “who”), the representational
possibilities (the language(s) of dissemination, the “for where” or “for whom”).
Research relationships - Who are the people in the whole research project, e.g.
researcher(s), supervisors, participants, translators, interpreters, transcribers,
editors, and funders, and how do their relationships influence language choices
within all phases of the project (from design to (re)presentation and publication).
(Holmes, P., Fay, R., Andrews, J., & Attia, M. (2016, in press). How to research multilingually: Possibilities and complexities. In H. Zhu (Ed.)
Research methods in intercultural communication. London: Wiley.

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

8. RMTC RQs (from proposal)
• How do researchers generate, translate, interpret and write
up data (dialogic, mediated, textual, performance) from one
language to another?
• What ethical issues emerge in the planning and execution of
data collection and representation (textual, visual,
performance) where multiple languages are present?
• What methods and techniques improve processes of
researching multilingually?
• How does multimodality (e.g. visual methods, ‘storying’,
performance) complement and facilitate multilingual
research praxis?
• How can researchers develop clear multilingual research
practices and yet also be open to emergent research design?

9. RMTC Developments in the
Rmly@Borders project
 To develop a theoretical understanding of how researchers
draw on their multilingual resources, and those of others, in
multilingual contexts of pressure and pain, e.g., where
people are stateless and homeless due to war, poverty,
persecution, and economic instability.
• Generally, we are concerned with the following:
– what it means to “language”, “be languaged”, “be languagers”, and
“language oneself” in the world today
– what alternatives or other modes of researching and representation
might be possible
– what is unsaid, liminal
– the messiness, precarity, unpredictability of RMly experience

10. Further emerging research
questions
1. Do conventional methods of researching do justice to research in
contexts of pain and pressure? How can researchers forge new
ways of “languaging” in their researcher praxis?
2. How do critical theories support a “researching multilingually”
approach?
3. How do researchers negotiate relationships and ethical practices
through language in the research site? What intercultural
capabilities are researchers drawing on?
4. How are the creative arts translating the experience of
researching multilingually in a multimodal way?
5. What are the issues for conceptual transferability when
researching multilingually?

11. Languaging
Languaging
“… a way of articulating the full, embodied and engaged interaction
with the world that comes when we put the languages we are using
into action.”
“… being a person in that language in the social and material world
of everyday interactions.”
Languagers…
“… engage with the world-in-action, … move in the world in a way
that allows the risk of stepping out of one’s habitual ways of
speaking and attempt to develop different, more relational ways of
interacting with the people and phenomena that one encounters in
everyday life.”
(Phipps, 2011, p. 365)

12. Languaging
Languaging is …
•relational - about the feelings we experience with
others, through place, positioning
– Intercultural, interpersonal, interagentive
•rhizomatic – “the dense tangled cluster of interlaced
threads or filaments any point in which can be
connected to any other” (Ingold, 2000, p. 140).
•involves a language ecology that includes the senses
and sensory experience
•phenomenological – how people perceive the world

13. Translation as a languaging response to phenomena
“… a way of living in translated worlds, the worlds
that meet in relations and that come to make sense
through relations” (Phipps, 2011, p. 372).
Languaging – not just cultural work, but translation as
embodiment of feeling, and ways of relating to place
and to words; shared through habitation
 Yolland speaks of the land to Marie using the Irish names
 Maori identity – whakapapa, mihi
How can researchers draw on languaging in their
researcher praxis?
Languaging

14. Translingual practice
“My aim has been to provide new research insights
into the ways in which mobile semiotic resources are
negotiated for meaning in global contact zones, and
also to suggest pedagogical approaches to develop
such co-operative dispositions and performative
competence for cosmopolitan relationships”
(Canagarajah, 2013, p.202).
Our concern – maybe a translingual mindset could be
nurtured in researcher praxis? If so, how?

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

16. Critical indigenous methodologies
 Indigenous communities seek a “set of ethical
principles that are feminist, caring, communitarian,
holistic, respectful, mutual (rather than power
imbalanced), sacred, and ecologically sound”
Denzin, Lincoln and Smith (2008, p. 569)

17. Critical indigenous
methodologies …
 seek to address injustices through research
processes that demonstrate an ethical and
reciprocal relationship between researcher and
researched.
 acknowledge marginalised people and “recognize
the need to avoid forms of representation that
maintain power in traditional locations” (Cannella &
Lincoln, 2011, p. 82).
 For Rmly researchers, they enable the examination
privilege created by language in research practices.

18. Critical indigenous
methodologies …
… offer frameworks for democratic research that
advocate for voices—that have been, and continue to
be, marginalised and unauthorised by dominant (and
often colonial) regimes of power—to be heard.
(Linda Tuhiwai Smith, 1999; 20120
(Freire, 1972; 1976)
(hooks, 2003), )

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

20. Ethical practices - Halaqah
 Islamic indigenous methodology - “a spiritual circle-
time . . . conducted purely orally with students and
teacher sitting in a circle on the floor” (Ahmet, 2014,
p. 567)
 It may be transmission-based teacher-led, or
dialogic/student-led, or a collaborative group effort
 It “enable[s] participants to articulate themselves
within their own epistemological and ontological
context and engage in critical reflection within an
Islamic paradigm” (p. 561).

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

22. Reflective Practice
 Reflections represent is key to exploring RM-ly
practice on our project.
 Following the project plan, two main sources of
understanding about RM-ly practice are:

23. Reflective Practice
a) “reflections and narratives gathered from
researchers’ journals, virtual communication tools, and
multilingual researcher practice”
b) “RMTC hub members’ dialogues, reflections,
observations, and where necessary, their own data
collection with researchers and participants, and with
documents”.

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

25. Reflective Practice
 The following definition (Boud, Keogh and Walker,
1985: 3) provides the starting point for our RMTC
Hub thinking on Reflective Practice.
 It is sufficiently broad, we hope, to encompass other
traditions which maybe more familiar to the wider
project team:

26. Reflective Practice
 A generic term for those intellectual and affective
activities in which individuals engage to explore their
experiences in order to lead to new understandings
and appreciation.
 Seen like this, Reflective Practice is a goal-oriented
“process of turning experience into learning … [in
which we take] the unprocessed, raw material of
experience and engag[e] with it as a way to make
sense of what has occurred” (Boud, 2001: 10).

27. Reflective Practice
 The RMTC hub has specific research questions, and
these RQs - along with the overall project research
questions and the questions specific to each Case
Study and to the CATC might offer focus for our
reflections.
 .. So, too, might the different stages of the project
(e.g. literature review, data generation,
dissemination, etc).

28. Where to next? Questions for you!
• How do/might these approaches inform your
researcher multilingual practice?
• What opportunities do they offer?
• What challenges?
• How can researchers’ creative arts processes
complement researching multilingually processes?
• Or: How can the creative arts be incorporated into
our developing “researching multilingually”
framework?