‘Failing’ at researching multilingually

Written by Maddie Breeze

On Tuesday 27^th February 2019 Professor Alison Phipps from the University of Glasgow School of Education spoke to the Feminist Research Network about her work Decolonising multilingualism: What happens when English takes a step back?

Alison’s talk was rich and wide ranging, and articulated a commitment to sharing how she and her collaborators negotiated the epistemological and political dilemmas of doing research multilingually; across different languages and linguistic practices, as well as across different ways of knowing, and the militarized borders of nation states.

Alison Phipps

Alison addressed methodological questions that arise when researching multilingually, highlighting the centrality of creative and artistic practitioners to this research, and the important role of art and artists in de-centralising the dominant ways of knowing of the Western, Anglo-centric academy. The talk was attentive to the limitations of how ‘decolonisation’ is claimed and done in academic contexts, as Tuck & Yang (2012) have argued in Decolonisation is not a metaphor, ‘Decolonization brings about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life; it is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools.’

Throughout the seminar, Alison emphasised the mundane, behind-the-scenes, practical details of researching multilingually, including ‘making it all make sense on Je-S[1]’ and ‘phoning up the AHRC[2] to explain’. A significant part of these endeavours clustered around distributing resources, making sure that collaborators were paid and trying to push back against extractivist modes of researching in the global south. Alison’s emphasis on these everyday details struck me during the talk, and in a context where research on the conditions of academic labour is burgeoning, I was inspired to continue the focus on the everyday details of doing research (including of course talking about it at seminars) in this blog. The rest of this piece then deviates from an exclusive focus on the substantive content of the seminar to consider some of the ways that academic work and academic identities were negotiated and discursively re-produced during the talk, in the bounded space of a Strathclyde seminar room one unsettlingly sunny and warm February afternoon.

One of the first things that strikes me here is that Alison’s work resonates with research at Strathclyde and in the Feminist Research Network, and especially with those researching across multilingual contexts and creative practices like Dr Churnjeet Mahn, colleagues investigating migrant experiences in Scotland like Dr Laura Lovin and Dr Daniela Sim, and those with expertise in linguistics and literacy like Dr Virginie Theriault. During Alison’s talk I thought of these colleagues and their work, and wondered about what their responses and questions might be. In writing this out I’m conscious of instrumentally inhabiting a ‘good’ academic subjectivity; promoting my colleagues and in doing so promoting the university, naming and claiming sites and centres of expertise. As with other seminars and events, there were many who couldn’t make it to Alison’s talk, expressing regret at not being there to join the conversation. This speaks to stretched academic subjectivities and timescapes, in which impossible workloads, multiple demands and overlapping competing commitments can leave academics running to catch up, always missing or missing out on something. I think these questions – of who is present and who is absent, who is an absent presence – are particularly prescient for a talk like Alison’s, when the issue of who gets to be in the room is always bubbling just beneath the surface.

As one of the seminar series organisers (alongside Prof Yvette Taylor and Dr Laura Lovin), I had the pleasure of introducing Alison. While an enjoyable and increasingly familiar task, doing such introductions generates an undercurrent of nervousness in me: will I pronounce the speakers’ name correctly… will I forget to mention an important publication of theirs… will I get their title wrong… have I thanked everyone who needs to be thanked… I’ve also felt the discomfort of being introduced, as publications and institutional affiliations are strung together to tell a story of the striving, successful academic self, and felt the urge to interrupt that narrative; wait, that isn’t the whole story. In preparation for introducing Alison I looked up her institutional profile and noted down her titles and numerous roles, positions, and publications, her visiting professorships, and her fields of expertise. I spoke to these in the introduction, including Alison’s UNESCO Chair in Refugee Integration through Languages and the Arts and the recent news of successful funding for a Global Challenge Research Fund Hub on South-South migration which Alison is co-directing. As Alison started to speak she drew attention to the sometimes strangeness and discomfort of such introductions, complicating the narrative by telling us that she didn’t always see herself in those lists of achievements, that she liked cooking and gardening, and that she was running late on a writing deadline.

Strathclyde UCU picket 2018

Drawing attention to and questioning the blurry boundaries between the personal – professional –political is characteristic of feminist scholarship more broadly, and often a subject of discussion in the seminar series. In complicating her introduction further, Alison drew attention to the one year anniversary of the 2018 UCU industrial action over changes to the Universities Superannuation Scheme Pensions. Alison’s talk had originally been scheduled for February 2018, when UCU members were engaged in 14 days of strike action, the longest in the union’s history, alongside action short of a strike. We cancelled the seminar, and joined pickets at our workplaces, alongside those at 64 other UK universities. Remembering the industrial action – and the still unsettled questions over pension reforms – served as a reminder of the ways that higher education is fractured, by career stages and by precarious hourly paid contracts, entangled with the well evidenced inequalities according to for instance intersections of class, race, and gender. As Alison described how doing multilingual research involved ‘bumping up against’ entrenched imperialistic ways of knowing, and of organising and resourcing academic research, she reflected on ‘failing at researching multilingually’, and ‘all the ways our work is held together, and foundationally depends upon, colonial structures’. This could be read as a pessimistic conclusion, but I think it is precisely in attending to academics’ implicatedness, investedness, and interestedness in the power structures that feminist researchers often work against and the micro politics of practice in these circumstances, that there might be a way through.

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[1] An online application system for submitting bids for research funding, used by UKRI funding bodies.

[2] Arts and Humanities Research Council.