Researching Language in Superdiverse Urban Contexts. Группа авторов
multilingually. With a retrospective look at the research I carried out with a team in 2009–2011 (reported in Cadier & Mar-Molinero, 2012, 2014) I am very aware of the limitations the team had in terms of language competence. While able to operate in many European languages, including besides English, the major ones found in Southampton, such as Polish, Spanish, Portuguese and (to a much lesser extent) Greek, as a team we completely lacked knowledge of and competence in any non-European language. The South Asian languages are those most spoken in Southampton after English and Polish; Chinese is also increasingly apparent. We were not able to develop personal relationships using these languages, and had to depend on interpreters and translators. And yet, our mediators were quite often unexpected and key to our research in that we quickly discovered the linguistic competence and ease of many of our (European) informants to move between languages including, for example, Urdu or Somali, translanguaging with their linguistic skills and resources. We observed and shared in our informants’ practices of translanguaging and metrolingualism, to negotiate understandings between researcher and researched in a fluid and productive way. In this sense, our informants, the researched, became sometimes our gatekeepers and facilitators. As Blommaert writes,
… we see very fragmented and ‘incomplete’ – ‘truncated’ – language repertoires (...). We also see how many communication tasks are accomplished collaboratively, by combining the resources and skills of several people. (2010: 9)
We learned to work collaboratively. We identified the linguistic landscape in terms of whether information was directed generally and therefore in more than one language, or at a specific linguistic client group. We ‘played’ with language as did our informants.
Far more challenging is to consider the issues of power and control that as researchers we may have (and continue to have) over our informants. With senior managers and policymakers we can negotiate a complicated kind of equal footing. I am personally viewed by the latter as an academic and a tax payer, to be engaged with and treated with respect. I can and maybe do exploit this relationship to persuade and cajole for information I seek. I can play the media and invoke my voter status. The ethics clearance I am required to complete by my university to carry out empirical research with informants does not begin to explore these kinds of relationships, or even, perhaps, recognise them as issues (see, Copland, 2018: 136).
On the other hand, surmounting the challenges of inequality in relationships with our informants amongst the migrant communities is much more delicate and difficult if we wish to avoid always seeming to be representing ‘authority’. Clearly, these are challenges all ethnographers face and much has been discussed about the ways of working ethnographically in the fairest and most unobtrusive manner (e.g. Blommaert, 2018; Blommaert & Dong, 2010; Tusting, 2020; Wells, this volume). As Wells reminds us:
While ethnography is often discussed in relation to specific fieldwork practices such as participant observation, it can never be reduced to a fixed set of methods (Blommaert, 2018: 2) due to its emphasis on the negotiation of knowledge as a context-specific process which is shaped by both researcher and those with whom they research (this volume: 134)
Researching ‘multilingually’ does allow us to consider the importance of language in these relationships and how by embracing the opportunities of language, we may actively seek to reduce the more thoughtless and unacceptable arrogance that research into those from different linguistic, social and cultural backgrounds from ours, as researchers, may seem at times to produce. The authors of the following chapters seek throughout to manage the relationships they have with those they are researching through a sensitivity to and respect for their informants’ linguistic skills and resources. The stories that unfold of language practices in this series of cities we believe contribute to furthering our understanding of what happens in the linguistic mosaics of urban environments and how we can explore and analyse them.
Notes
(1) This document was originally drawn up and published internally within Southampton City Council (SCC) and available on their website in 2010 by their Stronger Communities and Equalities Team and Communications Division. The link to SCC’s current website no longer shows this document and the team has had many subsequent iterations. When I asked a SCC official (August 2019) responsible for communications he had not heard of the document and admitted it had ‘probably long since ceased to be available’ [personal communication].
(2) It should be noted that there has recently been significant criticism from certain commentators as to the validity of the concept of translanguaging (Jasper, 2017; Jasper & Madsen, 2019). I have not engaged with this criticism here as it is largely directed at the use of translanguaging to underpin criticial pedagogy and educational practices in multilingual settings.
(3) As with many other concepts reviewed here, such as translanguaging, superdiversity, metrolingualism, to claim them as truly ‘new’ and ‘different’ is wrong. Many of the theoretical and methodological approaches discussed have echoes going back historically and reflect the impact of migration and movement of peoples over centuries, as well as how people have studied them. Finding new names or labels, however, helps identify the contemporary contexts and the snapshot of the moment and challenges us to interrogate the way we most effectively describe linguistic practices.
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