Multilingual Researching, Translanguaging, and Credibility in Qualitative Research: A Reflexive Account.

In this chapter, we draw on aspects of the first author’s (Lamia’s) doctoral research project – the research site in Algeria, and her plurilingual identity (her mother-tongue Algerian-Arabic, French, Modern Standard Arabic [MSA], and English) – to demonstrate how her multilingual resources were in tension with the dominance of English in the UK university where she was supervised. Following Bourdieu (1986), we show how a doctoral researcher’s assumptions about Anglophone universities affected the researcher’s decisions and meaning-making processes, and how linguistic agency shaped identities and power relations throughout data generation. We investigate and problematise linguistic choice: how the researcher and participants perform (Goffman, 1959) their linguistic identity in the research contexts of the supervisory institution and the multilingual research fieldsite; how they use their linguistic resources to negotiate positionality and power (Bourdieu, 1986; Chen, 2011); and the role of named languages and translanguaging (Li Wei, 2018) in these processes. We aim to show the importance of a multilingual researcher approach, including translanguaging (Li Wei 2018), to ensure the credibility, and ultimately, trustworthiness, of qualitative research.