Intercultural mediation as a research process: Médiation interculturelle comme un processus de recherche

This paper will examine multilingualism as a research process and a subject position within that process by considering how multilingualism can contribute to research practice and exemplify the possibilities for multilingual research practice by examining the working processes of a AILA Research Network Intercultural mediation in language and culture teaching and learning/ La médiation interculturelle en didactique des langues et des cultures. Although some members of the group can work across both languages, the group itself has no common working language for academic communication and all communication is done through an informal process of translation in which ideas expressed in one language are then communicated in the other. This means that epistemologies can be communicated first in the language in which they have created and then re-languaged for communication across the whole group. The process of translation often reveals epistemological differences that underlay what appear to be superficially similar academic terminologies and how some misconceptions can circulate without any deep translation processes or deeper joint meaning-making. Working as a multilingual group with two working languages and more languages present, researchers develop their own plurilingual habitus of communication based on the slow and long-term necessities of research. The experiences of the ReN reveal that multilingualism as a research practice involves engaging with linguistically and culturally diverse others both as a way of engaging with existing knowledge and also as a way of developing new ideas and insights in analysis. Researchers work within an epistemological universe in which knowledge is created and communicated in many languages but in which monolingualism in English is coming to dominate academic work.