This presentation demonstrates the potential of using autoethnographic accounts of individual scholars’ life-long process of language shift. We intend to show how this method enables researchers to identify the critical incidents in an individual’s experience and to reveal the interpretive complexity involved in the translingual practices for research publication.
In response to pressures for greater accountability in higher education around the world, there has been a rise in the development and use of codified ‘evaluation regimes’ (Curry & Lillis, 2017), which increasingly use bibliometrics that involve English-dominating key journal indexes such as the Web of Science. Within this mechanism, researchers’ ability to publish in English has become the key ‘symbolic capital’ (Englander & Uzuner-Smith, 2013) to gain promotion, access funding opportunities and guarantee tenure positions. In this presentation, we intend to share the autoethnographic accounts of the first presenter, who is a Chinese scholar specialized in Japanese language teaching, and who managed to mobilize three languages (Chinese, Japanese, English) to conduct applied linguistic research from 2009 and 2018. We will discuss the use of first-person diaries and reflective accounts as well as co-constructed interpretations of these autoethnographic accounts to identify the key stages of her struggle to incorporate multiple languages into academic research. The findings uncovered the constant interplay of researcher’s own purposefulness, the research spaces and research networks when multilingual scholars navigate the possibilities and complexities of writing for research publications in a challenging environment. This presentation intends to demonstrate the potential of using autoethnographic accounts of individual scholars’ life-long process of language shift. By sharing the findings, we show how this method enables researchers to identify the critical incidents in an individual’s experience and to reveal the subjectivity and interpretive complexity involved in the translingual practices for research publication. References: Curry, M. J., & Lillis, T. (2017). Problematizing English as the priviledged language of global academic publishing. In M. J. Curry & T. Lillis (Eds.), Global Academic Publishing. Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters. Englander, K., & Uzuner-Smith, S. (2013). The role of policy in constructing the peripheral scientist in the era of globalization. Language Policy, 12(3), 231-250.
