In this paper, aiming at decolonising multilingualism (Phipps 2019), we propose the concept of ‘biographical encounter’ to capture the messy yet dialogic nature of constructing a life story in a research event, where both the researcher’s and the participant’s lifetime and language learning trajectories intersect and are being reexamined.
Biographical approaches have been implemented in a range of areas such as cultural and trauma studies, anthropology and education, studies of bilingualism and literary criticism. The interest in person as a speaking subject entitled to silence, to her own voice and emotions, as a participant in social practice opens ways into the ‘history in person’ (Holland and Lave 1995). Biographical approaches reveal lived experiences with language: from language loss at times of war to language learning as investment in migration; from silence and trauma in language revitalisation to affect in shaping linguistic repertoires. Over the last decade in Portugal and recently in Norway, in our work with displaced people (migrants, refugees and diaspora), we have applied biographical approaches to unlock the embodied migration trajectories through a new language in a shared space of biographical workshops. Common in them was the (hi)story of embodied change and investment into a new language, a subject’s active role in collective history, a biographical turn (Renders 2017), a story of “telling oneself in other words”. Throughout this work, we began reflecting on our own privilege and responsibilities as researchers in research events. In this paper, Inspired by the call for decolonising multilingualism (Phipps 2019), we propose the concept of ‘biographical encounter’ to capture the messy yet dialogic nature of constructing a life story in a research event, where both the researcher’s and the participant’s lifetime and language learning trajectories meet, intersect and are being reexamined. In our view, the concept of biographical encounter shifts the focus away from the veracity of the biographical narrative towards the ‘granularities of experience’ (Phipps 2019:7), discursive positioning and historical dimension underlying the mutual constitution as social subjects in the biographical time. After all, by exchanging life stories we might change history (Kearney, 2009).
