With the rise of English Medium Education continuing, calls are being made for research to inform policy. This talk sets out to ponder some of the challenges and complexities involved in this endeavour and concludes by proposing four possible ways of conceptualising the researcher as policy adviser.
With English Medium Education in Multilingual University Settings showing no sign of abating, and a sizable body of Applied Linguistics research into the phenomenon, calls are being made for research to inform policy. At the same time, social scientists are under pressure from the impact agenda to make their research relevant to society. Whilst greater interaction between researchers and policy makers is therefore both timely and potentially mutually beneficial, in this talk, I set out to ponder some of the challenges and complexities involved in this endeavour. Specifically, given paradigmatic shifts from positivist notions of ‘one truth’ to interpretivist stances of ‘multiple truths’, compounded by the prevalence of fake news, misinformation, deception and alternative facts in our post-truth era, I invite us to consider how our research can inform policy in other than unpredictable and selective ways (Hammersley 2014). I further invite us to consider the possibility for us as researchers to absolve ourselves from our own ideological stances and offer ‘evidence-based advice’ to policy makers (Jaspers 2019; Salö 2017; Cameron 2012). Illustrating my argument with ‘parallel language use’, a language policy mantra that has been advocated across the Nordic region, I show how this concept has been interpreted in diametrically opposed ways by different stakeholders (Hultgren 2014). Recognising the complex interplay of various actors with disparate interests (Dafouz and Smit 2014, 2020), I reluctantly find myself questioning whether an ‘evidence-based policy’ that serves everyone’s interests can ever be achieved. Nonetheless, to conclude in a constructive spirit, I draw on Pielke (2007) to propose four possible ways of conceptualising the researcher as policy adviser, suggesting that our best hope may be as the ‘honest broker of alternatives’: raising awareness of different scenarios and seeking to expand the scope of choice for decision makers (Pielke 2007).
