Multilingual Radical Intimate Ethnography: Burning the Empire

• In Event: Talking Back: The Intersection of Multilingualism and Racism Through a Critical Ethnographic Lens

Abstract

This paper comes at a time of collective transgression that is visible, invisible, and imagined through the Black Lives Matter uprising, COVID-19, mass displacements, and wars among other events. Events that radically manifest the injustice that exists in our world as well as radically ask us to question our contemporary way of being and knowing. Most of all, the current recycled events of the present and the past warn us that our ways of capturing ancient knowledges as hostages of modernity and the empire no longer work. At the core of this paper is an invitation of desire to a journey of radically trusting our intuitions about the intimacy that exists when we move away from understanding languages as a commodity to understanding languages as inherently intimate. Retrospectively, how the relationship we have with our languages as researchers impacts many facets of how we understand multilingualism and the relationships imposed on participants, students, and researchers to have with their languages we love and learn with. The intimacy of languages asks us to think about the types of relationships we desire students, participants and ourselves to have. This paper is an invitation towards my own journey as a multilingual being and as a researcher delving in the intimacy of language. I call this journey multilingual radical intimate ethnography motivated by a deep desire to free my heart, mind and soul from the restraints and constraints of hostagehood of modernity and knowledges of empires that have harmed the intimacy of languages we love, write, speak and build relationships with. An invitation to let go of the knowledges of the empire and to trust that ancient knowledges extend to us a less harmful imagination. I ask that you keep the following questions in mind: What sort of relationships have your epistemological, axiological, and ontological inheritances from your educational experience left you with? What sort of relationships have you developed with the languages you speak, write, learn, and use for doing research? What sort of relationships do you hope and desire that your students build with their own languages? The languages of their families, their communities, their friends, teachers, and coworkers?

Author

• Youmna Deiri, Texas A&M International University