The Labor of Refusal: Creative and Ethical Possibilities for Decolonizing Linguistic Practices in Research

• In Event: Trans(re)lating Diversity in Academic Terrains

Abstract

Objectives: Research involving marginalized populations who speak in diverse languages is often translated into the master’s language, academic English and in that process, it loses certain contextual, affective, and conceptual nuances. In this paper we examine and problematize the concept and practice of translation, drawing from Roy (2019) and Koskinen (2020). We wonder about the generative possibilities that might arise if we actively refuse to translate as researchers (Bhattacharya, 2019). How would understanding these different orientations to language help us reimagine educational research methodology?

Perspectives and Points of view: Roy (2019) distinguishes between the Western conceptualizations of language as primarily a means of intellectual verbal argumentation (hence mastery) and Eastern conceptions of receiving insight in relationality, where mastery does not play any role. How would a non-Western conceptualization of language relate to issues of translation, and particularly the hierarchization (or mastery) of one language over another? On one hand, translation is “anu-vada” – the speaking after, or an echo, as Chakraborty-Spivak (2013, p. 252) points out. The very act of translation might be fraught with certain impossibilities and unraveling of mastery narratives. On the other hand, as Koskinen (2020) points out, the translator or the interpreter is always at the centre of communication, and thus often confused for being the actual speaker. Similarly, the researcher is confused for being a master of knowledge. Both interpreters and researchers communicate what is not their own and often, they speak for or represent others. Bhattacharya (2019) shows us a way to escape the mastery narrative by her refusal to translate. This paper engages with such problematics and pushes the impossibility to its limit where there is an active refusal to translate through certain affective and performative labour. Such a refusal to translate would imply the refusal to settle upon meaning; instead, dwelling in the refusal might enable us to foreground creative and ethical possibilities in research.

Modes of inquiry/Data sources: Data will be drawn from the presenters’ experiences of being the linguistic “other,” of being dominated and colonized by the master’s language. Of South Asian and East European descent respectively, the presenters encountered the master’s language in widely differing contexts. The presenters engage in certain affective and performative tasks to explore first-hand the implications of a refusal to translate, using critical arts-based research methods. As Finley (2017) highlights, critical arts-based research methods “challenge hegemony… and colonizing ways of being” (p. 562) and are thus particularly suited to our questioning of dominant linguistic practices in research.

Scholarly significance: Refusal is often seen as a passive unproductive act. Our presentation rethinks refusal actively and creatively as performative labor and serves to question dominant linguistic practices. Our questioning of language is particularly important in a linguistically diverse and inequitable world, where the dominant language hegemonizes and homogenizes ways of being and relating. A creative and ethical refusal to translate might open up possibilities for research to move away from relations of hierarchy between researcher and researched.

Authors

• Marina Basu, Arizona State University

• Mariia Vitrukh, Arizona State University