1. Researching Multilingually: 25-26th April 2012
Louise Bowen, Department of Education, University of
the West of England
Andrina.Bowen@uwe.ac.uk

2. Intro
 Research design: Methods and language
 Giving voice?
 Words from David
 Discussion

3. Research design
 Research aim: explore experiences of higher education within
everyday lives of refugee students
 10 participants- cultural diversity / different stages in HE studies
 Interviews academic year 2010-2011
 Photo/written diaries
 Online forum
 Emergent methodology
 Sought to engage participants as co-researchers
 Methods chosen to recognise cultural and linguistic diversity

4. Giving voice?
 Questioning authority of interpretation (Mazzei,
2009; Fine, 1992, 1994), lack of ‘textual innocence’
(Lather, 2007; Bhabha,2004)
 “Voices can be used to accomplish a subtler form of
ventriloquism. Within such texts, while researchers
appear to let the Other speak, just under the covers of
those marginal—if now “liberated” voices—we hide,
unproblematical” (Fine, 1992)

5. Reflexivity?
 Where am I in our interviews? When did I ‘push’ a refugee
subjectivity?
 What interpretations do I favour? What do I do about that
if/when I notice it?
 “under the surface of…scholarly analysis and description of
other races, peoples, or groups . . . we find a powerful
ideological layer of self-interest, in-group favoritism, and
ethnocentrism” (Van Dijk, 1993: 160 in Shome, 1996: 46)

6. David
Obviously for myself coming from Africa to England I didn’t have any connections, I
didn’t know any one in the industry, so the best possible way was through the University
and that was the biggest link.
Was there ever any point at all when you thought that legal status, refugee status, had any
other impact upon your engagement in what you were doing with your university
studies?
not only myself, but obviously within the social networking of people that I deal with,
asylum seekers and refugees… I find it very, very difficult, because in my field or the
industry that I am in everybody is treated equally, nobody asks you where you are coming
from…
But discussing with various other people, they find the label is kind of like a stereotype
and whether it is just the mentality of people- just accepting the way it is or whether
they are stereotyping themselves- is another issue that I don’t know.

7. I wondered if, for you, that status, refugee, if didn’t have any impact on your
University decisions and experiences, or, if it was something that came up in
discussions with other people as you were going about your course of study ?
So I found it very difficult, but personally didn’t have any kind of thought
about being a refugee or an asylum seeker or the piece of paper that says
whatever. I’m still a human being, this is the circumstances I found myself to
be in. It’s either I accept it, and the people I am dealing with or that I am
talking with in my social networks at the University- everybody around me
accepts it as it is. If they don’t accept it then tough luck, that’s the way it is.
Maybe I just blocked it and said “I’m not going to be thinking about all this
label thing because that’s not what I am, this is the circumstance” . So maybe
that’s what came to me and it never really bothered me.

8. And then someone phones you up and says “will you be part of this
research project?”
It’s good because obviously it is not only myself, I deal with other people
and they feel like, they fill in a form and it asks “are you an asylum
seeker?” and they feel like “is it because I am claiming benefits or…” all
those kinds of things come out and one thing that I set out, once I got
everything authorised, is I didn’t even go for the student finance for my
first degree. I was working and I was paying for it. I wanted to
distinguish myself from that benefit culture of getting student loans and
finances and all that kind of stuff. So I was working and whatever I
would get I would pay for my fees, so I don’t have a student loan, I don’t
have anything.

9. Discussion
 Exploring limits of methods and design- have ‘failed’ methods
contributed something?
 What are the limits and location of my questions and silences?
 What does this mean with regard to knowing about refugee
experiences of HE?
 education is a space in which refugee people may retreat from their
position as Other, but at the cost of refugee-ness becoming silenced
(Mosselson, 2011:5)
 Complexity of identifying with/ resistance to ‘refugee-ness’- making
audible the ambivalent voice.

10. References
Bhabha, H. (2004) The Location of Culture. Abingdon: Routledge
Fine, M.(Ed.) (1992) Disruptive voices: The possibilities of feminist research. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Lather, P. (2007) Getting Lost: Feminist efforts towards a double(d) science. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Mazzei, L.A. (2009) An impossibly full voice. In: Jackson, A.Y and Mazzei, L.A.,Eds., (2009) Voice in Qualitative Inquiry.
Abingdon: Routledge, pp.47-62
Mosselson, J. (2011) Conflict, Education and Identity: Resettled youth in the United States. Conflict & Education, 1(1) [online]
[Accessed at http://conflictandeducation.org/?p=126 ]
Shome,R. (1996 )Postcolonial Interventions in the Rhetorical Canon: An “Other” View . Communication Theory, 6(1) pp 40-59
Van dijk, T. A. (1993). Elite discourse and racism. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Acknowledgement: This research is sponsored by an ESRC studentship.
E: Andrina.Bowen@uwe.ac.uk