Scholarly sisterhood: Collaboration is our academic superpower

Editor’s note: Regular readers of Language on the Move will have noticed that we have been very quiet for the past two months. This is because some core team members have been busily working on a new and exciting book manuscript. The book is called Life in a new language, and last week we submitted the manuscript to our publisher, Oxford University Press.

International Women’s Day is a great opportunity to share news about the book and reflect on the strength of women’s academic collaborations.

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Ingrid Piller, Donna Butorac, Emily Farrell, Loy Lising, Shiva Motaghi-Tabari, Vera Williams Tetteh

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Life in a new language

Life in a new language examines the language learning and settlement experiences of 130 migrants to Australia from 34 different countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America over a period of 20 years.

The aim is to understand the dual challenge of learning a new language while living one’s life through the medium of that language. This is a challenge that remains poorly understood and non-migrants tend to underestimate its severity and the hardships involved.

1. There is the shock of finding oneself in a new linguistic environment where you may not understand much of what is going on around you, while all the time being cognizant of the fact that not understanding what is going on may have acute repercussions for your wellbeing.
2. There is the difficulty of finding work that will not only pay the bills but also sustain your ambitions and self-worth. Most participants took years to recapture their careers, many never did.
3. To improve proficiency in the new language, migrants need to interact in the new language, a task that is made difficult by the frequent absence of interlocutors willing to indulge newcomers, a lack of common topics, and the pervasiveness of misunderstandings. Misunderstandings may go on to reverberate through future interactions as each misunderstanding leads to a loss of confidence that needs to be reclaimed over time.
4. Migration intrudes even into the most intimate domains of life and alters family roles and relationships. It is not only that familial obligations and duties are redistributed but also that new family tasks emerge. Prominent among these are new ways of parenting, including setting an—implicit or explicit—family language policy, and managing child language learning of both new and heritage languages. As children usually learn the new language faster, the potential impact of their superior (oral) proficiency on parental authority can become another tribulation for adult migrants.
5. Migration continues to be imagined as a point of difference from the idealized sedentary mainstream population of their destination. This difference often marks those with a migration history as perpetual outsiders to their new society. Difference may be audible in their ways of speaking and visible where they are differently racialized. Experiences of Othering, exclusion, discrimination, and racism based on such differences create another level of adversity, as migrants need to cope with micro-aggressions, invalidations, insults, and sometimes even assaults.
6. Migration severs the self into a before and after. As pre-migration habits and identities have disappeared, new selves with a new sense of belonging, home, and community need to be fashioned.

Through the voices of our participants, we document the magnitude and anatomy of these challenges. Understanding them leads to an appreciation of migrants’ courage, perseverance, and resilience.

Ethnographic data-sharing and re-use

The research behind Life in a new language was conducted over a period of more than 20 years in six separate sociolinguistic ethnographies. For this book project, we revisited those six projects, shared our data, and re-analyzed them to answer questions about language learning, employment, interaction, parenting, experiences with racism, and sense of belonging.

Our methodological approach was inspired by open science principles and the desire to share our data and to pool our existing resources to be able to paint a bigger picture of language and migration. While most researchers now accept the value of data sharing and reuse, implementation and practice remain patchy, particularly when it comes to qualitative data in the humanities and social sciences. In ethnographic research, data sharing and reuse is in its infancy as researchers struggle with questions on what open research might even mean for them and how to implement FAIR principles, i.e., making their data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. These problems are compounded by time pressures and the absence of tried and tested workflows for reanalyzing and bringing to publication shared datasets.

As such, Life in a new language ventures into unchartered methodological territory. We explain the academic motivations, affordances and limitations we encountered in the book. Here, we want to share a more personal story.

The story behind the book

Life in a new language is co-authored by six academic women, who have collaborated over an extended period as members of the Language on the Move research team. Donna, Emily, Shiva, and Vera conducted their PhD research under Ingrid’s supervision, and Loy was mentored by Ingrid as an early career researcher.

As such, Life in a new language shows what can be done with linguistic ethnography and provides a working model for how to combine existing small datasets into larger longitudinal studies of a social phenomenon or practice. It also provides a framework for supervising academics and their doctoral students to create a research and publishing community of practice that connects separate higher degree research projects under a single, post-award project umbrella. Similarly, our study provides a model for early career and experienced scholars to work together to create and analyze big datasets from qualitative methods of inquiry.

Life in a new language is personal in yet another way. For the six of us, the intersection of language learning and settlement is not only an academic research topic. Beyond our academic expertise, we share with our participants the experience of being migrant speakers. Like our participants, our group of authors reflects the diversity of 21^st century Australia. All of us are settlers on Indigenous land. We or our ancestors have come to Australia from Germany, Ghana, Iran, Ireland, the Philippines, and Yugoslavia. Those four of us who came to Australia as adults share with our participants the experience of settling in a new country through the medium of a new language. Our experience as English language teachers and teacher trainers also informs our account. We hope that the way we have pooled our lived experiences in a unique intercultural team to write this book will add richness and depth to our account.

Meet each of the 130 migrants in our book over the next months in a serialized Twitter thread 🧵

First up: Katja from Poland
Katja’s engineering degree was not recognized in Australia. She retrained as a beautician. Tremendous skills loss for herself and our society 😞
1/n https://t.co/ehvPDznp6f

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) March 7, 2023

Good things really do take time

Data collection on the first project to feed into our analysis started in 2000, but the idea for the book and the reanalysis of previously collected datasets started to take shape in 2018, just around the time one of us had a baby. Seeing this little person ready to start school now, has been the yardstick for how long it has taken us to turn a brilliant idea into a completed manuscript.

We not only got derailed by the Covid-19 pandemic, but we also discovered that writing a truly co-authored book with a team of six authors, who are not even co-located, is more challenging than anticipated. It is also much more rewarding and fun.

We learned that the principles of open science can be best brought to life through the spirit of collaboration, engagement, dialogue, and friendship that guided our endeavor. And we warmly recommend collaborative writing to all academic women this International Women’s Day because pooling strengths can better keep us all afloat.

What’s next?

We hope we have whetted your appetite for Life in a new language. The academic publication process is a protracted one and we will share key dates here on Language on the Move as they come to hand.

For now, people in Sydney might want to pencil our International Symposium on Bilingualism workshop devoted to the project into their diaries. For everyone else, we have started a Twitter series @lg_on_the_move, where you can meet one of each of our 130 participants per day while we count down to publication.

Related International Women’s Day content

• 2021, Remembering cancelled women
• 2020, Female academics and shamans face the same glass ceiling
• 2019, Why are there so few notable academic women?
• 2018, Why do female academics publish less than their male peers?
• 2013, Migrant women’s empowerment in the city
• 2012, Strange Academic women