Languaging research: Multidisciplinary policy and practice insights

Attentive to a) the widespread, but often undervalued and under-utilised plurilingual resources of international (and other) students and of those working with them (e.g. supervisors), and b) the tendency in research and its dissemination to privilege certain global languages (e.g. English) and through them particular (often dominant) voices and perspectives (e.g. from the Global North), in this presentation we argue that greater visibility and importance needs to be given to the role of language in research by and with international (and other) students. It is an argument underpinned by a belief that, as analogous with the value of bio-diversity for the broader environment in which we live, so too linguistic-epistemological diversity has an important contribution to make in the pursuit of a sustainable and equitable presence here on planet Earth, and that collective wisdom, diversely languaged, will enable us to better respond to challenges both known and unknown, now and in the future. Having outlined the above argument, we briefly review some recent thinking from three practice-oriented disciplines - global mental health, intercultural education, and multilingualism studies - in which conceptual, policy, and practice issues related to linguistic-epistemological diversity are considered. In particular, we focus on a language-oriented framework proposed in each discipline. Given the frequent policy vacuum regarding the languaging of research, we conclude with a call for researchers with/by international students to be equipped with a generative tool to help them fully value, utilise, and make visible the linguistic and related epistemological resources in their research. We present our initial attempt at such a tool.