Becoming a Multilingual Researcher in Contemporary Academic Culture: Experiential Stories of (Not) Learning and Using Languages

This chapter reflects on social science researchers’ narratives of learning and using languages. Through these accounts, the chapter identifies how notions of proficiency and fluency in the competent multilingual researcher are often conceptualised through a set of exclusionary value paradigms, rooted in forms of social inequality. The chapter grounds this in the contemporary academic context of neoliberal competition, and in doing so, demonstrates the intellectual, professional, and emotional risks and vulnerabilities involved in using languages in research. Based on this, the chapter suggests that ‘breaking the silence’also involves ‘breaking the culture’of a hegemonic value system which underpins the academic field.