Sara Ganassin – författare

This book critically reflects on the challenges faced by refugee aspirant professionals in securing employment and the ways in which professional intercultural competence development and attendant language learning practices can help facilitate the professional (re)integration in these communities.The volume draws on data from a large-scale research project that saw refugee aspirant professionals, researchers, and volunteer language teachers working together to develop and operationalise key intercultural skills needed for professional employment in the UK, the Netherlands, and Austria, ultimately culminating in a toolkit of free online resources co-designed to meet the needs of communities and facilitate the development of these practices across Europe. Detailed analyses of the data drawn from the project allow for critical reflections on co-production in intercultural spaces and researchers’ positionality, power relations, and ethical choices in multilingual contexts. Taken together, the book offers both theoretical and practical considerations for application beyond the European context toward better facilitating the professional (re)integration of migrant communities on a more global scale.The book will be of particular interest to students and researchers in intercultural communication, refugee studies, and language education.

This edited collection provides research-informed guidance on how reflexivity may be practised in applied linguistics research. Specifically, we promote reflexivity as an essential hallmark of quality research and argue that doing reflexivity confers greater transparency, methodological rigour, depth, and trustworthiness to our scholarly inquiries.The collection features perspectives from different sub-fields of applied linguistics, including intercultural communication, language education, and multilingualism, and draws on data from a range of settings, including language cafés, classrooms, workplaces, and migration and displacement contexts. Each chapter follows a unified structure: theoretical background, context of the empirical study used as a backdrop for the chapter, an analysis of how reflexivity played out throughout the study, and conclusions which include takeaway points for other researchers. This approach allows readers to gain a sound understanding of the challenges and affordances of doing reflexivity in concrete examples of applied linguistics research whilst also gaining guidance on how to nurture and report on researcher reflexivity as this unfolds throughout the lifetime of a project.This book will appeal to students and scholars in applied linguistics, particularly those with an interest in research methods in the areas of language education, multilingualism, and intercultural communication.

This edited collection provides research-informed guidance on how reflexivity may be practised in applied linguistics research. Specifically, we promote reflexivity as an essential hallmark of quality research and argue that doing reflexivity confers greater transparency, methodological rigour, depth, and trustworthiness to our scholarly inquiries.The collection features perspectives from different sub-fields of applied linguistics, including intercultural communication, language education, and multilingualism, and draws on data from a range of settings, including language cafés, classrooms, workplaces, and migration and displacement contexts. Each chapter follows a unified structure: theoretical background, context of the empirical study used as a backdrop for the chapter, an analysis of how reflexivity played out throughout the study, and conclusions which include takeaway points for other researchers. This approach allows readers to gain a sound understanding of the challenges and affordances of doing reflexivity in concrete examples of applied linguistics research whilst also gaining guidance on how to nurture and report on researcher reflexivity as this unfolds throughout the lifetime of a project.This book will appeal to students and scholars in applied linguistics, particularly those with an interest in research methods in the areas of language education, multilingualism, and intercultural communication.

This book critically reflects on the challenges faced by refugee aspirant professionals in securing employment and the ways in which professional intercultural competence development and attendant language learning practices can help facilitate the professional (re)integration in these communities.The volume draws on data from a large-scale research project that saw refugee aspirant professionals, researchers, and volunteer language teachers working together to develop and operationalise key intercultural skills needed for professional employment in the UK, the Netherlands, and Austria, ultimately culminating in a toolkit of free online resources co-designed to meet the needs of communities and facilitate the development of these practices across Europe. Detailed analyses of the data drawn from the project allow for critical reflections on co-production in intercultural spaces and researchers’ positionality, power relations, and ethical choices in multilingual contexts. Taken together, the book offers both theoretical and practical considerations for application beyond the European context toward better facilitating the professional (re)integration of migrant communities on a more global scale.The book will be of particular interest to students and researchers in intercultural communication, refugee studies, and language education.

This book investigates the social, political and educational role of community language education in migratory contexts. It draws on an ethnographic study that investigates the significance of Mandarin-Chinese community schooling in Britain as an intercultural space for those involved. To understand the interrelation of ‘language’, ‘culture’ and ‘identity’, the book adopts a ‘bricolage’ approach that brings together a range of theoretical perspectives. This book challenges homogenous and stereotypical constructions of Chinese language, culture and identity – such as the image of Chinese pupils as conformist and deferent learners – that are often repeated both in the media and in academic discussion.

This book offers a unique understanding of how researchers’ linguistic resources, and the languages they use in the research process, are often politically and structurally shaped and constrained, with implications for the reliability of the research. The chapters are written by both experienced and novice researchers, who examine how they negotiated the use of their own, and others’, linguistic and communicative resources when undertaking their research in politically-charged, and linguistically and culturally diverse contexts. The contributing authors are either from the Global South, or engaged in work which is contextualised within the Global South; or they face linguistic structural hegemonies in the Global North which challenge their research processes. They utilise diverse theoretical, methodological and disciplinary approaches to produce a collection of engaging and accessible accounts of researching multilingually in their contexts. These accounts will help readers to make theoretically and methodologically informed choices about the political dimensions of languages in their own research when researching multilingually.