Researching Multilingually: Conceptual and Methodological Failures, Struggles and Successes

This book examines what ’researching multilingually’ means in practice and theory. It is multinational and transnational in scope, including the voices of both experienced and emerging scholars who reflect on the process of conducting, analyzing and reporting multilingual research in various settings. Together the chapters address issues including theorizing multilingualism and collaborative research with multilingual scholars and research participants; navigating insider or outsider positioning with research participants; making and accepting language choices among researchers and participants during research; translating and interpreting multilingual data; and confronting policy challenges of multilingual research design and reporting in English-dominant contexts. The book ties these processes to existing theories of multilingualism in research and proposes new ways of understanding best practices while also wrestling with challenges and at times ’failures’ in the research process.

Bridget Goodman is an Associate Professor, Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan. She is co-editor of Looking Inward: Autoethnographic Explorations of Lived Raciolinguistic Experiences Among Multilingual Scholars (with Qianqian Zhang-Wu, Multilingual Matters, 2025).

Brian Seilstad is Director for Internationalization and Partnerships, Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco. He is the author of Educating Adolescent Newcomers in the Superdiverse Midwest: Multilingual Students in English-centric Contexts (Multilingual Matters, 2021).