Navigating Power and Language: Methodological Reflections on Biographical Research in Transnational Contexts

Gwendolyn Gilliéron and Marie Hoppe
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Gwendolyn Gilliéron: School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences of Paris (EHESS), Institute of Political Anthropology, France
Marie Hoppe: Department of Educational Sciences, University of Bremen, Germany

Social Inclusion, 2026, vol. 14

Abstract: Transnational research settings create shared linguistic spaces between researchers and participants that are framed by global power relations, postcolonial constellations, and unequal access to resources. Against this backdrop, our article highlights methodological, ethical, and practical research issues in biographical research in multilingual settings, arguing for power‐sensitive perspectives in all stages of the research process. We discuss methodological decisions and research dynamics from two transnational research projects in which biographical narrative interviews were conducted by native German speakers in the national contexts of Morocco and Turkey. The interview languages—French and English in Morocco and Turkish in Turkey— were learned by the researchers as foreign languages, while some of the interviewees’ first language was Arabic or Kurdish. We argue that in this transnational and multilingual context, biographical research can have specific potentials to reflect on (hidden) aspects of social power relations that might be inherent in the designs of our projects. We therefore propose to understand multilingual research settings not as a burden for knowledge production but rather as an opportunity to engage more deeply with how meaning is produced in interview settings and with contextual complexities.

Keywords: biographical research; language; methodology; multilingual research; power relations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cog:socinc:v14:y:2026:a:10849

DOI: 10.17645/si.10849

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