Researching Words without Speaking Them. Language as Care Practice in Multi-Lingual Care Environments in Poland

ABSTRACT

Being able to speak and understand local languages is regarded as an important prerequisite for conducting fieldwork. In this article we reflect on fieldwork in which we did not speak the local language – Polish – but in which we could still learn something about a central practice in our field sites: how language was implicated in practices of care. Hanging out as linguistically constricted researchers propelled us to research situations in which care was done through using words as sounds and practices, rather than relying on meanings, and to relate to not sharing a language in new ways.

ABSTRAKCYJNY

Umiejętność rozumienia i posługiwania się lokalnym językiem uważana jest za warunek wstępny dla prowadzenia badań terenowych. W niniejszym artykule dokonujemy refleksji nad badaniami terenowymi prowadzonych bez znajomości lokalnego języka – polskiego – w ramach których byłyśmy w stanie dowiedzieć się więcej o praktyce kluczowej dla naszych badań: w jaki sposób język uwikłany jest w praktyki opiekuńcze. Spędzanie czasu w terenie jako badaczki lingwistycznie ograniczone doprowadziło nas do skupienia się na sytuacjach, w których opieka odbywała się poprzez operowanie słowami jako dźwiękami i praktykami bez opierania się na ich bezpośrednich znaczeniach oraz umożliwiło zrozumienie braku wspólnego języka z innej perspektywy.

ABSTRAKT

Die Fähigkeit, lokale Sprachen zu sprechen und zu verstehen, gilt als wichtige Voraussetzung, um Feldforschungen durchführen zu können. In diesem Artikel reflektieren wir über Forschungsaufenthalte, in denen wir die lokale Sprache – Polnisch – nicht sprechen konnten, aber dennoch etwas über eine zentrale Praxis im Feld lernten: wie Kommunikation in Praktiken der Pflege impliziert war. Aufgrund unserer sprachlichen Einschränkungen konzentrierten wir uns auf die Untersuchung von Pflegepraktiken, in denen nicht nur die lexikalische Bedeutung der Worte relevant waren, sondern auch deren Klang und das Sprechen. Dadurch sahen wir eine fehlende gemeinsame Sprache im Forschungskontext in einem neuen Licht.

KEYWORDS:

• Dementia care
• hanging out
• linguistic cooperation
• non-speaking language
• Poland
• will-work

Acknowledgments

We want to express our sincere thanks to the residents, care workers and management of the care homes for their trust, time, and patience. We would also like to acknowledge the crucial help of Mariusz Sapieha, who facilitated not only access to the field, but gave feedback, checked the Polish words in the text and translated the abstract. Developing the article has furthermore benefited greatly from generous comments of peer reviewers and input by Veronika Prieler and Matouš Jelinek from the ReloCare team and Vincent de Rooij, Bregje de Kok, Annelieke Driessen, Leonie Dronkert, Patrick McKearney, and Jeannette Pols from the Anthropology of Care network, University of Amsterdam. For polishing our English thanks to Steve Russell, and for editorial encouragement to James Staples.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. ERC Grant 949,200 “Relocating care within Europe, moving the elderly to places where care is more affordable,” https://www.relocatingcare.org/.

2. Relocating German seniors to Central and Eastern European countries happens only on a small scale. But it is emblematic for the privatization and marketization of care in Europe and for “care fixes” (Dowling 2022: 191) that fix a gap but do not address the underlying structural issues. Thus, while EU legislation provides the template within which it is possible, the actual outsourcing of care is an outcome of austerity regimes and the marketization of care in both sending and receiving countries (Aulenbacher et al. 2018; Bender et al. 2018; Kolářová 2015; Ormond and Toyota 2016; Schwiter et al. 2020).

3. Private care homes are a relatively new phenomenon in Poland (Krajewska 2014; Robbins 2014). Societal changes but in particular the big numbers of out-migrating women have affected the availability of care within families. Many of the Polish seniors in private care homes have family members abroad who can afford the costs, or are themselves returning migrants.

4. In the three care homes in which we did fieldwork, we encountered many seniors who for various reasons (which to detail are beyond the scope of this paper, see Palenga-Möllenbeck (2014)) hold German citizenship and speak both languages fluently. In this article we are mainly concerned with monolingual German seniors and ignore the complexity and multiplicity of the category “German” in the region (but see Kneip 2021; Strauchold 2014; Wiszewski 2014).

5. Multilinguality in the field did not only concern Polish and German, but also Ukrainian, since in several of the homes Ukrainian members of staff were employed. In one of the homes there was also a resident with another first language, who had migrated to Germany for work and was now taken care of in Poland. These complexities are however beyond the scope of this paper.

6. Apart from being practically “not ideal,” it is also sensitive, because it potentially reproduces the power imbalance between Poland and Germany, in which the Polish side makes more efforts to learn German.

7. Luise, first author, conducted the research in 2019 as part of her Masters at the University of Amsterdam, supervised by second author Kristine, and as part of the pilot research for the bigger project. Ethical clearance was obtained through the ethical board of the master’s program. Kristine’s research took place in 2022 when the project had received full funding from the European Research Council (ERC). Ethical clearance was obtained by the ethical boards of the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research and the ERC.

8. These included seniors who spoke only German, and many who spoke both German and Polish, due to the specific history of the region.

9. Both authors had hands-on experience as care assistants from previous jobs.

10. Information about the project, including details on data protection and how to withdraw from the study, were circulated before the research started in Polish and German via the management, to family members (proxy-consent for residents with advanced dementia) and care workers. This required people to actively reach out to us if they wanted to voice disagreement. Appreciating that this might be uncomfortable because of dependencies on management and hierarchies within the organization (Plankey-Videla 2012), we stayed (and remain) sensitive toward the question of consent throughout the (still ongoing) research process.

11. Pols (2015: 83) uses this term to denote the analytical quality of descriptions, which never only record but actively reshape what they are describing. See also Hirschauer (2006).

12. While we focus here on interactions between care workers and seniors, we also witnessed seniors communicating with each by smiling, touch, clapping or pointing.

13. It is beyond this paper to discuss whether people with dementia should continue to be fed if they are no longer cooperating with eating. The fact that Ewa sometimes accepted food and enjoyed it (she showed preferences for dessert over the main course) was understood by the care workers to mean she still wanted to eat.

14. It is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss the role of language and dementia in the geriatric sense.

15. Transcription of what Luise heard.

16. In addressing me like this, the resident was using a polite Polish form in German. In German one would use the surname.

Additional information

Funding

The authors wish to acknowledge funding from ERC Starting Grant [949200] “Relocating care within Europe, moving the elderly to places where care is more affordable” (https://www.relocatingcare.org/), and seed grants from the Health Care and the Body program group, AISSR, and Centre for Social Science and Global Health, University of Amsterdam.

Notes on contributors

Luise Schurian-Dąbrowska

Luise Schurian-Dąbrowska holds a master’s in Medical Anthropology and Sociology from the University of Amsterdam. She carried out ethnographic research in Cameroon and Poland, focusing on migration, aging and everyday life within care institutions. After her studies, she worked in international cooperation to find out more about the making of migration policies and is now applying her knowledge of social science research methods and theories while working in the non-profit sector in Switzerland.

Kristine Krause

Kristine Krause is an associate professor at the University of Amsterdam, working at the intersection of medical and political anthropology. Her interests include how care is organized transnationally and how care is related to citizenship, political subjectivities and history. She is the PI of the ERC funded project Relocating Care within Europe: moving the elderly to places where care is more affordable. www.relocatingcare.org