Working across languages/cultures in international and environmental communication fieldwork

ABSTRACT

As environmental communication grows as an area of study, international and environmental justice issues increasingly need attention. Sustainability, climate change, habitat erosion, water access, and a number of other issues disproportionately affect rural and marginalized communities around the globe. For researchers working in and with such communities, the ethics of interviewing local and/or non-academic people requires much thought and consideration. One of the authors has worked in Indonesian and Spanish, and the other in Hindi, Nepali, and Bengali. Questions such as what voice means, in relationship to postcolonial/decolonial theories, are especially important. Furthermore, how such interviews are recorded, transcribed, and then translated also raise significant ethical considerations. This paper explores how environmental communication researchers might rethink approaches to ethnography and interviews across cultures, languages, and other aspects of difference.

KEYWORDS:

• Multilingualism
• ethnography
• interviews
• voice
• decoloniality

Notes

1 Pocho/a is a term meaning rotten or wilted, a slang word often used to refer to Mexican Americans who do not speak Spanish well or do not know Mexican culture/language very well; it is considered a derogatory assessment of one’s cultural and linguistic fluencies. Used here, it is more of a reference to reclaiming identity and language, that is, through turning the term on its head. This term also illustrates the challenges of translation, as it is not a one-word translation, but requires several sentences to explain how Sandoval and her colleagues use this term.