The field of climate services for development (CSD) is growing rapidly, presented by donors and implementers as an opportunity to address the needs of the global poor, whether informing agricultural ...decisionmaking in rural communities, facilitating disaster preparedness or promoting public health. To realise this potential, however, CSD projects must understand the information needs of their intended users. This raises a critical epistemological challenge for CSD: how can we know who is vulnerable to the impacts of climate variability and change, and why are they vulnerable to particular impacts? In this paper, we consider both the epistemological tension arising over the construction of vulnerability that emerges at the intersection of the physical and social science communities within CSD and a second, less-discussed epistemological stress surrounding how user identities are understood within the social science community engaged in CSD-related research and implementation. We illustrate these tensions through the example of a climate services programme that delivers agrometeorological advice to farmers in Mali, demonstrating the ramifications of these epistemological issues for the design and delivery of services that further development and adaptation goals.
This article explores the affordances of translanguaging as methodology by reflecting upon the role of the multilingual repertoires of research participants (including the researcher) in shaping an ...ethnographic inquiry on 'language cafés' (LCs), understood as public events which provide a non-formal learning space for (foreign) language socialisation. Drawing on the 'researching multilingually' framework proposed by Holmes et al. (
2013
, 2016), we reflect on the affordances and complexities of using different languages in the research process. In particular, we focus on how the researcher's fluid multilingual approach enabled her to co-construct translanguaging spaces with LC participants as part of a methodology to study multilingual socialisation for and through the lived experience of those involved in the research. We aim to inspire researchers to make visible the multilingual, collaborative, and relational processes that shape their research, and to problematise and be reflexive about their choices of transcription of multilingual data. We argue that applying translanguaging as methodology to study multilingual environments can challenge the monolingual ideologies that still prevail in research, while enabling research participants to perform and develop their multilingual social selves.
This article aims to explore the views of the Turkish elite on the state of polarization in Turkey. By identifying four political frames—namely, harmony, continuity/decline, conspiracy, and ...conflict—that selected Turkish political and civil society elites use in discussing the phenomenon of polarization in the country through their contributions to a workshop and in-depth qualitative interviews, the article finds that there is a considerable degree of polarization among the Turkish elite regarding their views on the presence of polarization in Turkey. Moreover, this overlaps with the divide between the government and the opposition in the country. An analysis of the justificatory arguments employed in constituting the aforementioned frames shows that, while those elites who deny the existence of polarization seek its absence in essentialist characteristics of society, in reductionist comparisons with history, or in internal/external enemies, those who acknowledge polarization’s presence look for its roots in political and institutional factors and processes. The article highlights how, given the denial of polarization by the pro-government elite and the substantial gap between the two camps’ justificatory narratives, the currently reported high rates of polarization in Turkey can, at best, be expected to remain as is in the near future, barring a radical change in political constellations.
This article traces the recent history of border closures in Turkey and Morocco and their impact on human mobility at the two ends of the Mediterranean. Border closures in the Mediterranean have ...produced new spaces where borders are often fenced, immigration securitized, and border crossings and those facilitating border crossings criminalized. Here, bordering practices are conceptualized as physical bordering practices, border controls, and legal measures. Turkey and Morocco constitute comparable cases for an analysis of border closures insofar as they utilize similar mechanisms of closure, despite having quite different outcomes in terms of numbers. The article’s findings are based on fieldwork conducted at both locations between 2012 and 2014, as well as on analysis of Frontex Risk Assessment Reports from 2010 to 2016. The first part of the article reflects on the concepts of border closure and securitization, together with their implications, and draws for its argument on critical security studies and critical border studies. The second part of the article is an overview of controls over mobility exercised in the Mediterranean from the 1990s onward. Then, in the third and fourth parts, we turn to the particular cases—respectively, Turkey and Morocco—in order to discuss their processes of border closure and the various implications thereof. Through analysis of the two country cases, we show that border closures are neither linear nor irreversible.
In this article, the authors advance recent discussions of atmospheres by developing an approach that builds theory in relation to methodological understandings of how and what we can we know about ...atmospheres. They argue that, in order to be able to understand the significance of an atmosphere empirically, a theory is needed that can account for the specificities of particular atmospheres that are generated in the context of actual research sites, the everyday contingencies in relation to which they shift and change, and the different ways in which they might be perceived. To do this, they propose that atmospheres should be understood as part of and as emerging from within environments Simultaneously, to be able to build theory thorough empirical research, an approach is needed that is capable of researching how atmospheres are made and sensed by people in mundane everyday moments, and how they are generative of sensory, affective and empathetic forms of engagement. Situating video recording, like atmospheres, as emerging from within environments, the authors show how video ethnography can enable us to build the theoretical and empirical ambitions of this field of investigation.
Language can impact the research process in complex ways. This special issue (SI) brings together seven contributions which discuss the methodological implications of researching in a multilingual ...world, where researchers and/or research participants are likely to know more than one language. The papers examine the relationship between researchers' language ideologies and actual practices with multilingual participants, teams or projects, from a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives. The SI also considers positionality, including how researchers feel - and are perceived - when working in one or more first languages (L1), a later learned language (LX), or a language outside of their linguistic repertoire (L0). It provides practical examples of the stages of researching multilingually, focusing on key decisions that researchers make over the course of their projects, which are seldom made visible in research reports. We argue that linguistic reflexivity is an essential practice, through which researchers make informed language-related choices and continually reflect on the role of language(s) throughout their research projects. These illustrative accounts, from various geographic contexts, offer lessons from experience - distilled as questions and principles - to guide researchers in applied linguistics and beyond as they embark on the multifaceted journey of researching multilingually.
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