Stranci: Political Research and Language Learning in the Former Yugoslavia

Abstract

There is a striking contrast between the amount of time researchers spend thinking about and addressing questions of language in relation to fieldwork, and the little guidance provided on this matter in methods textbooks and research programmes. This chapter analyses the challenges of fieldwork in the former Yugoslavia in relation to and through the lens of language skills, with a focus on researchers working within politics and international relations. The chapter addresses questions such as: how do language skills change the researcher’s experience of the field, their relationship with interviewees and their own positionality? How do they affect the kind of methods used, research findings and their interpretation? What are the ethics of language learning during fieldwork? What motivates PhD students to undertake expensive and long periods of training on the side of the demands of their research degree? The findings presented here are based on interviews conducted with researchers with experience of doing fieldwork in the former Yugoslavia, who had to consider such questions and decide whether to learn a local language, work with interpreters and translators, and/or carry out interviews in English or other non-Yugoslav languages.