Working with/beyond ‘language’: insights from a listening walk with young men from asylum-seeking backgrounds in a rural treescape

Abstract

This article articulates the affordances and challenges of researching with and beyond language on a listening walk with young men from asylum-seeking backgrounds in a rural treescape. Offering methodological and conceptual provocations for creative multilingual research, the article does not (re)present a traditional research encounter with fixed methodologies and confident findings. Rather, it stories a research encounter, anchored in participatory practice and developed conceptually through post-research puzzlement that critically unpacks and embraces vulnerabilities associated with the roles of language, feelings and understanding in social research.