Of Stumbling Blocks and Stepping Stones: Navigating Multilingual Challenges in Reconstructive Forced Migration Research

Reflexive migration research emphasizes the critical examination of knowledge production—particularly
concerning researchers’ positionalities, the categories they employ, and the institutional contexts in which
they operate. We aim to extend this research stream by systematically engaging with linguistic positioning,
which remains an underexplored feature in migration studies. Hence, our article critically engages with the
multilingual challenges encountered in a sub‐study of our project, The Art of Arriving, which reconstructively
examined the experiences of individuals who fled Ukraine to Austria during the early months of Russia’s war
of aggression. Our contribution pursues two main objectives. First, we highlight the linguistic challenges that
arose at various stages of the research process—including material collection, field access, data collection,
translation, and reconstructive data analysis—and critically reflect on the strategies we adopted to address
them. The active involvement of researchers with both cultural and linguistic expertise, combined with a
reflexive and continuous dialogue within the entire research team, was crucial for navigating the multilingual
research landscape. Second, we argue that translation processes in such projects should not merely be
viewed as obstacles to overcome. Instead, these processes should be recognized as integral to the research
itself. When critically reflected upon and facilitated through dialogue with culturally and linguistically
familiar researchers, multilingualism can even enable deeper and more nuanced reconstructive analyses.