Olga Solovova

The migrant patient, the doctor and the (im)possibility of intercultural communication: silences, silencing and non-dialogue in an ethnographic context

This paper attempts to reflect on the impossibilities of intercultural communication implied in institutional medical encounters. Drawing from an ethnographic case study among patients of a transcultural consultation for migrants in Portugal, the analysis focuses on the contents and forms of the interaction observed by the anthropologist in the clinical setting. A repetitive pattern of communication between a refugee women patient and her psychiatrist foregrounded the unsaid within the interaction as well as the unwillingness of the refugee to speak about her life with the anthropologist. In this sense, we propose to understand silence as a form of communication pointing to both the condition of the patient but more significantly embedded in the institutional framework of the clinical setting, discursive positions of the participants, as well as their social statuses. Following the theoretical work of Jaworski, Wagner and Winter, our analysis of silence leads us to the critical examination of the question of privilege in intercultural situations pointing to a necessary deconstruction of post-colonial institutional object/subject positions. In practical terms, this challenge corresponds to the work of international cross-cultural psychiatry (in terms of clinical matters) as well as that of biographical research and research on memory among migrants and refugees.

Publish in English or Perish in Portuguese: Struggles and Constraints on the Semiperiphery

This paper examines the choice between English lingua franca and Portuguese (a pluricentric language in research article publishing), a choice which presents both a challenge and an opportunity to authors operating within the semiperipheral space of Portuguese research communities. Data on articles from three disciplinary areas: Linguistics, Information Science and Library Science, and Pharmacology and Pharmacy, written in Portuguese and English, have been retrieved from the Web of Science (WoS) covering a 20-year period (1998–2017). Figures show a rise in publications in the second decade (2008–2017) in both languages: the number of English papers is higher throughout, but the rise in the number of Portuguese papers is steeper over these latter years. Given the disparity in the number of Portuguese and English-language WoS-indexed journals, the rise in English is probably not due to individual authorial choices, but to the lack of indexed journals in Portuguese, as well as to the constraints of the publishing market. Language choice is embedded in symbolic places of knowledge construction—in the processes of voicing research claims, in the multilayered historical processes within disciplinary communities of practice, and in the marketization of research publishing. These issues may shape future ways of disseminating knowledge in a publishing arena that will continue to be globalized, though perhaps not so monolingual.