Thinking Beyond Rigor: Epistemic Freedom in Multilingual Research

The Language Belongs to Everyone (LBE) Collective consists of eight researchers across seven countries: the United Arab Emirates, South Africa, Chile, Japan, Egypt, Indonesia and Ethiopia. English is not the dominant language for most of the LBE, so they communicate in real time through AI translation. They use generative AI not to translate but as the medium that lets them discuss and share ideas in their own languages.

In this talk, members of the LBE share what that collaborative practice teaches us about multilingual research, and why it makes us question how rigor is judged. Existing standards evaluate research only after it is rendered into English, assessing the translation rather than the multilingual sense-making that produced it.

So, they argue that epistemic freedom, the condition under which every collaborator can think and mean in their own language, must precede any assessment of quality, opening discussion on what decolonial multilingual exchange could offer organisational research.