This work was supported by the European Union / FP7 Framework (Fiducia Project, Grant agreement 290563, FP7-SSH-2011-12).

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Exploitation in Human Trafficking and Smuggling

Concepts, devices and practices have proliferated considerably since the signifier ‘feminist’ was first attached to ‘method’ and ‘methodology’, most prominently in the 1980s Early discussions suggested that feminist research and knowledge-making demanded a distinct approach to empirical inquiry: one that recognised and overturned systemic gender disparities, validated women’s ‘experience’, rejected hierarchies between the researcher and research participant, and had emancipation and social change as its purpose Some of these early defining aspirations have been used to experiment with method and continue to incite lively debate about the politics of knowledge production and even what might be the best feminist method (Wilkinson, 1999) Others have been recast by new technologies and the greater attention given to non-human modes of relating in areas such as science and technology studies, epigenomics and climatology Yet, a commitment to make feminism mean something in the doing of research, cultural analysis, teaching, artistic practice and in activism, has continued to complicate and supplement the idea of a distinct feminist methodological imperative 

It was from this point of enduring attachment, ‘returns’ as ‘products of repetition, of coming back to persistent troublings’ (Hughes and Lury, 2013, p787), and curiosity that our call for papers for this themed issue asked: ‘Where are we with feminist methods?’

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Introduction: The Wherewithal of Feminist Methods

Tracing a history of mediated life from nineteenth-century barricades to twenty-first century occupations, Sven Lütticken analyses the problematics and possibilities of contemporary social assemblage.

Social Media: Practices of (In)visibility in Contemporary Art

The main aim of this paper is to raise awareness about the importance of language contrasts in legal interpreting contexts. The semantic typology of motion events put forward by Talmy (1991, 2000) and its implications for discourse and narrative (Slobin 1991, 1996, 2004, 2005) are used as an example of how an applied typology approach can be useful for the analysis of language contrasts in a forensic linguistics context. Applied Language Typology (Filipovic 2008, 2017a, b) is used here to analyse transcriptions of police interviews that were mediated by an English-Spanish interpreter in California (USA) and an English-Portuguese interpreter in Norfolk (UK). The results of this analysis demonstrate that certain differences in semantic components of motion such as Manner, Cause and Deixis can lead interpreters to add, omit or modify the content of a message in the process of translation. This leads us to conclude that professional practices such as the production of bilingual transcripts and use of control interpreters, together with the inclusion of Applied Language Typology in interpreting training, would improve the quality of interpreting practices in legal contexts.

https://revistas.webs.uvigo.es/index.php/vial/article/download/87/87

Interpreting meaning in police interviews: Applied Language Typology in a Forensic Linguistics context

In this paper I discuss the many complexities that police officers have to deal with in their communication with suspects. Investigative interviewing is a very complex communicative situation in itself, with a number of different psychological and sociological variables at play during each interview. In addition, suspect interviews bring about an additional dimension of complexity, which is driven by the fact that a basic principle of conversation, cooperation (Grice 1975) is often not respected and is sometimes severely and purposefully violated, for example when suspects are guilty and want to obscure that very fact or when they believe that their situation would worsen if they cooperated with the police. A further layer of complexity is added when the interviews are carried out via an interpreter, where the fact that the officer and the suspect speak different languages during the interview creates additional barriers to straightforward communication. In the present paper, I identify a number of points at which communication difficulties are encountered in this highly sensitive legal context. For this purpose, I analyse authentic interview datasets provided by two UK police constabularies, and also make comparisons with examples from transcripts of authentic US police interrogations. In addition, I highlight the issues that arise when professional interpretation is not available and when bilingual police officers assume the dual role of investigator-interpreter. Finally, I suggest possible solutions that can help remove the hurdles standing the way of efficient and accurate gathering of communication evidence.

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Evidence-gathering in police interviews: Communication problems in evidence-gathering and possible solutions

This paper outlines the key elements of research that was carried out between 2010 and 2011 at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge by Hales and Gelsthorpe (2012) on the Criminalisation of Migrant Women in terms of goals, research methods, key findings and resultant policy and practice implications. It then goes on to document developments in the UK since publication of the findings and conclusions that we can draw from these in terms of meeting the challenges of combatting human trafficking. Este articulo traza los elementos claves -objetivos, metodos de investigacion, hallazgos principales e implicaciones resultantes sobre politicas y practicas- de la investigacion Criminalisation of Migrant Women (criminalizacion de mujeres migrantes) que realizaron Hales y Gelsthorpe (2012) entre 2010 y 2011 en el Instituto de Criminologia de la Universidad de Cambridge. Despues, documenta los avances en el Reino Unido desde la publicacion de los hallazgos, y las conclusiones que podemos extraer de aquellos en terminos de superacion de los desafios que plantea la lucha contra la trata de personas.Available from: https://doi.org/10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-0924

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The Criminalisation and Imprisonment of Migrant Victims of Trafficking

This chapter provides a discussion of communication problems that arise in a multilingual legal context. We analyse witness interview reports and interviews from both the UK and the US in order to assess the difficulties that non-English speakers can face in an English-speaking justice system. The problems encountered indicate the need for the provision of adequate language support and improved professional training that will focus on particularly problematic lexical and grammatical contrasts for translation. We argue that people’s language rights can be endangered as a result of the difficulties we discoverd, even for speakers of a major language (such as Spanish). We conclude that for the purpose of equality in access to justice these problems need to be addressed by both scientific and professional communities involved.

Language rights in danger

Invisible: Britain's Migrant Sex Workers by H.‐H. Pai. London: Westbourne Press (2013) 350pp. £10.99pb ISBN 978‐1‐908906‐06‐9

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Liz Hales

Papers

The Criminalisation and Imprisonment of Migrant Victims of Trafficking

Language rights in danger

Invisible: Britain's Migrant Sex Workers by H.‐H. Pai. London: Westbourne Press (2013) 350pp. £10.99pb ISBN 978‐1‐908906‐06‐9

Language rights in danger: Access to justice and linguistic (in)equality in multilingual judicial contexts