Graduate Researcher Series: an interview with David Felipe Guerrero-Beltran

David Felipe Guerrero-Beltran is a doctoral student at the Université de Paris and the University of Melbourne. His research focuses on the documentation and grammatical analysis of Amazonian and Australian languages from both typological and formal approaches.

Juerong interviewed David Felipe about his doctoral research, his PhD journey in Paris and his fieldwork plan in Australia.

As far as I know, joint PhDs are much more than a period of research abroad, which could be achieved simply as a visiting PhD student at a host institution. So, I’m wondering if you start by telling us why you choose to do a joint PhD.

It was a mixture of chance and choice. When I finished my master’s studies in Colombia, I was looking for a PhD position in Europe. My brother and his family live in Oslo, Norway, so I wanted to find a place close to them and obviously keep working on the topic of my interest, which is linguistic documentation and anthropological linguistics. Then, I saw a joint project between the University of Paris and the University of Melbourne, working with an Aboriginal community in Australia. I had already worked with an indigenous group in the Amazon during my BA and my MA, so it was still quite related to my work and interests. Then, I applied and got accepted.

There is a 10-hour time difference between Paris and Melbourne, so how did you manage to attend courses during your first year and schedule meetings with supervisor(s) at UoM?

It was quite wild. Last year, I was taking courses in three different time zones: one course in Melbourne, two in Paris, and another one in Colombia. All courses were in online mode. It wasn’t that hard to attend them, but sometimes it was demanding. For instance, the course in Australia was at midnight. It felt like travelling around the world in my room.

What’s your research topic and the significance of this research?

My topic is about how the speakers of Gu-jingaliya, an Aboriginal language from the Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory, codify and express temporal notions through their language and particularly how it works at the semantic level.

This study has different implications, so it is important in different domains. From a theoretical point of view, the language has very particular grammatical and semantic characteristics. It’s interesting to analyse how these linguistic differences are evolved in their semantic conceptualization of time. Also, this research will enrich the state of the documentation and description of the language by itself, which is useful for the speech community, because they can use some of the results and findings of this project to create pedagogic materials. Although at this point, I haven’t been able to visit the Northern Territory, my intention is to actually meet the people and work with them, finding ways in which my project can be useful for them according to their own interests. This project is not aimed only to have applications in the academic world, but I also aim to give something useful and practical to the community to support different linguistic projects in the community.

I notice that both your BA and MA theses focused on the analysis of an Amazonian language. How does your previous research relate to your current project?

Before I started my PhD, for both my undergraduate and master’s studies, I worked with the Carijona people, an Amazonian community in Colombia. That’s what made me get involved in anthropological linguistics and linguistic activism. It was a wonderful experience documenting the language and also supporting the revitalisation process of the Carijona language. Their language is in a very delicate state; there are fewer than 15 speakers alive. They are trying very hard to preserve their language and culture. When I finished a master’s degree, I was also interested in working in a different context, so I could have different perspectives. This enriches my research.

Colombia has great potential in terms of linguistic research due to its huge linguistic diversity. In Colombia there are more than 60 different languages from more than 10 different linguistic families. It’s a highly diverse country. I want to explore how working with Indigenous people in Australia and learning their languages relates to what’s happening in Colombia. Hopefully, the two studies will complement each other. I keep working on it as a side project with my Carijona friends in Colombia. It’s something seperate to my PhD.

How does your research go? Are you learning Gu-jingaliya?

I’m learning it and getting familiar with its grammar. Also, I’m reviewing previous descriptions of the language and analysing second-hand data from Margaret Carew, who is a wonderful researcher that has worked with the speakers of this language for a few decades. I’m working with her data. I hope that once I will be able to travel to the Northern Territory, I can at least say some basic sentences. But it’s a huge and fantastic challenge, because it’s different from my mother tongue, which is Spanish. I think it’s important to integrate doing research and learning the language.

What is the most interesting or impressive thing you have encountered in your fieldwork?

To be honest, I could keep talking about it for hours. Working with people doing linguistic documentation is a wonderful experience, especially for the emotional connection. You start building up relationships with people there. At some point, even if your top interest is your research, when you start sharing time with the people, knowing their stories, when they know you better, and you have different kinds of interactions through time, it goes beyond academia. It becomes something personal as well. You start caring about the people, because they are not just consultants, they have their own problems, interests, emotions, hopes and wishes. So that’s the richest part of doing fieldwork, especially when you come from a different background. This intercultural encounter is valuable for both sides.

Most parts of the documentation processes are carried out in the context of minority communities that have been deeply affected by, for instance, colonialism and racism, with lots of social, political and economic complexities, most of them as a result of a very complex historic process of discrimination. As external researchers, it’s important to be aware that we’re arriving in a position of privilege in many ways. Even if our intentions are the best, and in our heart we have truly sincere intentions to work together with the people, we have to be aware that we have walls to break down ourselves. And we need to be careful about how we will interact with people. We need to think about how we can do our research from an ethical point of view; with respect, empathy, and reciprocity.

Thank you for sharing your fascinating research, David Felipe.

Thank you, Juerong.