Who Tells Whose Stories? Translation Dilemmas and Epistemic Injustice in Insider Research

In this paper, I write an analytic autoethnography of insider research from my positionality as a Sri Lankan Tamil researcher writing within and about my own community which had experienced systemic discrimination and marginalisation by the state. From an archive of memories and reflexive fieldnotes, I examine how as an insider researcher, my own narratives and those of my community are frequently rendered suspect within qualitative research and how epistemic injustice affects whose knowledge is treated as legitimate. Foregrounding translation as the central analytical lens, I focus on the dilemmas I encounter when moving between language, meanings, contexts and the ethical and epistemic tensions this movement produces. I argue that translation is entangled with experiences of silence and proximity which emerge as supporting analytical lenses for understanding the challenges of representing communities marked by structural marginalisation and trauma. Through this analysis, I conceptualise translation as a key site of epistemic negotiation in insider research and also present how silence and proximity can function as both data and analytic resources.