Intersecting disciplines in multilingual healthcare settings: dynamics of power, care, and meaning-making productions in intercultural communication

This article presents a reflexive ethnographic account of two critical episodes from different clinical settings in Italy in which the researcher was drawn into acting as a linguistic intermediary. Taking these episodes as its focal point, the paper examines how the boundaries between observation and participation dissolve rapidly in multilingual healthcare settings, where the researcher’s linguistic competence becomes a resource that others may mobilize. The analysis, conducted through interactional transcript and reflexive fieldnotes, tracks how roles are renegotiated, epistemic authority is redistributed, and accountability is redefined when a fourth voice – neither clinician, nor patient, nor professional mediator – enters the pragmatic choreography of the consultation.The contribution operates on three levels. First, it offers a linguistic-ethnographic analysis that foregrounds role fluidity and positionality in the clinical encounter. Second, it engages with interpreting and mediation studies to argue that the “researcher-as-intermediary” constitutes a qualitatively distinct actor whose epistemic status, institutional mandate, and moral accountability differ from those of professional interpreters. Third, it articulates the ethical and epistemic stakes of such moments through the lenses of epistemic injustice and cultural humility. The article argues that these episodes should not be treated as methodological contaminations but as analytically generative data that illuminate the fragility of multilingual care, the instability of ethnographic roles, and the systemic conditions of linguistic precarity in healthcare.