By Fardous Bahbouh, Researcher & Consultant on Labour Rights, Public Policy, and the Political Economy of the Translation Industry

Industry–academic collaboration is often framed as mutually beneficial, offering impact, stakeholder engagement, and practical relevance. Yet such collaborations are rarely neutral exchanges of expertise. Drawing on my experience as a doctoral researcher funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) through the White Rose College of the Arts and Humanities (WRoCAH) to investigate equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) within outsourced public service interpreting (PSI) in the UK, this account examines the ethical and structural tensions that can arise when academic inquiry intersects with commercial interests.

This reflexive analysis is situated within critical political economy and EDI scholarship, which emphasise the importance of researcher positionality as a lens for understanding power and ethics in knowledge production. I have also written a detailed critique of calls for more industry collaboration, such as in The Routledge Handbook of the Translation Industry (2025), which readers can find here.

Critical political economy highlights how institutional interests, material conditions, and asymmetries of power shape the production and validation of knowledge. Similarly, EDI scholarship emphasises that inequality is embedded in organisational practices, governance structures, and market logics rather than arising solely from individual attitudes. From these perspectives, industry collaboration must be approached with critical distance, recognising the potential for conflicts between commercial imperatives and equality-oriented research.

Structural Constraints in PSI Research

In the UK, PSI is largely outsourced to private language service providers (LSPs). Existing research has documented systemic precarity within the sector, including unstable income, limited employment protections and restricted career progression.

My subsequent research has developed these questions further through the interconnected dimensions of rights, value and voice: what rights and protections interpreters possess within outsourced arrangements; how economic and public value is created and distributed; and whose voices have meaningful influence over the institutions and rules governing their work.

During my collaboration, the industry partner prioritised framing challenges in terms of external factors, such as migration policies or the cost of education, despite the absence of evidence linking these factors to recruitment bottlenecks. This framing risked normalising existing institutional arrangements by locating the problem outside them and directing attention away from questions about pay, working conditions and structural inequality. It therefore created both practical and ethical constraints on my ability to pursue those questions critically.

Power Asymmetries and Ethical Tensions

As an early-career researcher, I experienced a significant imbalance of power relative to the industry partner. My attempts to critically engage with assumptions, challenge narratives, and highlight systemic inequalities were often dismissed as “perception” or “misunderstanding.” I was repeatedly advised to manage my bias, without any explanation of what I was purportedly biased against, despite my argument being grounded in the principles of just and favourable conditions and pay enshrined in Article 23 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Throughout the eight-month collaboration, I was confronted with statements that illustrated the limits imposed on reflexive critique. These included: “You are not an activist here,” “You are not a passionate advocate here,” “You need to learn to think like a researcher,” “The funding is not for this,” “You need to control your urges to find solutions,” “Talks about pay and working conditions are happening somewhere else,” “We must remember that translation companies do complex work!” and “We must remember it’s a hugely complex procurement landscape…” I experienced these interventions as constraining critical engagement, particularly around pay, working conditions and structural inequality.

Within this imbalance of power, my awareness that I retained authorship and analytical responsibility for the research became an important source of resilience. Knowing that I was ultimately accountable for how the research was framed and written allowed me to maintain a sense of intellectual autonomy, even as my contributions were constrained within the collaboration.

To manage the pressure and preserve critical distance, I made deliberate choices about how I engaged. I increasingly avoided meetings and relied on written communication, which provided space for reflection and reduced the immediacy of institutional pressure. These strategies were not acts of withdrawal but forms of boundary-setting that enabled me to continue the research ethically and with analytical clarity. Such practices reflect how early-career researchers may exercise constrained agency within structurally unequal collaborations, highlighting the affective and relational dimensions of power in knowledge production. I also held firmly to my belief that my research should contribute to the public good, particularly as it is publicly funded.

The ethical tension reached a climax when I was told, in writing, that I was allowing my situated knowledge of PSI to override my critical thinking. I found this particularly troubling because situated knowledge and critical analysis are not necessarily opposites; knowledge derived from professional experience can itself provide evidence, questions and insights that require rigorous examination.

More than two years later, I am still awaiting a response from my university on whether a formal conflict of interest occurred. To prevent similar challenges for future researchers, I have requested an internal review to evaluate how collaborations are structured and governed, particularly when research outcomes may affect labour rights of a highly racialised and feminised workforce.

Reflections and Implications

The asymmetries I experienced prompted me to ask whether they were incidental to one collaboration or reflected broader structural relationships between commercial interests, academic institutions and knowledge production. This question matters particularly for early-career researchers, who may face incentives to maintain relationships, secure funding or achieve institutional recognition while also being expected to exercise independent critical judgement. Examining these dynamics is important for understanding whether, and under what conditions, collaboration can shape knowledge production in ways that reproduce existing hierarchies.

This reflexive account is also motivated by concerns about scholarly representations of the translation and interpreting industry. This reflexive account is also motivated by concerns about scholarly representations of the translation and interpreting industry. In my separate critique of The Routledge Handbook of the Translation Industry (2025), I identified what I regard as multiple ethical blind spots, including ways in which current industry practices may become normalised while structural challenges facing translators and interpreters receive less attention. As Hanna Risku briefly notes in her contribution to the roundtable discussion in the final chapter, maintaining critical distance from industry actors is essential. I believe that without adequate critical engagement and objective analysis, we cannot preserve academic independence, exercise rigorous critique, or adequately scrutinise the influence that commercial interests may acquire within academic institutions.

Conclusion

Ethical tensions in industry–academic collaborations are inseparable from structural power dynamics. Reflexivity is not only a methodological tool but an ethical imperative: recognising power asymmetries, advocating for transparency, and preserving critical independence are central to producing research that is both analytically rigorous and socially responsible. Institutional mechanisms should support early-career researchers in navigating these challenges, ensuring that collaboration does not inadvertently reinforce structural inequalities in labour and knowledge production.