In this CLER Conversation, we share our experience and outcomes of collaborative working to explore this question. The project was supported by an Arts and Humanities Research Council grant: “Ethics and Aesthetics of Encountering the Other: New Frameworks for Engaging with Difference” (AH/T005637/1). Its data are inspired by an anthropological probe into communication practices in rural Slovakia with a history of conflict between its ethnic Slovak majority and its stigmatised and spatially segregated Roma minority. The country has had a complicated historical relationship with the ethnic and linguistic other (Kubátová & Laníček, 2018). Its social, education and language policies concerning the Roma minority have contributed to spatial segregation (Rusnáková & Rochovská, 2014), unequal educational outcomes for young people from Roma communities (Markovič & Plachá, 2020) and a systemic stigmatisation and erasure of Roma communities’ linguistic practices from schooling and public life (Hübschmannová, 1970; Kusá, 2016; Vašečka, 2003). Encountering the Other is at once an ethical demand (Erasmus, 2018; Levinas, 1998) and, in this context of separation, a political impasse. We use our combined disciplinary tools of sociolinguistics, education, poetry and art, not to analyse but to invite the audience into an encounter. We open up a conversation about the role for collaborative language education research that unsettles rather than cumulates knowledge.