We offer some reflections on our research in applied linguistics and the arts. As authors we approach from different disciplinary histories, from backgrounds in modern languages, translation studies, applied linguistics and migrant language education. We consider some of our transdisciplinary projects which intersect, overlap and build on each other and ask what’s next for research of this kind, after Covid-19.
We focus on the work below for a number of reasons. First, much of the research we describe has had to be re-thought over the past year, as the pandemic has changed the ways in which we interact, and the extent to which people might be together in the same space. Second, these changes have caused us to reconsider the very assumptions framing our projects. And third, the move to the digital for so much of our working, social and cultural lives during the Covid lockdowns makes some of our questions even more urgent.
We present our reflections individually within the blogpost, and then return to the shared questions at the end.
Jess:
As we’ve moved so much ‘online’, I’ve been thinking a lot about representation. So I want to begin by talking about representing multilingualism, and the problem of the decontextualised image. The images above and below are stills from visual artist Elina Karadzhova’s multimedia installation Languages: Time Dreams Avatars, which was created for Edinburgh’s Multilingual Stories Festival in December 2018. Back in that same year, a time I think of as ‘pre-Covid’, I was part of a project initiated by the British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL) which launched a call for artists to submit work responding to the idea of multilingualism, or living multilingually. Selected outputs from around ninety artists or artistic collaborations - all photographs of artworks or installations - formed a digital exhibition, shown at a series of venues across the UK and in Finland in 2019 and 2020. Elina Karadzhova was one of the exhibiting artists.
Karadzhova’s project allows children and young people to question their experiences of everyday living across, through and beyond languages. She describes her work as using ‘visual arts as a means of liberating the intangible essence of our experiences and feelings of living ‘through’, ‘with’ and ‘in’ more than one language simultaneously in our everyday life’. In other words, she wants to explore the sensory and embodied aspects of multilingualism, and how the boundaries between one language and another might blur and merge. Her work goes beyond language, bringing a broader focus to the idea of living across languages.
Installation image from Elina Karadzhova, Languages: Time Dreams Avatars, 2018, image exhibited as part of the Visual Representations of Multilingualism exhibition
Louise Atkinson, Zhu Hua and I, as project organisers and curators of the Visual Representations of Multilingualism exhibition, were conscious of the limitations of the submission format for the call in terms of the artworks we sought to include. To what extent could we - even fleetingly - understand the sensory and embodied experience of the installation itself through only static images? How might we appreciate the blurring and merging, the everyday experiences of languaging of those participating in Karadzhova’s project? How do we engage with the experiences of those involved in the process, with the different perspectives and experiences of the children and young people whose lives, experiences - and therefore artworks - are entangled with the animations and installations? Is any of this even possible through a series of images and text? How might we engage with our imaginations to immerse ourselves in what we think the experience might have been, how we ourselves might have experienced it? The static image positions us as observers, with what we might consider as meaningful dialogue rendered impossible beyond our own limited interpretation. Our imaginations go so far, but always fall short.
The problem of the static image and how it represents an experience is not in any way new. I’m not exploring new ground by describing our reactions to the work and frustrations with the photographic rendering. But our puzzlement here also relates to the original aim of our project, and to what we wanted to gain, what we thought we might gain, by inviting artists to submit their work and enter into dialogue with us. We wanted to bring together different ways of understanding multilingualism, and indeed, living multilingually, that went beyond our disciplinary approaches in applied linguistics. And yet, the modal restriction imposed by the framework we were working within narrowed and limited the possibilities for engagement and understanding. We catch only tiny, partial glimpses of what the experience might have been like and what those participating wanted to convey, through the images and description. In some ways, unknown to us at the time, these puzzles were to become especially relevant to everyday lives.
James:
Much of our work together has been on themes of identity, belonging and non-belonging. My interest is in how we might understand these concepts better, and how we might adopt transdisciplinary approaches to do so. My own background is in language education and my research typically involves the analysis of language. But is language the best or even most appropriate means through which to explore the sense and the expression of who we are, and who we are to each other, in relation to affinity with a place, a space and a community? The artworks in the Visual Representations of Multilingualism exhibition hint that it might not be. Identity and belonging are central to the experience of adult migrant language learners, who have been the focus of much of my own research over the past 15 or so years and my teaching before that. People’s sense of identity can be profoundly disturbed in contexts of mobility, where the being and doing of identity happens in new and unpredictable linguistic and cultural environments. Likewise their belonging can be disrupted when, in some ways, they both no longer belong to a place they have left, and do not yet belong to a new one. What our research has sought to do is to understand these experiences better, and to seek methodologies which might enable deeper insights.
We worked on these ideas together on two projects: Migration and Home (2015-2016) and Migration and Settlement (2016-2017). We collaborated with students on the Steps to Settlement programme of RETAS Leeds, and with the Wakefield-based arts organisation Faceless Arts (now Edgelands Arts), to explore how people express, perform, understand and develop their attachments and belongings.
Digital images made with artworks created by Migration and Settlement project participants (artists credit Bev Adams, Louise Atkinson and Sam McKay).
Both projects challenged persistent assumptions about political belonging that rely on the notion of a homogeneous (and inevitably monolingual) community of ‘insiders’ to which an ‘outsider’ new arrival needs to adjust, for the sake of social cohesion. This understanding of belonging is disturbed in a contemporary globalised world, and the point of the projects was to shed light on this disruption, to challenge the idea of an ‘us’ and an ‘other’. The projects were ethnographically oriented and co-created, so we were able to focus not only on the students we worked with, refugees attempting to settle in a new home, but on the creative practitioners and their concerns, characterised by productivity and precarity in equal measure, on our hosts at an East Leeds community centre, and on ourselves, as researchers. How was our own belonging disrupted by our activity on the projects? Where was our own belonging, in all of this? The problem though remains, of how we might represent the multivocal, multimodal and multilingual experiences of those we were working with, and how we can convey the experiences of the projects themselves.
Space, and movement through space, ideas of dislocation and relocation, became central to our work. Yet we never questioned our own ability to work all together in the same physical space to explore our ideas. Did we ever suppose we wouldn’t be able to do so? After a year of isolation from one another, we find our taken-for-granted assumptions to be more than challenged.
Jess:
While the Visual Representations of Multilingualism and the two projects on Belonging may appear only loosely connected, the questions they raise and the challenges they pose interlink. These questions and challenges - for us as researchers and creative practitioners - are, in Barad’s terms, ‘ethico-onto-epistemo-logical’ (2007). They simultaneously occupy a space of tension and demand further attention and exploration. And in the intervening time since, our ways of working, our ways of doing, of interacting, of seeing, have changed in ways we could never have anticipated. This raises existential questions for the kinds of artistic work within Karadzhova’s project, where the emphasis is on co-creation and on collaboration, on engagement with understanding being through languaging, and also beyond language. It also offers an opportunity to reflect on previous research you and I have undertaken together, at these disciplinary intersections of languages, linguistics and the arts, including in contexts of English language learning in the North of England.
James:
Our work in the spaces of classrooms, and in arts and community centres, has helped us understand the complexity of belonging as simultaneously a connection with place, an affective experience, a social act and fundamentally a shifting process that must be constantly negotiated. Through our research in collaboration with artists and creative practitioners, we have gained some understanding too of our participants’ non-belonging, their in-between-ness, insights that would not have been possible if we had restricted our attention to language. The profound changes in our own lives since then, and our move to virtual communication, have sharpened a sense of their liminality and of our own. The emergent and multiple nature of belonging - as political, social, material, virtual, translocal, imaginary - cries out for attention as never before. But the pandemic that prompts us to ask our questions with greater insistence is the very thing that limits our ability to explore further.
Jess:
So, what is clear is that we need to adopt a new perspective on some of these puzzles. Much of what people have experienced this year - educationally and socially - has been through a screen. The concerns we had about engaging with the ideas explored in Karadzhova’s immersive art installation have been intensified with the ‘shift online’. Of course the shift is not all bad news. We recognise that engaging digitally can bring more people together, from across the world, into a space, albeit a virtual one. Amanda Fulford writes about the ‘return to normal’ after such a disrupted and traumatic year: she talks of ‘unavailability’ and ‘disponibilite’, asking how this experience has made us reconsider our ways of being present with each other. This chimes with the points we make here, and our reflections on our projects, all of which to some extent engage with the problems of representation. The pandemic has brought us countless ways to interact differently, offering on the one hand opportunities to connect virtually, while on the other hand meaning a loss of opportunities to do what Richard Sennett describes as participating in slow time with the wider spaces around us, and people within those spaces. The arts are spaces in which this becomes possible.
More information
The AILA Creative Inquiry and Applied Linguistics international research network, co-directed by Jessica with Lou Harvey and Emilee Moore, brings together creative practitioners and linguistics researchers to explore ideas about creativity, the arts and understandings of language and communicative practices. The network has a colloquium at the AILA World Congress in August 2021.
Jessica recently presented a paper on Visual Representations of Multilingualism as part of the ‘Art in Language Education: research, creativity and practice in the multilingual world’ conference in November 2020, and a film which includes selected artworks and extracts from Jessica’s presentation is available here.
References
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Bradley, J., Zhu Hua & Atkinson, L. (in press, 2021). Visual Representations of Multilingualism: Exploring aesthetic approaches to communication in a Fine Art context. In Anderson, J., Lytra, V., Macleroy, V. & Ros i Sole, C. (eds) Liberating Language Education: personal, aesthetic and political perspectives. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Bradley, J. & Atkinson, L. (2020). Translanguaging beyond bricolage: Meaning making and collaborative ethnography in community arts. In E. Moore, J. Bradley & J. Simpson (Eds). Translanguaging as transformation: The collaborative construction of new linguistic realities. Bristol: Multilingual Matters, pp. 135-154.
Fulford, A. (2021) A year at a distance: is there hope when this is all over? Institute for Social Responsibility Blog, Edge Hill University [Online]. 24 March 2021. Viewed 2 March 2021. Available from: https://blogs.edgehill.ac.uk/isr/a-year-at-a-distance-is-there-hope-when-this-is-all-over/ .
Sennett, R. (2006) The open city LSE Cities Blog [Online]. November 2006. Accessed 24 March 2021. Available from: https://LSECiti.es/u3d3d134f.
Authors
Jessica Bradley is Lecturer in Literacies in the School of Education at the University of Sheffield where she co-directs the Literacies Research Cluster, co-directs the BA in Education, Culture and Childhood and teaches on the MA in Digital Literacies, Culture and Education. Her research is interdisciplinary across modern languages, applied linguistics and creative arts and her AHRC-funded doctoral research investigated translanguaging practices in street arts production and performance.
jessica.bradley@sheffield.ac.uk @JessMaryBradley
James Simpson lectures in Language Education at the School of Education, University of Leeds, United Kingdom. His research interests span multilingualism and language education, and include adult migrant language education practice and policy, and creative inquiry in applied linguistics.
