We’re now in the final stages of the linguistic landscapes-focused research project, Multilingual Streets: Translating and Curating the Linguistic Landscape, which explored how people experience languages in public space in their everyday lives.
During the last stages of the project our attention has been focused on finishing the artistic outputs and developing the different toolkits and creative activity sheets, which will be available to download and use in the Autumn, once our project website is launched. It can be easy, in these later stages of a research project, to be somehow caught up in the production of outputs, in checking expenditure and in assessing how what we’ve managed to achieve aligns with what we said we would achieve, back when the project was first designed and submitted for funding. In the intervening time, the world has changed. In this blog post, I reflect on some of the questions arising from the research, theoretical directions and the complexities of undertaking research of this kind during the COVID19 pandemic.
- Point of departure
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The project takes linguistic landscapes as its point of departure, and brings together arts practice and linguistic ethnographic research into languages in public space. It builds on a developing body of work in linguistic landscapes which is expanding to encompass the visual, the sensory and the embodied. Even just a brief glance at the journal, Linguistic Landscape, gives an insight into the diversity and complexity of the field. We see ‘servicescapes’ (Auleeaar et al., 2021), ‘homescapes’ (Boivin, 2021), semiotic rural landscapes (Reershemius, 2020), multilingual ‘picturebooks’ (Daly, 2019) and even ‘bikescapes’ (Pennycook, 2019), inter alia. A multiplicity of scapes, all brought together through linguistic landscapes as a holding space - a space for attention to what surrounds us in everyday life. Arguably, a wide range of methodological approaches and methods for researching linguistic landscapes exist (see Blommaert, 2016; Pennycook, 2021), with ethnographic approaches (Blommaert, 2013) prevalent (see also Matras & Gaiser, 2020) and digital methods including apps for documenting and tagging signs developing, including LinguaSnapp (Gaiser & Matras, 2021). Bringing creative practice into contact with linguistic landscapes oriented research (e.g. Bradley et al., 2018; Bradley & Atkinson, 2020) is relatively new, although attention to wider semiosis, beyond ‘text’, is central to much research in this area (Jaworski & Thurlow, 2010).
Yaron Matras and Leonie Gaiser (2020) describe a framework for bringing together the choices made by the authors of signs and the ‘encounter or engagement’ (p.215) envisaged and subsequently enacted (or not) with and by others with reconceptualisations of ‘community’. Community, they posit, can be de-essentialised if linked to practice (p.213), with engagement with signs as a ‘linguistic-cultural practice’ (p.232). This moves it away from older conceptualisations which link with place and with a named language (p.110), aligning more with Mary Louise Pratt’s ‘contact zone’ (1991). They argue, and the handful of diverse research articles listed before also demonstrate, that, as with sociolinguistics in general, linguistic landscapes research has moved far beyond the position of a ‘language community’ as linked to, and therefore to some extent defined by a geographical space (e.g. Jacquemet, 2019). Instead, the fluidity and unexpectedness of public spaces can help to re-orient our understandings of community:
‘Community’ is thus seen as the cultural performance of belonging and identity in the form of shared narratives and histories around the dynamic interplay of encounters, engagements and social ties (Matras & Gaiser, 2020: 214).
- Community
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And of course, pandemic-related lockdowns, periods of isolation, and the fundamental changes to everyday life that we have experienced since early 2020 have given us much reason to think about the concept of ‘community’, and how we might understand this in the wake of COVID19. Attention to linguistic landscapes, and of course, attention to signs, as linguistic-cultural practices, has much to offer in terms of making sense of huge shifts in practices, everyday lives and our understanding of and experience of community.
I have written previously about the sudden change brought about by the pandemic, reflecting on both the Multilingual Streets project and the lockdowns in England in Spring 2020. At the time that the first lockdown started, we were completing project workshops in a school in Manchester, working with students at the school to conduct linguistic landscape-focused research and then using creative methods to engage with both the process of undertaking that research - of being in the street - and the data the students had collected. To be thrown into a geographically-restricted suburban existence away from the city, in the middle of a project which required - indeed was built on - engagement with busy public spaces, with cities, with commercial centres - places which embody the fluidity and complexity of people in everyday life - was unexpected and disorienting. The project was designed on the assumption that busy public spaces, the ‘semiotic assemblage’ (Pennycook, 2017) of the city (Otsuji & Pennycook, 2021), would always be accessible and would always be ‘normal and unremarkable’ as a fundamental part of everyday life. Suddenly what was remarkable was the emptiness of such spaces, and the abrupt change in how we experienced them, if indeed we experienced them at all. Much has been, and will be, written on this, with multiple interdisciplinary perspectives found on the collective website PanMeMic and developing research under the umbrella of linguistic landscapes (for example by Jackie Jia Lou in London’s Chinatown).
Returning to Matras and Gaiser: if community can be understood in terms of the ‘cultural performance of belonging and identity’, how are narratives and stories shared, how are belonging and identity performed, when those everyday encounters cease, or are radically reduced? When the cities - as we know them - stop? Of course, for many people, work continued beyond the home, albeit much altered: for keyworkers, shopworkers, delivery drivers, refuse collectors, teachers, nurses, doctors (and many more) and arguably ‘lockdown’ was mainly experienced by the privileged whose work could be undertaken from home (Smith, 2020). But the kinds of complex encounters which we took for granted before experiencing the pandemic, were changed beyond recognition. These changed encounters, and how stories continued to be created and shared in diverse ways, are the focus of much research, for example the Play Observatory project (Potter et al., 2020-2021) which explores children’s experiences of play during the pandemic. And researchers in linguistic landscapes are exploring the much changed semiotic space of the city, of the street, of the neighbourhood corner shop, and perhaps, as things may slowly trip back towards something that looks and feels more like how public spaces felt before, the gradual shift away from ‘pandemic’ to ‘post-pandemic’ landscapes. But of course, we are not yet ‘post-’ anything, and ‘post-’ pandemic is unlikely to resemble ‘pre-pandemic’.
- Language and spatial boundaries
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The project therefore bridged the time we might categorise as ‘pre-pandemic’, when we crowded onto public transport and did not even consider what a 2m gap between people might look like, when we did not question the sharing of artistic resources and space in the creation of shared knowledge and artworks, and ‘during pandemic’ time. In boundary-spanning, it therefore offers different vantage points from which to reflect, perhaps opening up to wider perspectives and how this kind of research might re-emerge, and be reconsidered in the future.
The project involved two periods of fieldwork in the form of participatory workshops with students from two schools in Manchester (Key stage 3, years 8 and 9, so aged between 12 and 14 years old). For the first period, the research was intensive, organised into four single-day workshops for around 40 students per event, held at the University of Manchester, the streets around Rusholme, and the Whitworth Art Gallery. In one day, students learnt about the key principles of linguistic landscape research and then conducted their own investigation of languages in Rusholme, including experimenting with LinguaSnapp, followed by creating collages using electrical tape and sticky back plastic sheets in the Whitworth Gallery. The second period, cut short by COVID19 before it could finish, took a slower pace, involved weekly 2-hour workshops with a smaller group of students. Each workshop had a different theme, starting with an introduction to linguistic landscapes and fieldwork exercise, and followed up with a series of arts workshops which focused on a different practice each week, including collage and printing.
For both periods of fieldwork the students used an individual workbook, which sought to guide them through the process and introduce them to key aspects of linguistic landscape research methods and approaches, while also giving spaces for writing notes and sketching. Over the course of the project we therefore generated a range of ‘data’, beyond the ‘linguistic landscape’ data collected by the students. Our dataset includes student workbooks, photographs, fieldnotes from the workshops, and the artworks produced by the students. We also created a series of artworks which were based on the images produced by the students. These took the form of large-scale site-specific installations for both schools and a zine (e.g. Burnage Academy zine) - also for each school - which included the visual and linguistic data collected by the students and different artworks. These artworks were created by project artist, Dr Louise Atkinson, who worked to retain the authenticity of the images produced by the students.
- Artworks as translation
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These artworks perform in multiple ways. On one level they represent - to a greater or lesser extent - the experiences of the students as they undertook the research. They bring together the different elements of the research that the students chose to focus on: words, shapes of buildings, typography. The locally-situated elements, found in the landscapes in which we conducted the research, intertwine and merge with symbols of the wider city, Manchester - a bee and a heart, a Pride flag - as the students interwove their own knowledges, memories and embodied understandings of their city, and their own places within it. The content of the artworks demonstrates a porosity between named languages and between modes. For the two artworks created for the schools, languages are co-present with shapes of the city streets themselves, with other emblems, including flags chosen by the students themselves to index wider connections and geographies. The artworks, and the images within them - both nestled and bumping up against each other, overlapping, merging - offer a translation. This translation is beyond the interlingual, beyond language(s): it is the translation of experience, of the embodied experience of everyday life in a city, which for a time, was lost. The artworks translate a city bounded by time and space, and as experienced individually and collectively by the students. Drawing on the idea that engagement with signs as a linguistic-cultural practice (Matras & Gaiser, 2020: 232), these images and subsequent artworks perform belonging in a way that transcends (or provincialises, following Thurlow, 2016; Harvey & Bradley, 2021) language(s). The shared narratives are bound into visual displays of streets, both experienced, but also imagined - subsequently collectively reimagined and (re)created.
If translation cannot be limited to ‘between languages’ (Otsuji & Pennycook, 2021) and is instead part of all communication, we are then able to view the artworks as translating across, through and beyond languages, semiosis, and wider embodied experiences and memories of the city. One possible starting point for how we might start to theorise these artworks, is by thinking with the concept of assembling artefacts (Otsuji & Pennycook, 2021), which foregrounds the role that objects might play in ‘assembling other objects and resources’ (Pennycook & Otsuji, 2017; Otsuji & Pennycook, 2021). In the case of the artworks, the translation process between languages, objects, buildings, iconography, and between the localised and the city is made visible, and the artworks then have agency in what they might do - how they might both translate and be translated. In this sense too, they can understood also in terms of linguistic-cultural practice, as ‘doing’ community (Matras & Gaiser, 2020).
Research attention to ways of conceptualising dynamic multilingualism such as translanguaging (Bradley, 2018; Harvey & Bradley, 2021) also has the potential to go beyond breaking down the borders between languages towards epistemology and ontology (Otsuji & Pennycook, 2021; Moore et al., 2020). Adrian Holliday and Malcolm Macdonald describe this as research which seeks to succeed ‘in dismantling one of the great shibboleths which is shared alike by methodological nationalism and modern sociolinguistics, the one-to-one correspondence of a language (or language variety) with nation, ‘culture’ or ‘community’ (2020, 631). This echoes Matras and Gaiser’s calls for a rethinking of community beyond place (2021) and how linguistic landscapes research might enable this. The Multilingual Streets project so far suggests we might also rethink community through collective production and collective creation, with linguistic landscapes as our point of departure.
- Next steps
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So - what is next? We will be thinking about - and writing about - the project in different ways in coming months, and from different disciplinary perspectives. This will include a focus on the artworks themselves and what creative methods and participatory research might bring to the field of linguistic landscapes. And, in reverse, we will be exploring what linguistic landscapes research can bring to artistic practice, and transdisciplinary approaches to research and to the concept of community. There is significant potential for bringing creative inquiry (Bradley & Harvey, 2019) into linguistic landscapes as a critical lens on the changing city and our experiences of it, through and beyond language. As I consider the artworks created through the project, there is the sense of capturing a suspended moment in time and space - as the work was all carried out pre-COVID19 but the artworks were created afterwards.
Future outputs include a legacy website (launching Autumn 2021), with downloadable toolkits based on the research workshops, an exhibition area, and a space for the public to submit their own linguistic landscapes artworks. Both project artist Louise Atkinson and I have created and delivered workshops (e.g. this one) based on the projects at a number of invited seminars and conferences, including the Language Education for Social Justice conference, Jyväskylä University (June 2021); MA Creative Inquiry, University of Leeds (May 2021). The artworks will be exhibited at the AILA World Congress in August 2021, as part of the Creative Inquiry and Applied Linguistics symposium.
I have received NPIF ABC funding for a 2-day workshop exploring impact with key partners in August 2021. The ideas and questions coming from this project, and other connected work, will be developed into interdisciplinary research funding applications
- Acknowledgements
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Thank you to students and staff at Burnage Academy and Abraham Moss Community School, to Multilingual Manchester and to the Whitworth Gallery for hosting the workshops in summer 2019. We are grateful for the funding we received from the AHRC OWRI Cross Language Dynamics Programme, through the Reshaping Community: Multilingual Communities strand.
- References
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Auleeaar Owodally, A.M & Peeroo, S. ( 2021). Multilingualism in Mauritius: Using a virtual linguistic servicescape lens. Linguistic Landscape, 7(1), pp.6-36.
Blommeart, J. (2013). Ethnography, Superdiversity and Linguistic Landscapes: Chronicles of Complexity. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Blommeart, J. (2016). The conservative turn in linguistic landscape studies. Alternative Democracy Research [Online] 5 January 2016. [Viewed 21 July 2021].. Available from: https://alternative-democracy-research.org/2016/01/05/the-conservative-turn-in-linguistic-landscape-studies/.
Boivin, N. (2021). Homescape: Agentic space for transmigrant families multisensory discourse of identity. Linguistic Landscape, 7(1), pp.37-59.
Bradley, J. & Atkinson, L. (2020). Translanguaging Beyond Bricolage: Meaning Making and Collaborative Ethnography in Community Arts. In Moore, E., Bradley, J. & Simpson, J. (eds). Translanguaging as Transformation: The Collaborative Construction of New Linguistic Realities. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Bradley, J. (2018) Translation and Translanguaging in Production and Performance in Community Arts. University of Leeds. Unpublished thesis.
Bradley, J., Moore, E., Simpson, J. & Atkinson, L. (2018). Translanguaging space and creative activity: Theorising arts-based learning. Language and Intercultural Communication, 18(1), pp.54-73.
Bradley, J. & Harvey. L. (2019). Creative Inquiry in Applied Linguistics: Language, Communication and the Arts. In Wright, C., Harvey, S. & Simpson, J. (eds). Voices and Practices in Applied Linguistics: Diversifying a Discipline.York: White Rose University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.22599/BAAL1.f.
Daly, N. (2019). The linguistic landscape of multilingual picturebooks. Linguistic Landscape, 5(3), pp.281-301.
Gaiser, L. & Matras, Y. (2020). Defining the position of ‘community’ in the study of linguistic landscapes. Linguistic Landscape, 6(2), pp.109-127.
Gaiser, L. & Matras, Y. (2021). Using smartphones to document linguistic landscapes: the LinguaSnapp mobile app. Linguistics Vanguard, 7(s1), pp.20190012. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2019-0012
Harvey, L. & Bradley, J. (2021, in press). Epilogue: intercultural dialogue, the arts and (im)possibilities. Language Teaching Research.
Holliday, A. & Macdonald, M. (2020). Researching the intercultural: Intersubjectivity and the Problem with Postpositivism. Applied Linguistics, 41(5), pp.621-639.
Jacquemet, M. (2019). Beyond the speech community: On belonging to a multilingual, diasporic and digital social network. Language and Communication, 68, pp.46-56.
Jaworksi, A. & Thurlow, C. (2010). Semiotic Landscapes: Language, Image, Space. London: Bloomsbury.
Matras, Y. & Gaiser, L. (2020). Signage as event: Deriving ‘community’ from language practice. Linguistic Landscape, 6(2), pp.213-236.
Moore, E., Bradley, J. & Simpson, J. (Eds). (2020). Translanguaging as Transformation: The Collaborative Construction of New Linguistic Realities. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Otsuji, E. & Pennycook, A. (2021). Interartefactual translation: Metrolingualism and resemiotisation. In Lee, T.K. (Ed). The Routledge Handbook of Translation in the City. London: Routledge.
Pennycook, A. (2017). Translanguaging and semiotic assemblages. International Journal of Multilingualism, 14(3), pp.269-282.
Pennycook, A. & Otsuji, E. (2017). Fish, phonecards and semiotic assemblages. Social Semiotics, 27(4), pp.434-450.
Pennycook, A. (2019). The landscape returns the gaze: Bikescapes and the new economies. Linguistic Landscape, 5(3), pp.217-247.
Pennycook, A. (2021). Jan Blommaert, linguistic landscapes and complexity. Linguistic Landscape, 7(1), pp.2-5.
Potter, J., Cannon, M., Cowan, K., Olusoga, Y. & Signorelli, V. Play Observatory: A national observatory of children’s play experiences during COVID19. Funded by ESRC via the UKRI Covid Rapid Response call.
Pratt, M.L. (1991). Arts of the contact zone. Profession, (1991), pp.33-40.
Smith, C. (2020). All in this together? Isolation and housing in ‘lockdown London’. Social Anthropology, 28(2), [Online]. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12874. [Accessed 21 July 2021].
Thurlow, C. (2016). Queering critical discourse studies and/or Performing ‘post-class’ ideologies. Critical Discourse Studies, 13(5), pp.485-514.
Contact and more information
For more information please contact Dr Jessica Bradley, University of Sheffield jessica.bradley@sheffield.ac.uk.
The project toolkit and online exhibition will be available online in Autumn 2021.
