Multilingual Streets: the story so far

The linguistic landscape – or, visible languages in public space – can tell us a lot. And how we experience languages in everyday life is something we often don’t think about, as we move from space to space. With the Multilingual Streets project we wanted to explore young people’s everyday, mundane, experiences of language(s) and to undertake research which drew attention to process – process of the young people’s engagements with languages in public space and the entwined creative and research processes.

The research started in 2015 when Jessica was a doctoral researcher (her thesis is entitled ‘Translation and Translanguaging in Production and Performance in Community Arts’, 2018) at the University of Leeds, as part of the AHRC-funded ‘Translation and Translanguaging: Investigating Linguistic and Cultural Transformations in Superdiverse Wards in Four UK Cities’ (PI Professor Angela Creese). Jessica was working closely with the Leeds case study team, led by Professor Mike Baynham and Dr James Simpson, and working with visiting researcher Dr Emilee Moore and researchers Dr John Callaghan and Jolana Hanusova. John was leading a strand of the project which focused on linguistic landscapes, and had conducted extensive mapping of the Harehills area of Leeds, also as part of his doctorate a few years previously. Jessica’s professional background was in educational engagement and widening participation at the University of Leeds and she saw potential in linguistic landscapes as an interdisciplinary area, bringing in modern languages, linguistics, geography and literacy, and opening it out to arts-based and creative approaches within a public and educational engagement context (see Bradley, 2017). Artist-researcher Dr Louise Atkinson was also undertaking her doctorate at the University at that time and she became involved in the early stages of the project, expanding the research approach towards socially engaged arts.

After some initial piloting research activity with two educational centres in Leeds under the working title of ‘LangScape Curators’ (see Bradley et al., 2018 and Bradley & Atkinson, 2020) we developed the ‘Multilingual Streets: Translating and Curating the Linguistic Landscape’ project, collaborating with Professor Yaron Matras and Multilingual Manchester. For this stage of the research we worked with two secondary schools in Manchester. We were interested to explore the theoretical affordances of collaborative research with creative methods with young people and how the arts might offer new and different lenses to understand the lived experience of multilingualism (of being multilingual and of living in a multilingual city). 

For Multilingual Streets we created and delivered a series of workshops – research-based and creative – with young people in Years 8-9 (ages 12-14) around linguistic landscapes. In many ways it was quite a complex undertaking, trying to bring together activities which are institutionally separated – schools engagement/public engagement/’outreach’ with interdisciplinary linguistic landscapes research. 

Our workshops engaged with linguistic landscapes research, introducing the key concepts and ‘why’, methods for researching and artistic and creative practice. We led workshops on campus at the University of Manchester and in one of the schools. We worked with The Whitworth Gallery and Manchester Art Gallery as part of our programme of activities. Participants also undertook fieldwork in the areas of the city surrounding the school and the University (Cheetham Hill and Rusholme). 

It’s important to note that we didn’t see this work as purely outreach and engagement – we saw potential for this to be collaborative and co-produced research (e.g. Bell & Pahl, 2018; Facer & Pahl, 2017; McKay & Bradley, 2016), bringing in pupils as co-researchers. These kinds of university activities are often positioned as a one-way transmission in which expert research findings are shared with the public, usually at the end of a research project. We sought to explore how methodologies in linguistic and visual ethnography (Copland & Creese, 2015) could be developed towards collaborative engagement with children and young people, enabling us to pay attention to the relational and dialogic processes inherent in this kind of research activity.